Before You Delete Everything: A Revision Plan

Practical approaches to revising your draft

Photo by Tunafish on Unsplash

If you’re staring at a messy draft wondering whether to fix it or torch it, this is for you.

Stare at a draft long enough and you’ll start imagining how satisfying it would feel to just delete the whole thing (or is that just me?). Finishing a draft — which I wrote about last week — feels triumphant for about five hot minutes. But it’s also the beginning of revision, which is where a lot of writers stall.

At a recent conference, during an agent and editor panel, one of the biggest reasons they gave for passing on pitches was simple: the manuscript wasn’t ready. It hadn’t been worked enough. And that’s the part of writing no one romanticizes.

Revision is hard. It’s complex and it takes time. It can bring up uncomfortable feelings, doubts, feelings of inadequacies. So sometimes it feels easier to delete everything than to work through it.

But before you do that, pause. Take a breath. Read this first.

Kill Your Darlings

The reigning revision advice in the writing world is kill your darlings—the idea that a line can be gorgeous, a passage powerful, but if it doesn’t serve the story, it has to go.

In my novel, about fifty-plus pages about events from my character’s childhood made it into the first draft. Those scenes built empathy for my character. They showed what shaped her. They mattered deeply to me. I loved those scenes and felt they showed the heart of the story. But.

But, but, but.

When I finished the draft—actually wrote the ending and then drafted a synopsis of the whole thing—I realized those pages didn’t support the central narrative. In fact, they misdirected readers, which took away from the actual story.

Le sigh.

So while I can attest to the power of this advice, I don’t always find it helpful. It tells us what to do, but not how to loosen our grip when we’re attached, and for someone like me, I tend to get attached a lot.

Marie Kondo That Bitch

Many years ago, Marie Kondo gained international fame for encouraging us to keep only what “sparks joy.” (Yes, including books—much to the horror of readers everywhere.)

While revising my memoir, I borrowed her philosophy and included the process in a workshop I did at Hippocamp, the conference hosted by Hippocampus Magazine and Books, about revision strategies.

At the time, I had a very long draft of my memoir, almost 80,000 words, and I tried to apply the idea of only keeping the best parts to that draft. It was helpful: I had written everything about that period of my life in the memoir—not just the essential pieces—and needed to trim it down. I couldn’t yet tell what the “big” moments were.

So I rifted off of Marie Kondo’s advice and asked:

Does this scene create impact?
Does it move the narrative forward?
Does it deliver the gut punch the story needs?

The question became less Do I love this? and more Does this belong? This approach was helpful, but it also became problematic, because what I perceived those big moments to be seemed to change over time.

My Tried-and-True Method

While I’ve killed my darlings and marie kondoed my writing, those approaches are too ambiguous for me. Too much of it depends on how I’m feeling in the moment and so, while initially helpful, I still need a slightly more logical approach. So my core revision process has a little bit of structure to keep me focused, but not so much to be stifling.

Before You Begin

First, it’s important to be serious about revision. To get into the right mindset (for me positive, determined, curious) and to be organized before you begin.

1. Set a schedule and goals.
   Choose a specific time and date range to focus on revision. Many writers begin their sessions by rereading the previous day’s work. Whether daily or weekly, the key is staying connected to the thread.

   And try different types of goals within that writing frame:
   Time goals: 7–9am, one-hour timer, specific days
   Pacing goals: Chapters 1–3, first 500 words, just the endings
   Themed goals: Identify themes, read for tone, fact-check only

2. Cut out distractions.
   This is huge for me. I can’t have people around when I’m revising. I hole up, shut the door, silence my phone, and resist the urge to snack, scroll, or stare out the window wondering what everyone else is doing.

3. Get organized: Commit to a categorizing system and back up everything.
   If you’re working on a large project, label everything clearly. When I make major structural changes, I save a new version. When I cut something, I move it into an “Unused Writing” file. Nothing is ever truly gone.

   Have an automatic backup system if you can. I once believed I was backing up “every few days” until my computer crashed and I realized it had been ten. Never again.

Diving In

Once you have gotten rid of distractions, you have the space and time, and know what you are going to work on:

1. Go Big to Small.

   Start with a full read-through before you do anything. This helps you make a plan (don’t edit as you go). Get a sense of the whole before you start adjusting the parts. Begin by looking at themes, overall tone, plot holes, character holes, and then jump into small sections or more focused editing. This can be a great place to consider kill your darlings or marie kondo thinking.

2. Identify Themes

   Track each narrative thread. You can try reverse outlining—going back through your draft and listing the themes and threads touched on in each chapter. This is what I’m doing with my novel now. If you’re a tactile person, try printing out your draft and highlighting them that way (this can also be done with sticky notes). This is what I did with my memoir. I even used color-coded highlighters to visually identify the themes.
   Ask yourself: Where does it appear? Does it disappear consistently? Does it need strengthening—or cutting?

3. Recognize Tone

   An issue I had with the pages from my character’s early years is that the tone was inconsistent. We began with a child narrator and jumped to a totally different narrator. For some pieces, this might work, but it didn’t for me. Another thing to watch for is the tone of early chapters. Our characters and stories evolve and so often the tone we began with is not the one we settled on.

   Ask yourself: Is your tone consistent? Do early chapters match later ones?

4. Check for Completeness

   Though we looked for major plot and character holes, and we looked at themes, we can break that down even more by honing in on specific threads within each theme, and looking at a comprehensive list of characters. I have a character in my novel that becomes pretty important but in the draft, I didn’t introduce her until more than halfway through the book. In reflection, there really wasn’t a reason for it and her part would be stronger if I introduced her earlier. In my memoir, an outside reader asked me, But what ever happened to R—?!, an important character in the opening chapters who I never revisited.

   Ask yourself: Are all threads necessary and clear? Are there dangling characters?Unanswered questions? Missing context?

5. Confirm Accuracy & Relevancy

   This is especially important to nonfiction and historical writers. Take the time to to do the research. I had a scene in my memoir that takes place at a bank and when I fact-checked myself realized that it couldn’t have been the specific bank I was remembering because that bank hadn’t opened a location there until a few years later. Another thing to consider, is whether a thread, theme, or scene is relevant enough to keep it. I have a very deep thread about my character’s relationship with her grandmother, but in revision have realized that, while relevant, it is taking up too much space.

   Ask yourself: Did I fact-check names, dates, locations, titles? Is the backstory relevant, complete, or unwieldy?

6. Then Copyedit

   Once you do all of then, then you can copyedit it. Look for repetition, clunky transitions, overused phrases. This is the smaller, polishing stage—not the bigger, structural one.

Two Final Rules To Live By

1. Don’t revise on the fly.
   Make a plan. Otherwise you can contradict yourself and waste energy.

2. Never delete anything.
   When the muse shows up, everything sings. When doubt arrives, everything sounds terrible. Wait out the monster. Move the cut pages somewhere else. Revisit them later.

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Revision isn’t comfortable, but what you need isn’t comfort — it’s a method. Instead of burning down the very thing you’ve birthed, get curious about it, find areas to help it grow. Put your matches away.

And be gentle with yourself. Slow down. Make one intentional choice at a time.

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I would love to hear from you:

Do you have any tried and true revision approaches? What helps you when you’re staring at that first draft?