How do you revise a novel?

Simple answer: One word at a time.

I have a novel I finished writing months ago – okay, maybe it was a year ago. In fact, I got it back from an editor just about one year ago. I recall really wanting to get it back from the editor. She’s had it for a couple months and did a line-by-line edit with suggestions and comments.

Finally it came. I looked at the edits, well, some of them, and then I promptly put the novel away and went on to other things. For some reason I just could not face the task of editing this book I had worked on for such a long time.

It wasn’t that the editor’s comments were harsh or that she said the story was garbage. In fact, she said the story had potential, but it needed clean up and refinement. Okay, but then I just could not bring myself to deal with it. I’m really not sure why. Perhaps it was that I thought the damn thing was pretty good the way it was written, or more likely, I felt that it just wasn’t good at all and the effort was wasted energy.

But the other day something shifted for me.

I started a new project to minimize the junk in my life and started cleaning up my office. Of course, one of the things I located was a printed copy of my novel. I picked it up and glanced through the pages and thought, You know, this is not half bad. Then I thought, I need to revise this.

A writer friend of mine, Sara King, just finished a novel called, Alaskan Fire. When Sara was finishing the first draft of the novel she lamented trying to write a “sex scene” at the end of the novel. She tried several approaches and she was struggling. I made the flippant suggestion, “You know, sometimes the best sex scene is NO sex scene.” I was trying to be amusing, really. But Sara had an ah-ha moment and realized she’d already finished the novel twenty pages earlier and there was no need to force a sex scene between the two main characters.

Of course, knowing Sara, the characters did have sex off camera so to speak (really wild sex), or that may be the way the sequel, Alaskan Fate opens.

Sorry about the tangent. Anyway, when I was looking at the 300 pages of my manuscript and the editorial notes, I started thinking, What if I cut the first 50 pages and started with the confrontation between my two main characters in the meadow?

Booya! Suddenly I was un-stuck. I started seeing all kinds of possibilities.

The bottom line: Getting un-stuck is easy. It just takes a year or so of doing nothing and then a zen-like epiphany when you are trying to be funny at another writer’s expense.

Simple.