In what order to revise a whole book, and when to stop
The Craft Behind the Story (Second Edition) — Chapter 18. Part IV: Beyond the Book and Into Practice.
In brief. A structural edit revises a book’s architecture before its sentences, and its difficulty is order: every decision in a novel rests on others, so a repair made in the wrong order is undone by the next one. The chapter’s claim is that a book should be revised in the order in which its decisions depend on one another, not in the order of its pages: first what it promises and asks, then whose book it is and how its times and threads are arranged, then the shape of the whole, then the joins, and the scenes and their sentences last. Diagnosis runs the other way, from the place where a reader felt a problem up to the highest level at which its cause can lie. The tools are the book map, a table with one row per scene from which the other chapters’ instruments can be read, and the revision ladder, which puts those instruments in order. Use the chapter when you have a full draft and a pile of notes, when each revision seems to undo the last, or when you cannot tell whether the book is finished.
What you can do after this chapter
- Build a book map of a full draft in a day, and read the other chapters’ charts and tables off it.
- Sort a set of readers’ notes onto the revision ladder by where each problem was felt and where its cause lies.
- Revise in the order of dependence, recording for each repair the tests it reopens.
- Diagnose a page-order edit, premature polish, a local repair, a cascade and an edit by addition, and revise them.
- Decide when a structural edit is finished, and defend the failures you keep.
Key terms
Structural edit; line edit; copy-edit; macro-edit and micro-edit; the book map; the revision ladder; rung; the promise; allocation and arrangement; the shape; the joins; the scene and its materials; order of dependence; upward discovery; the rung-up rule; the edit list; reopened tests; the economy of the repair; the form audit; the stopping rule; the cold read; the page-order edit; premature polish; the local repair; the cascade; the edit by addition. Each is defined at first use and collected in the consolidated glossary.
Contents
The first files say what a structural edit is and why its order matters, the central files set out the ladder and the map that serve it, and the last are for use at the desk with a draft and its notes.
- The Problem
A household edit made in page order, and the chapter’s claim - Definitions
The structural edit and its neighbours, and what other chapters keep - How It Works
How experienced writers revise, what editors do first, what a map should record and how to read a reader’s note - The Taxonomy
The five rungs of the revision ladder, and the ruling on formal closure - The Mechanism
The book map, the order of dependence, the edit list and the stopping rule - Diagnostic Tests
Seven questions about the edit itself, and a table from symptom to rung - Failure Patterns
Five recurrent failures of revision, each paired with a work in which the same habit succeeds - Worked Analyses
The Great Gatsby, Never Let Me Go, Make Me, Annie Hall and the household revision case - Checklist and Exercises
The revision checklist and five exercises for your own draft - Coda
What the ladder assumes, and what no edit can decide
A writer with a draft and notes in hand can start at the mechanism, build the map, and then use the diagnostic tests. A writer who has revised several times and finds the book getting no better should read the failure patterns first, since the commonest cause is the order of the work rather than its quality.
The full treatment
This is a new chapter, so the Reference layer holds a single full treatment rather than a corrected original: the theory at greater length, every chapter’s instruments placed on the ladder, the kinds of structural edit, the ruling on formal closure in full, further failure patterns, the procedures for each test, further analyses (the Harry Potter series, The Martian, A Little Life and the remix of Arrested Development), the household book map and edit list in full, a glossary of the chapter’s terms and the sources.
See also: The Purposes of a Scene (Chapter 1), whose two-sentence statement of change is the map’s central column; The Ending (Chapter 16), whose plant audit is the last test of the shape; Series and Genre (Chapter 17), whose promise inventory is the first.