How to Revise Your Novel

How many times do you have to revise your novel before it is ready for submission? Learn how to whip your novel into shape in just a single revision. In this intensive 22-lesson course, Holly Lisle will teach you all the shortcuts, secrets, and insights she’s developed over her career.

Learn how to revise effectively so that you only have to do it once.

Course Contents:

Create Your Target

• Determine what you wanted to write, and WHY
• What you actually did write, and WHY
• And what you want the story to be when you’re done, and WHY

Discover Your Promises

• The promises ALL writers MUST make
• The promises you intended to make
• The promises you made by accident

Analyse and Fix Your Scenes

• Diagnose whether you’ve written scenes at all (some bits of fiction masquerade as scenes, screwing up your story until you learn how to discover what’s missing).
• Determine what happens in each scene (you’d be amazed at how simple this is…and how many writers don’t even check).
• Determine what each scene is doing in your story.

Analyse and Fix Your Plot

• Identify your primary plot, and determine where it hangs together, where it blows apart…and WHY.
• Identify any secondary plots you’ve written, what they contribute (or don’t)…and WHY.
• Identify those evil NotPlots you’ve put into your story that are sucking the life out of it…and WHY.
• What to do about story length if you have more or less book than you need.
• How to NEVER Pad, and exactly what to do instead.
• How to rewrite your main plot to your target, from start to finish.
• How to add and seamlessly work in subplots, and when and why you want to do this.
• How to cleanly subtract subplots, and when and why you need to do this.
• How to turn NotPlots into subplots that matter.
• And how to cut fat, not meat, in a long book.

Analyse and Fix Your Conflict

• Identify what kind of conflict you’ve created in every scene…and whether it’s the right or the wrong kind.
• Determine whether you’ve developed it effectively throughout the story.
• Determine whether you’ve resolved it well, badly, or not at all.
• Determine whether it adds to or subtracts from your story.
• And most importantly: whether it matters.
• Fix the places where you committed action rather than conflict
• Build real, meaningful conflict in “ordinary people, ordinary world” stories
• Keep only the conflicts that improve your story—and you’ll understand and be able to explain in clear, objective terms WHY the other conflicts don’t make your cut.
• Track the impact in the parts that have to go, and fix any fallout.
• Raise your stakes for your characters and your story.
• Bring it all in to The End and the BIG Conflict Resolution.

Analyse and Fix Your Characters

• Determine why each character is in your book
• Determine which characters are Main, Secondary, Stand-in, or Redundant
• How to make your characters work harder. And how to decide whether you need to kill them off.
• How to make your characters matter. How to get your readers to relate to them… the way you WANT them to.
• Decide who stays, WHY they stay, and what they’ll contribute.
• Decide who goes, WHY they go, and who gets the good stuff they leave behind.
• Know exactly how each character who remains will connect with your ideal reader

Analyse and Fix Your Setting

• Determine whether your setting fits your characters.
• Develop a setting that enhances the plot…not one that drags it down.
• Use your setting to add meaningful conflict and complications to your story

Discover Your Story and Theme

• Find broken and abandoned themes, and know how they’re broken
• Find weak themes, and know WHY they’re weak
• Discover any missing themes
• Develop cohesive stories
• Find the theme you want, the story you need, and the plan you must have to create them.

Fixing Your Timeline

• Set up your events timeline.
• Evaluate your use of story time and how it applies to and affects your plot and outcomes.
• Test alternate story and time orders to find improved conflict possibilities, and learn when and WHY you may want to alter the presentation order of story events.
• And adapt the time of your story events to create your most compelling direction for revision.
• Foreshadowing: where it belongs, and where it doesn’t.
• Backstory: when it helps, when it makes the story drag, and when it needs to go away completely…and how to make it work WHEN you use it.
• Flashbacks and Flashforwards, and revising through and around them.
• Past Lives, Alternate Realities, And Other Paranormal Time Treatments, and how to make sure they work…as well as how to know when they don’t, and what to do with problems.
• And you’ll make sure your book begins at the REAL beginning of the story.

Fixing Your Novel

• Editing VS. Revision VS. The Complete Rewrite, WHY they’re not the same, and when and WHY you use each.
• How to change “what is” to “what needs to be”
• And how to refine your revision needs and musts into usable form
• Check your consistency: characters, setting, description, voice
• Learn the pro techniques for Block Marking your manuscript.
• Go through a step-by-step walkthrough of the Rough Cut that utilizes all the preliminary work you’ve done in an orderly, sane fashion.
• How to shape YOUR voice and weed out what doesn’t sound like you.
• How to identify the difference between Rich Writing and Self-Indulgent Writing… and how to fix the latter.
• And how to use the professional novelist’s techniques of line-editing (these are not the same as a professional editor’s editing techniques).
• Revise dialogue, action, and description… and making it all flow like you wrote it that way the first time.
• Fix your beginnings so every scene has a compelling opening.
• Fix your endings so each one will make your reader NEED to read what comes next.
• Fix your transitions so each one gets your story from logical plot point to logical plot point without including a lot of clutter.
• Fix your pacing so that where you want speed and tension, you have it, and where you want the reader to catch his breath, he will.
• And finally, you will do one final run through the Step-By-Step Problem, to make sure you have eliminated it entirely.

Start Revising Your Novel Now

Or Learn How to Develop Your Writing Career

Don’t take this course if:

• You haven’t finished a novel yet.
• You’re not prepared to do a lot of work to improve your novel.
• You’re looking for a guaranteed magic formula that will sell your book. There are NO guarantees in publishing.
• Your completed novel took you only thirty days to write and you’re not prepared to spend longer than that to revise it.