My goal is to revise a chapter a day, but some of the chapters will need to be broken up into smaller chunks. I need to do this anyway because having only 16 chapters in a 70,000 word novel is not a good idea.
I'm hoping that during this process, I will be struck by some genius title for my novel. The working title of "The Career Killer" makes it sound like the criminal makes a habit of killing people's careers, which is a bit trivial compared to serial killers. Still not sure what direction I'm going there yet. But if I go the traditional publishing route in the end, it might not matter because they like to make those decisions themselves.
The first thing I did was color code the revision process. I bought sticky notes and wrangled up matching highlighters. Character is pink, world is green, language is blue, and plot is orange.
I got the color-coding idea from my young adult writing teacher, Jennifer Lynn Barnes, which is hilarious to me because she explained in detail how her process works and then said she does absolutely nothing with all of the colors when she's finished. I have a feeling my color-coding will end up going down a similar path. But it's fun, and the colors keep my brain engaged.
So far, revising has consisted of writing down line edits on the printed copy, adding more descriptive words, and rewording passages of dialogue to give characters more concrete voices.
I've also created hand-written pages for each character, where I am writing down all of the details about the character as they are mentioned in the novel. I have word documents like this already for each character, but this way, I will be able to tell which details I've left out and which ones I've mixed up.
I talked with my good writing friend, Rachel, about revising and she suggested that when I actually go to make the changes in my 380-page word document that I should save a new copy with the changes. She said this is in case I end up not liking the changes in the long run. I'm glad she told me this now rather than once I was halfway through the novel.
Keep checking back for more revision updates as I learn how to revise a novel.
You're doing great! Keep up the enthusiasm. You can accomplish anything with enough enthusiasm.
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