War & Peace Was Not Written in One Day

Writers revise to improve their writing. When you read a finished piece, it's easy to assume you are reading first-draft material. You don't see the hours of toil and the various draft revisions that the writer put into it.

I have a cousin who speaks to her Airedale in grave tones whenever the dog misbehaves, demanding to know, ''What did you do?'' That's the question you must confront head on if you want to become effective at revising your own work.

Ask yourself: What did you do? You have to approach the piece of writing as though someone else wrote it and then apply the same critical eye you might to a stranger's piece of writing, objectively assessing its strengths and weaknesses.

Does that sound cold and heartless? Here's something even more cold and heartless: If you're not willing to approach your own writing as another person would, you'll never be a good writer.

Revising isn't just editing, which can include improving sentence structure or grammar; it isn't just proofreading, which can include correcting punctuation or spelling mistakes. Revising addresses the big questions: Is it any good? If so, what is its value? How could its value be improved?

So the first step is to read what you wrote with a fresh mind. If you're out to materially improve the work, don't be afraid to rip it apart and put it back together again in a whole new way.

Remember, if you don't like the result, you can always put it back the way it was. By the way, before you begin revising a piece, make sure you save the previous version so you can always have it at the ready if you decide you want to go back to that version.

As you're re-reading, you'll find that four categories of concern come up:

Sections that need rewriting: Read through what you wrote critically for logic, structure, tone and style. Think about your audience. Will they get what you are writing? Will they agree with the assumptions you make in the opening? Will they comprehend and be able to follow your organization as you transition from point to point? Will they appreciate the attitude behind the writing? And will they like your manner of writing, what writers call style?
As you read through it, place question marks where you think the writing could be clearer, or where transitions could be made stronger. Find places where the logic falters or where your ideas lack clarity. Then rewrite based on your findings.

Paragraphs that need reorganizing: Go through your draft giving each paragraph a number. Then, on a separate piece of paper, write down what the purpose of that paragraph is in a phrase or a sentence. See if you can find entire paragraphs you can drop or re-order. Then go into each paragraph and see if you can find instances where ideas are not developed logically. Does each paragraph have a topic sentence that reveals the subject of that paragraph? The same goes for sentences. Are there any you can strengthen?

New sections that must be added: In most drafts you'll find areas that need additional development. Maybe in your draft you started with Idea #1 and went directly to Idea #3, but forgot to mention Idea #2 that logically comes between Idea #1 and #3. This is your chance to put Idea #2 where it belongs and develop it.

Parts that should be cut out: This includes areas that on second thought you decide you don't need to include. Delete them.

If all this sounds like a lot of work, it is. This is the work of writing. If you can revise on your own, without supervision, you can work independently, and become a much better writer. One of my favorite mottos that I use in business writing is, ''Revise without being asked to.'' It has served me well, and is just as applicable to my literary novel writing.

How I revised my novel: After writing Redemption for more than six years, I paid an excellent editor, Bridget Foley, to review it and make suggestions. She did line-edits on the entire 620-page manuscript and wrote a 12-page, single-space letter addressing theme, structure, tone, character, plot, subplots, etc., all the elements a novelist must deal with.

Bridget suggested that I combine two characters into one, in one case, and three characters into one, in another case; that I could drop entire parts of the novel if I wanted; that I could drop entire characters I had been writing, living with, so to speak, all those years; that I might consider killing off one of my characters, all for the purpose of improving my book's entertainment value (that's how ghastly gruesome being a writer can be) while still getting across the same theme with the same principal characters and with the same resolution.

I made only one decision as I went into this process: I would keep an open mind. And that is what I did. Bridget seemed to understand what I was trying to accomplish with my novel. She never once told me what to do. She simply suggested options. I was alive to the possibilities. I began a massive revision. Amazingly, I found I could repurpose about 75% of the actual writing in a new novel that tells a compressed but livelier version of the story. The revision took me about nine months to complete. Then I did a second revision that took another six months. At that point I knew I had finished my novel. It came in at 540 pages. The entire project took me 8-1/2 years.

Here's what I know without a doubt: The 620-page novel would never have been published. I had to totally rip apart what I had been working on for 6-1/2 years in order to unlock the novel within the novel. By cutting, rewriting, adding in a few new sections and repurposing old material, I brought the work through a destructive-creation process that unleashed a great deal of emotion and passion not present in the book previously. I now have a novel that I believe is a tremendous accomplishment. And here's my point: The sense of accomplishment I get from writing is mostly found in the rewriting. That's where the triumph is. It's the reason people say, ''Novels are not written, they're rewritten.'' And here's my final point: I got a sense of accomplishment by rewriting this EWA that is similar to that which I got from rewriting my novel. You see, the process is the same. The scale of the two projects is slightly different.