This week I’ve started revisions on book 6 in the Tales of Rydding Village series. I think I have an idea for a title, but I’m not sure yet. I’m looking at releasing sometime in February.

So far this week, I’ve gone through the book and made a reverse outline. That’s when I look at each scene and analyze what purpose it plays in the story. What happens, and why does it matter? What was the scene’s protagonist trying to accomplish and what was the outcome? Did anything changed? What in this scene leads to the next scene?

Looking at the book this way helps me see the character arcs and plot arcs by looking at the events and what they mean to the characters. I didn’t outline this book before writing it. I usually do a lot of outlining, but the opening scenes came to me while I was working on the outline, so I wrote them. Then more scenes kept coming to me, and I kept writing them, so I finished the book before I finished the outline. I was worried this would mean that I’d have to do a lot of rewriting, but this should be a pretty mild revision. The main thing I need to do is add something I came up with late in the book to the front of the book to properly set things up.

After doing this outline, I wrote a short synopsis of the story from each of the viewpoint characters’ perspectives, as well as a plot-level summary and the book’s sales blurb. That gave me a sense of how it should all flow overall.

Next, I’ll use this to make notes in my outline for what I need to fix from a plot level. I don’t think I’ll need to do any major restructuring. I don’t need to write new scenes, move scenes, or delete scenes, so I’ll probably do the plot and arc-level revision along with the scene revisions, where I make sure the scene structure works, add in any needed plot bits, and make sure the characters are having actual emotional responses (I’m bad about skipping that part). That’s all I’ll do on this draft. Then I’ll put it aside for a few weeks before I edit on the sentence/word level. That’s what I call the “making it pretty” pass, though I also do a lot of that during the first round of revision. I like to take another pass where I’m only looking at that, and I can also fix any errors introduced during the revision.