Prioritizing Critique
Greetings and salutations Scribblers! I’m Katie, the founder and CEO of The Scribbler’s Den, your online source for writing craft and writing community. In last week’s video we chatted about accepting feedback and working to process it logically rather than taking personally and allowing your emotions to interfere with your growth as a writer.
This week, we’re going to continue to discuss feedback and take a look at how to prioritize the various elements to really streamline your revision process. So grab your beverage of choice and lets dive in.
Getting an 11 page edit letter or a document returned to you with hundreds of inline comments can feel overwhelming. You’re trying to review it and take it all in and just being bombarded from every angle with a million things you need to fix in your manuscript. It can feel overwhelming and like even if you started right then, you’ll never make it through all the revisions you need to.
I’m going to stop you right there. Take a deep breath. You can figure out your way forward and you can do it in the way that best fits your work methods and style. But, you need to process what needs done and then make a plan, whatever that may look like.
We talked about processing that feedback last week. It may take you a few days, a few weeks, or even a month or two. No matter how long it takes, processing the feedback is going to give you the insight you need to evaluate what does and doesn’t need revised and the best order to do it in.
There are different ways to do this and this is the method I use. It makes logical sense to me, and prevents me from wasting time revising something that will likely end up being changed or cut from the manuscript entirely.
I like to work from the edits and changes that will have the biggest ripple effect down the ones that have little to no impact on the bigger elements of the story. The first thing I do is I compile my feedback. I try to get three to five people to read for me and give me feedback. For me, if I have more than that, I start to get too many conflicting ideas. And I am very specific about who those 3-5 people are. They’re people I’ve worked with in the past who know me and my writing and I know them and their critique style, so I know they’re going to vibe with the vision I have for my manuscript.
I’ll print out all the edit letters and then I get out my highlighter and pen and start marking them up. I read each one again–I usually end up reading each letter several times before I dive into this phase. And as I go, I highlight the parts that really stand out to me and leave myself margin notes. If it’s something more than one person points out, I note that in the margins too. My margin notes can be anything from a possible solution or edit to me emphasizing that this needs done to a reminder that if I tweak X, I’ll need to tweak Y as well.
Once I’ve read and highlighted my feedback, I create an outline or bulleted list (depends on my mood) and write myself my own edit letter based on the feedback. This allows me to process what I want to do, why, and hopefully, how I plan to accomplish these edits. My edit letter tends to be between 4-6 pages in length when I’m all done. But it’s a detailed plan of what I want to accomplish and how.
Once I have that sorted, then I go through and put it in an order that deals with the biggest, most influential thing first. This is the element that will have the biggest ripple effect and cause there to be the most changes in the story.
For my last manuscript, Harpy Girls, this was a shift in the setting and the order of events. I narrowed the setting down to a single city from having been an expansive continent and then I had to reorder several of the events. These were the biggest changes because it removed a lot of travel scenes and moments and for the order of events, I had to be very aware of what information was being shared when since something they learned later had to stay later in the book, even though I moved the circumstances around it to happen earlier.
It had me doing a lot of careful copying and pasting and getting things in the right order. Making these big structural changes made sense to do first before I went in started refining character emotions or tweaking dialogue or the romance arc of the novel. Those were things that would have an effect throughout, but I couldn’t have them advance and escalate correctly before I had the plot beats and setting sorted.
If I had tried to do those smaller things first, I would have wasted time perfecting them only to have to get rid of or tweak them again once I shifted the order around again. And then, finally I do the small things, like do a search for every time I use the word ‘that’ and go through and delete them.
And, again, this is something I do at the very end because otherwise I’ll be doing line edits on bits and pieces that might be entirely cut–meaning I’ve wasted my time.
So my general order for prioritizing my revisions is to start with the bigger, structural changes. Whether it’s moving events around, changing locations, or adding in another character’s point of view–something else I did for Harpy Girls that had a huge impact as I had to rewrite various moments from an entirely new point of view, which meant figuring out different ways of sharing the information I needed the reader to get.
For me, these tend to be a bit sloppy as I frankenstein my manuscript back together after cutting into pieces. Once I have those big structural bits settled, then I move on to the smaller items like emotional arcs, or banter. I focus on making sure it’s escalating and building tension, that I haven’t left a dynamic character moment too early before they’ve had a chance to experience that growth.
And at each phase, I return to my edit letter to make sure I’ve hit all the details I wanted to for that aspect. It becomes my to-do list and I do my best to stick to it.
Doing my revisions this way means I’m reading through my manuscript several times with each time having a distinct focus where I’m only looking for a singular element. This took a bit of work to learn how to do, a trick I’ve heard working for other people is that they work from end to beginning their manuscripts rather than beginning to end. This can jar your author brain from just filling in the gaps that you instinctively know because you have to actively consider if the information you’re reading has been actively set up for in the previous chapters.
That strategy has never worked for me, so I usually work from the beginning to end. It’s taken practice over the years to learn how to focus on just one main element and ignore all the rest, but each time it’s become easier to do.
Whether you choose to work from front to back or back to front, having a plan in mind and focusing on the bigger structural issues before shifting to the smaller ones can really help to streamline your revision process. I also like doing it this way because I feel like the smaller edits are often more nuanced and my brain needs more time for ideas to percolate. So while I’m shifting chapters around or changing points of view, I’m slowly figuring out how to create character depth or increase the romantic tension.
That’s my method for prioritizing feedback and applying it to my manuscript. I’d love to hear how you go about it, so feel free to drop your method in the comments!
The Scribbler’s Den has an amazing course that focuses on the revision process and breaks it down into small, manageable chunks to help you get comfortable with the process–whether it’s your first time revising or your 10th and you’re looking for strategies that can help. Check it out at www.scribblersden.org/courses.
Have a fantastic rest of your day and I’ll see you next week! Happy Writing Scribblers!
As always, your mileage may vary! If you have any tips for recognizing burnout before it takes over completely, please drop those in the comments below.
Consisting of five sections, this course will include strategies for revising characters, plot, pacing, and worlding building. It also includes resources for copyediting and for gaining insight into your manuscripts theme and purpose
