Confessions of a Revision Addict

I’m going mad. Novel revisions aren’t cool. The moment I think I’ve solved an issue, another one pops up like an unwanted ad. My keyboard is starting to dislike me. Fixing a chapter’s pacing can suddenly create a character-voice issue. If I strengthen a character’s motivation, it can skew other characters’ motivations in the same chapter. I suppose that’s why top writers have editors. I don’t have that luxury. It’s just me, the manuscript, and an increasingly punchy relationship with my own writing.

My remedy is embarrassingly low-tech. I use Microsoft Word’s “Read Aloud” feature. I sit back, hit play, and listen to my draft read back to me in a flat, slightly judgmental robotic voice. It helps me catch errors I might miss visually, boosting my confidence in my revisions.

It’s rather humbling. My eyes skim over problems my ears cannot ignore. A sentence that looked good on the page suddenly sounds as if it were translated into Klingon. Okay, maybe not that bad, but software can only tell you a sentence is grammatically correct. It cannot tell you when “at” should have been “as,” because both could be correct. Hearing the words pinpoints the difference between what I meant to write and what I actually wrote. Sometimes I think the misspellings of two-letter words are becoming an epidemic. It seems the simple words are the ones most often misspelled.

It’s also the best pacing tool I own. I used to read everything out loud, stop, make a correction, start over, and repeat. It took too long. Having Word read it saves a lot of time and helps me better understand my story's rhythm, making me feel more in control of my pacing.

It’s wonderful to have a fully formed novel, but oy, the revisions are when the process becomes a bit less creative and a bit more maddening. I’m figuring it out, though, and that’s what matters most. Sharing these techniques might help others feel less alone in the process and inspire them to find their own methods.