Edit like an Editor: A Wattpad Featured Guide ✔

Part iv. How to Revise

If it's important to have a plan for drafting your story, it's certainly important to have a plan for revision. Solid revision transforms unfinished work by giving it levels or depths it didn't have before, smoothing it out, and producing a polished product. Before you dive into the revising stage, I think it's important to consider some general revision strategies. What is revision all about, and how do you go about it?

What is Revising?

Revision is overhaul—partial or total. Revision is about tearing down walls and ripping up floorboards. It's not about changing light fixtures to make the place look a little more presentable or spiffy. Real revision digs below the surface of the work to seek out possible depths that might give the story complex meanings and to further explore and refine these deep structures.

Working with lasting value calls for some interpretation on your reader's part; it poses questions—questions that have no easy answers. The point of revision is to make your story as complex and integrated in all its parts as possible, and yet to keep it as lively as possible—to keep intact its imaginative power. This, of course, is no easy task, but it's well worth the effort. When you revise, you should do the five basic things:

1. Make Sure Your Work Is Complete

Is anything missing? This question leads to questions like these:

• Is your protagonist's overall arc convincing, or does it require more development?

• Does the end of the story come too quickly?

• Do some scenes need more development?

• Do some subplots in your novel need more fleshing out?

• Could more be done with secondary characters?

• Could some themes in your story be given more attention?

It may take several readings of your draft to be sure it's complete. An outline, especially a detailed one, will probably serve you well here as a blueprint. Yet the question of completeness may also come down to a non rational or intuitive sense that this story "feels done." It's not too short, nor is it overlong.

What's the right amount? When fiction is working, it's working because it bears the fullness of life. The course has been run. The distance covered. We're at the finish line. Or, to change the metaphor: We want no more—the meal's over—we're satisfied.

But that ending... what to do? There's, of course, plenty of room for creativity in terms of the final closure. You will have to decide on the right ending for your work.

2. Develop a More Complex Work

Range and Depth of Character

Protagonists should be "round," not "flat," and "dynamic," not "static." This means they are complex and have range as well as depth. But what is the benchmark of complexity or depth? How can you know where to draw the line between round and flat, dynamic and static? Certainly, this is an important question to consider as you revise your manuscript. I will speak about characterization generally here, as all of Section V covers this in more depth.

A complex character resists easy summation. You can list her personality attributes, attitudes, beliefs, typical behaviors, and quirks, but something about her surpasses all of these things. Like people in real life, a complex character isn't predictable or cookie-cutter and may even have contradictory impulses. She is not a stereotype.

This doesn't mean that you set out to create characters so contradictory that no explanation is possible. However, it's important as you revise to look for ways to develop more complexity in your character and to let your imagination take a second run to keep her from being pigeonholed.