Ultimately revision is a personal process. You can have people critique your work. You can have editors recommend changes. But at the end of the day you are the one who chooses what or what not to change. Previously I outlined the collaborative nature of this process, but in this section I want to talk about self-editing and revision.

Self-editing and revision includes writers who don't use any feedback at all as well as those that are grappling with the initial revision draft (before it is sent to critique partners) as well as the final check before submission or publishing for those that use critique partners or editors (the final round of personal edits). In all of these cases, you are assessing your work without feedback.

Unfortunately, no strategy or method will help you improve your own writing if you don't have the basics of grammar, spelling, and structure down. There are numerous books that will help you with all of these pieces, and, of course, reading other writers is also an excellent way to see how other professionals approach various narrative and writing challenges. But addressing those is beyond the scope of this section. What is within the scope of this book is avoiding blind spots while self-revising.

Earlier in this book I discussed the concept of blind spots. These are the essence of what makes writing frustrating—you did something wrong, and you can't even see it. Beyond catching obvious mistakes like misspellings and grammar issues, self-revision is about helping you reveal these blind spots so you can address them.

This section is about practical shortcuts that will help you identify mistakes you would otherwise miss. As a normal read-through generally doesn't achieve this aim, be prepared for some interesting, fun, and possibly strange ways to re-engage with your fiction.

Use Your Ears

One of the best ways to look at your writing in a new way is to not look at it at all. It's to listen to it. I learned this first hand when I submitted my book Tommy Black and the Staff of Light to the audiobook narrator. He did a quick preliminary read-through and in the process of doing that found five small mistakes.

That may not sound like a lot, but this book was edited and critiqued by nearly ten people. Not one of them caught the errors. Why? Because they were the kind of errors where the mistakes naturally fell within the rhythm of the sentence as you read it in your mind. Here's an example:

"The Ifrit spoke while using it hands."

Now outside the context of reading the novel, this seems like an obvious error. The "it" should be the possessive word "its." However, within the context of the sentence as a whole, the reader is presented with a word that is both plural and singular so there is some cognitive confusion over whether the "S" should be there or not. (Ifrit and not Ifrits.) Similarly, the rhythm of the sentence is pretty clear, and as readers we expect the word to be "its" and not "it," so we put it there ourselves.

Rhythm and expectation are just two of the ways that our brains "fix" the words that we read. If you've ever wondered why horribly written novels can be so universally loved, this is one of the reasons—our brains make them better. However, as writers we don't want to rely on our readers to make our writing better. We want to make it better.

So how do we do that? Well, we trick our minds by removing the context of where our minds fix the words, sentences, and paragraphs. Listening to your writing is a primary way of doing that. There are a few ways, all of which have their own benefits.

Read your work out loud

This works quite well, as you are using a different part of your brain to speak the words than you would to read and understand them. This is also a fantastic method to assess the rhythm of your sentences. If you are often criticized for stilted prose or lacking a poetic touch to your descriptions, reading your own work out loud will reveal them like no other.

The method is simple: Just start reading your work out loud, as if you were reading it to an audience. Don't speak in a monotone. Speak the words the way you want them to be read. As you do this, a fascinating thing will happen—you'll start to understand that some of the punctuation and sentence structure that you use will not at all sound the way you intended it.

This has a tremendous number of side benefits. Simple things like contractions will start to stand out if you over- or underuse them. You'll get a better grounding on when to use commas and other pauses. Your paragraph structure will start to become clearer as you better understand the natural breaks that a new paragraph creates. And, of course, you'll start to pick up minor mistakes that seem to slip past everyone—such as a "you" that should be a "your."

Have your computer read your work to you

As recently as a year ago, the narration engine within Windows and Mac OS were so robotic that having them read to you was almost painful. While not perfect, those same programs are able to provide an acceptable narration experience for the writer. The process is different for each operating system.

In Mac OS, you turn this on by choosing "Dictation & Speech" in the system preferences and creating a key combination to turn it on. The default is option | escape. In Windows go to Settings and select Time & Language. Then click on Speech and configure the text-to-speech option.

One of the benefits of having a computer read to you is that your own biases in terms of rhythm are hidden. If you fly past a comma in your own work, you can be sure that the computer will pause there. While the stilted reading will make a truly natural understanding of rhythm difficult to assess, the raw objectivity of it will reveal some important mistakes.

Read Backward

While listening to your work will pick up some mistakes, it will not do a great job of revealing subtle grammar, spelling, or other errors. As I noted earlier, our brains often hide these errors from us by "fixing" them. The context of reading a narrative that makes chronological sense is a prime culprit in assisting in this unconscious error correction.

One way to understand this is that as words flow into sentences and sentences flow into paragraphs and paragraphs create scenes our minds logically follow the narrative. This is why reading is a collaborative experience. The reader will make a character more vibrant by providing description and background that isn't there. What happens between scene breaks will be unconsciously filled in, and, at the prose level, we skip over little mistakes because we understand the bigger story.

One way to totally disrupt this process is to remove narrative flow and context. The primary way of doing this is to edit backwards. There are a number of guidelines, from edit the last chapter first and then move backward through the novel to edit each sentence from the last to the first.

Sentence-level revisions that are done backwards are absolutely ideal but the process is surprisingly grueling. This is good on the one hand—you'll be reading each individual sentence as a discrete unit. This will dramatically improve your ability to avoid blind spots and to catch even the most minor error. However, this can be extremely time-consuming.

In practical terms an acceptable solution is to work backward at the paragraph level. You'll still scramble your cognitive understanding of the text and will shave quite a bit of time off your revisions. The downside is that you will introduce rhythm to your reading as one sentence flows to the next, and that has a likelihood of covering up some errors.

Change Little Things

Since the goal is to change your cognitive awareness of the text as you read it, sometimes little things can make a subtle but tangible difference. Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award winning author Ken Liu revises his work in a different font. I do the same thing, writing in an OS standard font and then revising in Courier.

This may sound odd, but it is quite astounding how different a work will look by simply changing the font. Your eyes process the sentences differently. If you ever wondered why cover designers and book designers spend so much time and effort at typography, this is one of the reasons—it absolutely affects the reading experience.

Once you consider that changing the font can change how you perceive your writing, other things start to enter your mind, and you should check them all out. Line spacing? Yes. Try that. Always work on a computer screen? Print out the document and grab a pen.

In fact, process alone can be counterproductive to getting into the revision mindset. Do you do all your writing and editing at a desk or writing nook? Take your writing to a café where there are a lot of distractions. Wait, distractions are bad for editing, right? Not necessarily, if they pull you out of the story and the rhythm of the piece, then they are actually beneficial.

The writing brain v. the revising brain

Writers often talk about the mindset of writing being different than the mindset of revision. Earlier I talked about how that wasn't true and that writers like Ray Bradbury clearly illustrated that revision is as creative as the process of putting the words down for the first time. It is for this exact reason that you need to actually work hard to find a new mindset. It just doesn't come naturally.

In terms or practical revision, the real challenge is getting past your blind spots. The only way to do that is to find a new perspective. The above are some of the ways to provide that valuable perspective.

Thanks for reading No Fear Revision. If you found it helpful, please be sure to vote for it. Thank you!

Jake