How to Enjoy Revising Your Drafts
By: Deepti Kannapan
Tags: Writing, Editing, Creative Writing, Creativity, Writing Tips

I have the opposite of blank page syndrome. My folder of essays to revise has over thirty pieces in it, but I’d rather open a blank page and write a new essay than revise an existing one.

The joy of starting from a blank page is of pulling an idea from the creative ether and following it to unexpected places. Your hand darts across the keyboard or page, your thoughts cluster and connect and compete to be the next one you write down.

Sometimes it’s not like this, and each sentence is bumpy going. You wait tensely until the words resolve themselves. Long, excruciating gaps separate sentences as you agonize over the choices of structure and syntax.

Either way, the ideas in the first draft flow in only one direction: outward. You think; you write; you move on to the next line. You are completely free in all your choices, unimpeded by constraints of best practices, fact-checking, or readability. You don’t have to stop to read what you’ve written, look for references, or intake new ideas to write about. Most writing advice recommends that you don’t.

In contrast, writing the second draft begins with reading your first. You need to process what you’ve already written and decide how to make it better. Information flows both in (reading) and out (revising). The process tends to be slower and less thrilling, with few surprises. You’ve seen all this writing before when you wrote it.

When I noticed my reluctance to revise (and hence publish) my essays, I sought out the areas of the revision process that are enjoyable. I knew there must be some.

Hone your taste for good prose

The pleasure in revising stems from improving and enjoying your prose — when you read a paragraph you just revised and appreciate how well it flows, how artfully it uses languages, and how clearly it lays out its ideas.

To appreciate your writing as you improve it, you need to have a sense of what you like. I looked for examples of novels and essays where I’ve savored every word. After racking my brain a bit, I pulled out my old favorites, Jane Eyre, books by P.G. Wodehouse, the late John Le Carre, and Agatha Christie.

My choices are subjective, and probably don’t match what critics, the public, or more well-read readers prefer. Reminding myself what I enjoy is for my own benefit, so none of that matters.

Occasionally, before or between sessions of revising my drafts, I pull out a random paragraph from these books and mentally note what I like about it.

I’d like to expand my list of options to include more books from this century. I might start by working my way through this list of books selected for their quality of prose.

Choose a piece to revise and note your impressions

I have resolved to spend a set number of sessions per week revising my essays. I am well-positioned to do this because I have a folder of essays waiting to be revised, so it will be a sort of isolation exercise — focusing on the one skill I want to improve for a period of time.

Each session, I open one of my unedited essays or fiction pieces and decide what element(s) of the writing I plan on improving, such as structure, pacing, character consistency, world-building, and completeness of story threads.

Before I start, I note down in a spreadsheet a few words assessing where the piece stands with respect to the selected element, including where I see its flaws and strengths.

Spend a session revising the piece

I then start making revisions, experimenting with changes, and assessing if I like the writing better after the change. My sessions usually last between half-an-hour and an hour. I turn on ‘track changes’ in my word-processor before I start altering the first draft.

Depending on what element of the writing I’m concerned with, the modifications may be on the macro level, like moving whole blocks of text around, adding sections, adding research, and cutting sections, or on the micro level, rearranging sentences or changing word choices.

Check for your revisions to converge consistently

Since I write down my impressions before each session, I can review them to see if my impressions get better the more I revise.

In mathematics, when you solve an equation numerically, you check a condition called ‘convergence’ to see if the equation solver is working properly. When you iteratively improve your solution, you expect the change with each iteration to get smaller and smaller, as you hone in on the best possible answer.

When you revise your draft, you know that you are consistently improving the draft when you don’t see glaring issues anymore after a few sessions.

If you changed the opening or moved paragraphs around until you liked the structure, but then when you come back to it in the next session, you still think the structure is bad, it might mean that your idea of ‘bad’ is changing from session to session and isn’t consistent. Or that you are seeing new flaws that you couldn’t see before.

I find that after I’ve changed it around a handful of times and explored all the options, I arrive at a solution that still looks good to me every time I look at it. That’s how I know I’m ready to move on to the next stage.

Do a before and after comparison to see how far you’ve come

After you’ve revised your piece enough to move on to the next element (macro to micro) or completed your revisions altogether, it can be satisfying to read the first draft and the latest draft back-to-back.

If you tracked changes, you can view the first draft by changing the viewing option in your word-processor, or by making a copy of the file and ‘rejecting all changes’.

The final draft may be massively better than the first, which is encouraging. Or they may be sections that were freer and more spontaneous in the original and got lost in over-writing by the final draft. This is less encouraging, but also useful to know and to correct going forward.

I like having a tangible outcome from all that time I spent revising. While I don’t have word counts or the number of pages filled as a metric, as I did for the first draft, the before-and-after confirms that the revision sessions were worth the trouble.