Revising efficiently—and well

Today I’d like to address something you may be thinking if you’ve gotten past your first draft. Maybe you’ve tried writing whenever you have a free minute and found that it’s worked well for you. Maybe you got out an entire first draft this way, or maybe you’ve supplemented longer writing sessions with ten-minute bursts and finished your draft quicker this way. And now you’re ready to revise, but you’re finding the prospect daunting. As if shaping the raw material of the first draft wasn’t hard enough, the idea of finding the time to do it—especially if your schedule allows only for short writing sessions—can make revision seem impossible.

Ever since I started writing in smaller bursts in addition to longer stretches, I’ve worked mostly on the second and third drafts of my WIP. I haven’t written much new content this way. So I’ve found some things that work well when you have to revise in smaller blocks of time.

First of all, revising in this manner doesn’t feel much like writing a first draft felt—at all. If you're willing to put it all on the page and not fuss about details in the rough draft, you can fly through several pages in fifteen minutes, often without feeling like it’s difficult. Of course, that feeling of ease comes partly from knowing that the difficult work comes later—not now, but certainly it will come. Revising in fifteen minutes feels very different—deliberate instead of freewheeling. Depending on how much revision the material in question needs—a short story, a chapter, a scene—you might also get through several pages in fifteen minutes. Or you may get through only one paragraph in fifteen minutes.

The question is, how do you know whether the section in question needs intense revision? The answer comes in your planning. When you reread your work or get feedback from your writers’ group or beta readers—an activity that, while related to writing, is not actually writing and requires longer spans of time—take notes on what needs to be changed, according to your initial reread or according to your writers’ group. Later you can decide how you’d like to make these changes or even if you think they all need to be made (there’s usually at least one suggestion from a group member or one knee-jerk reaction from yourself that you may want to disregard). As you craft your plan, make sure your notes are in consecutive order as they apply to the story/chapter/essay’s organization, with notes for the overall manuscript at the top, where you can see them first so you can implement them throughout the piece. Then, once you have a plan in place, you’re ready to revise—in ten-minute chunks if that’s what you have.

When I have fifteen minutes to revise, I know I’m not going to get through all of my notes—far from it! And really, even if I could stay awake for seventy-two hours straight and do nothing but write, I wouldn’t get through all my notes. That’s because revision has depth; it can’t be rushed. So what I do is look at the next few notes that apply to the current section I’m revising. If I have several that say things like “Watch the tense here” or “This line sounds more like something Character X would say, not Character Y,” I know I can get through several notes because they’re quick fixes. If a note says, “Deepen the POV throughout this chapter,” I know I have to go slower, not just because a note like that applies to the whole chapter but also because I’m going to have to remember to do that as I implement my other notes.

So I come up with a realistic expectation for what I can complete during those fifteen minutes. Yes, it can be slow going if I have a lot of revisions to do, but it’s like they say in response to the question, “How old will I be by the time I can play piano well if I start now?” The answer is, “The same age you’ll be if you don’t learn.” In other words, time is ticking no matter what we do with it. So instead of waiting for a spare two-hour gap in my schedule, I can take my fifteen-minute gaps and my two-hour gaps—and finish that second draft faster than I would have if I’d waited.