One of the questions that often arises is: can you teach how to write a novel? Maybe not, talent is an innate thing, sensitivity is either something you have or you don’t, and the desire to write cannot be transmitted with motivation.
Why?
Because motivation is external, while the desire to express one’s opinion on the world is something that comes from within. However, one can learn to consider with a critical eye what we have written, in other words, how to write creatively, edit a book, revise, and rewrite a novel.
Whether you decide to send your manuscript to a publisher to publish as a book, or you decide to self-publish, or even just have your grandchildren read it, revision is a fundamental process to improve the style and quality of your writing, to “clean it up” and perfect it as best as possible.
While I always recommend seeking the help of a professional editor, through their editing service, or taking a course for editors and proofreaders, in this guide, you will find many practical tools to revise your novel independently.
Practical tips for editing and revising a book
- Let your manuscript settle after the first draft. This will allow you to reread the text with fresh eyes and more objectively and rationally. A family member always seems the same if you see him every day, but 3 weeks of vacation are enough to see him change, grow, and put on weight, and in short, different.
- Don’t revise when you are tired, perplexed, or doubtful.
- When in doubt, keep your drafts, and then save your changes to another document.
- Don’t be afraid to delete entire paragraphs and rewrite them: sometimes old words can block the flow of new ones.
- Have someone read the text without following the plot (e.g. in random order). In this way, attention is not carried away by the flow of events and is concentrated more on other aspects (and therefore errors and typos will be more easily noticed).
- Scroll through the text with your cursor (in this case you can notice double spaces or missing spaces more clearly).
- To eliminate extra spaces, use Word’s find and replace function: enter two spaces in the search box and replace them with just one.
- Read aloud (this way you will get an idea of the rhythm ).
- If it is a novel or a long story, make a bullet point outline of the events. This brings to light errors of logic or unnecessary passages.
- Ask someone to read the text aloud (this way the narrator’s voice is detached from you).
- Change the font and size of your text characters: this will make it less familiar to your eyes.
- Distinguish between writing and revision times.
How to Approach Editing a Book
The novel should be approached like the preparation of a cake, that is, with different layers and stages of processing. Even in the revision phase, you have to do the same, so in each revision focus on just one aspect. Probably when we write we want to clarify our ideas, we want to explore ourselves and the world around us, so we collect plenty of material that we need to tell the story and get to know our characters better.
Using the same culinary metaphor, the first draft could correspond to all the ingredients a chef needs to prepare a dish. But when we serve it at the table, we certainly do not present the broth with which we prepared the risotto or the garlic with which we made the soffritto.
The structure of a novel
Before delving into narrative aspects such as style, dialogues, and the use of rhetorical figures, the first thing to pay attention to
it is the structure of the work.
Is it clear? Coherent? Solid?
There are several architectures for writing a dramatic work. A timeless model is Aristotle’s 3-ACT STRUCTURE.
Another tool that may be useful in revising your novel is the narrative pyramid.
Distinguish between writing and revision moments
To revise and edit a book, everyone adopts the method that is most congenial to them, these are general considerations. However, if during the writing phase, we stop to think too much with the rational part of the brain, we risk losing inspiration, which is, in my opinion, a current of ideas, thoughts, and intuitions that are already present in the air and that we, like a radio or a transceiver, can capture. To welcome these signals, we must tune in to our irrational, non-dominant part of the brain and our subconscious.
Do you know when you drive for hours on a highway at night? You don’t consciously think about pressing the accelerator, changing gears, or holding the steering wheel: you just do it. In the meantime, you sing, talk, or are lost in your thoughts. Here, you have to recreate that sort of trance when you write.
How?
First of all, don’t stop to reread every two lines (it would be like stopping every half hour at a service station).
Eliminate all distractions, create the atmosphere, and isolate yourself. Don’t worry if you’re writing nonsense: you’ll have plenty of time to delete and revise. But from a seemingly stupid sentence, something good can sprout. Write and never stop, otherwise, you’ll stifle instinct and the flow of emotions and risk falling into the trap of writer’s block.
If you are tired, forget about it: go for a run, do yoga, meditate, take a walk in the meadow; smoke a joint or drink a glass of wine. There are many ways to weaken the rational part of the brain.
Of course, once you get to the end of the first draft, you need to revise. Take a break —an hour or a day, you decide—and arm yourself with a red pen and put on your editor’s hat to edit your novel.
Editing a Novel The Importance of Going Back
As much as you rely on outlines, structured plots, and planning, you can’t predict from the outset exactly where your characters want to go, and what your novel is really about, what the theme of the story is.
Furthermore, if we blindly rely on a rigid plot, with scenes already planned at the table, we lose the taste for writing, we no longer let ourselves be surprised by a character’s twist, a sentence of his, even his rebellion against an event that you had planned.
It is the story that must surprise you, otherwise writing becomes a mere manneristic and stylistic exercise. Also I think that when we write, and we do it seriously, we reach a deeper, truer part of ourselves, where rationality does not exist alone.
When you write the first draft, you have to write a bit in a trance, letting yourself be guided by the narrative flow, and letting yourself be carried away by the story and the characters.
This, however, can mean that the story may suffer from some gaps and weaknesses. Especially in the climax of a scene, or in the ending of a novel.
Sometimes, especially in an advanced stage of the novel, we come across some scenes or dialogues that do not represent particular problems, but which, about the overall economy of the text, could be strengthened and improved.
The solution is often not to work on the scene or the dialogue itself, but on the part that precedes it, that is, in the first part of the text, working either on contrast or on recall.
If, in the first draft stage, you should follow the narrative flow and instinct, in the second stage
when reviewing and editing you have to use the rational part of your mind: in other words, you have to be clear-headed and ruthless.
Reviewing can also be creative and fun, it can help you find brilliant ideas to solve the problem.
I will show you some practical examples of editing shortly.
We are used to thinking of great novels as products born spontaneously: instead, even great novels have been subjected to many rewritings and revisions, first and foremost by the writers themselves.