How to Revise Your Zero/First Draft

This blog post goes out to all the other writers out there. And selfishly, I'm kind of writing this for myself because I just started revising one of my novels that's been stocked away for six months now. I like the idea of taking time away from the story and then going back to it at a later time. When I first wrote the dystopian I'm revising now, I was in a completely different headspace than I am now. My mind when making the zero draft (or first draft) is to just focus on enjoying the story and the plot and making sure my characters have an arc where they are able to grow. I'm not going to lie, because I'm the type of writer who likes to go with the flow as I write, my zero draft is usually pretty bad. For me, it's like watching a movie, I enjoy every second of it, and I don't think.

So far, I've already had to completely rewrite an entire chapter and a half. That's why I like the term zero draft, because I just end up severely changing everything. The message of the story and the characters and plot relatively stay the same, but a lot of scenes get switched around. I remember once I even added an entirely new character into the mesh. So far, I've left maybe three or four sentences completely alone, that's it.

I want to walk you through what my process has been so far and what I plan for the rest of my process to be like. I need to refresh my memory. I just finished the zero draft for a different novel that is now stocked away, so I need to get my mind reacquainted with revision. I'm also going from a novel about toxic Christianity to one about body image, so topic-wise, I'm kind of flipping over as well.

My process isn't solely my own. I've learned certain aspects of it from other writers. I like to start with simply reading through one chapter at a time and writing down comments that a reader would write about the story. I read as a reader first, kind of like a beta read. Then I go through and start making changes. I try to read through it all first though before making any large-scale changes that affect the entire book such as character arc and plot, just because they may just end up having to get changed again. I think it's a great strategy to read through it all first, and then organize through what the problem areas are, sort them into categories, and then start going with one category at at time and making changes throughout the whole book. That way you're looking at it as a whole and not making changes and then getting stuck halfway through. You want to get all the details right, yes, but you also want to get all the big pictures right, too.

I've done some reading, and right now I'm doing a lot of rewriting, while also keeping note of all the big themes. My biggest thing so far is world-building. This is the first novel where I've had to construct the entire society from scratch. It's so hard to world build effectively, so a lot of what I've been working on are those skills and how to use more description than what I'm used to. So far, similarly to how fantasy novels create a map at the beginning of their novel, I've created charts to organize how the society runs things.

Obviously I'm only one writer, and I'd love to hear how you or any other writers you know like to revise. Every book is different. I don't revise the same way for all of my books. I know a lot of writers dread the revision process. That used to be me, I will admit. But now that I see it as a way to make my story better, I love it. I love it. I love the journey of getting to that final draft for readers to enjoy. I love knowing all the hard work it took to produce something so life-changing for other people.

Writing one book, you should feel accomplished by that alone. But accomplishing revising too, then you know you're meant to be a writer, trust me, people don't revise unless writing is in their blood.