Edit – Page 4 – Write on the World

Up to this point, your novel manuscript is still in what we call the “rough draft” stage, which means that if you feel like your manuscript is still crap, you’re probably right (and that’s ok!) Once you have conducted a thorough evaluation of your first draft, it is time to get down to the work of revising it to address the issues you discovered during the evaluation stage of the writing process.

Revising and refining a novel manuscript often requires a great deal of paper– and coffee!

Revising a novel manuscript often requires the author to make significant changes to the content, structure, and style of the story to improve its overall quality and effectiveness. This stage of the writing process typically comes after the first draft of the novel has been completed and may involve multiple rounds of revisions.

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Finish Writing Your Novel Now!

Why is it so hard to revise your own writing?

September 17, 2024September 10, 2024 Mandy Webster

Sometimes the hardest part of revising a novel is getting started. There will always be gaps between what you think you have written and what you have actually put on the page, but it is often difficult to see those gaps until you have found a way to make space for alternative perspectives besides your own. There are a few reasons why it can be hard to see what edits you need to make in your own writing, including confirmation bias, expertise, and top-down cognitive processing.

How do you close the gap between what you think you’ve written and the actual words that you have put on the page?

Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs or hypotheses. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is stronger for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs. When we read our own writing, we tend to see what we want to see. We focus on the parts that we think are good and we overlook the parts that need improvement.

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Finish Writing Your Novel Now!

The fourth step in the novel writing process: Revise and Refine

September 16, 2024September 10, 2024 Mandy Webster

Now that you have evaluated your manuscript draft and have taken a plethora of notes to help you improve your story, it’s time to enter the next phase of the novel writing process. “Revise and refine” is an umbrella phrase that encompasses a handful of tasks that could be – and often are – divided into their own individual steps of the writing process. However, concepts like “revise, edit, and proofread” (among others) are commonly confused or conflated and are sometimes even used interchangeably as if they are all the same task. Because of this, I prefer to present these concepts together in one step so I can compare these tasks which, while all individual and important steps in the writing process, serve different purposes and involve different techniques.

In this series, we’ve reviewed the planning, writing, and evaluating steps of the novel writing process. Now it’s time to revise that first draft you wrote!

Here are a few key differences between these three central concepts that I have included in the “Revise and Refine” step of the novel writing process:

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