It’s July, which means it’s time for Camp Nanowrimo! This month I’m attempting to add at least 30,000 words to the second draft of Nothing Is Here, which started its life as my 2022 Nanowrimo novel. The poor thing has been limping through the sad space in between drafts for many months now, and it’s genuinely thrilling to be finally putting my planned changes into action.

But it’s gotten me thinking – that sad in-between space is something that really ought to be talked about more. It’s a phase of writing that sometimes doesn’t feel terribly productive because you aren’t really writing. Yet it involves making discoveries and hatching ideas that are absolutely critical to moving your story to the next phase. Still, if a project is going to founder and get abandoned anywhere in the process, for me it’s most likely to happen at this stage. It can feel hard to know what exactly will help at this stage, and it’s easy to feel demotivated and directionless.

If you’re like me, this post is for you! Today, I proudly present my checklist of things I like to do between revisions to keep the project moving forward, even if actual writing isn’t happening, and to set myself up for success when I go to write the next draft.

1. Reread everything

This one speaks for itself. No matter how well you think you know the draft you just wrote, you are wrong. You have forgotten more of it than you can possibly imagine. Even if you haven’t, you need to look at it with fresh eyes. Do whatever you can to make the book look different than it did while you were writing it: print it out, change the font, put it on a different computer, change the background color, whatever makes it feel like a completely different book. At the very least, do your re-reading in a new space – someplace you don’t usually write. This will all help you walk through the story with the freshest eyes possible. Make notes as you go on things that aren’t working (and things that are! Don’t forget to give yourself some complements, and make note of the things you definitely want to keep). But like a first draft, don’t stop to make edits. Just make notes, and move on, the way you would if you were getting ready to review a book someone else wrote.

Another benefit of this is the chance to evaluate your own skill level, and how it has changed. You have also grown considerably as a writer during the process of writing that draft, and you will be shocked, I tell you – shocked – by the stark difference in quality between the first and last chapter if you go back and read it in one fell swoop. This will not only help you appreciate how much better you’ve gotten, but also help you understand your own strengths and weaknesses as a writer.

2. List the big issues

With your re-read and annotated draft in hand, sit down and generate a list of high-level problems. Don’t focus on particular scenes or even chapters, as those will change enough on their own from one draft to the next that if you made a list of all those changes, you’d be stuck on this step for the rest of your life. To give you an idea of the kind of changes I’m talking about, here’s my list from Nothing Is Here:

• The third act was virtually non-existent. All the character arcs were heavily truncated, and the plot resolved so quickly that the ending, although it made sense, didn’t feel satisfying at all. Build up to the climax was minimal, and there wasn’t much emotional substance to the last third or so of the story at all.
• The subplots were a bit muddled. Some seemed to overlap in a way that wasn’t necessarily desirable, making it hard to pin down the cause of certain plot events or moments of character development. There was too much going on.
  • There was one major subplot in particular that didn’t fit tonally with the rest of the story. It was something I’d thought initially would work well, but didn’t end up feeling natural or needed once I actually put the story on the page. It was tied to a specific character, who I eventually realized likely needed to be cut from the story entirely (more on that in a bit).
  • There is a mystery subplot which I completely bungled in the first draft. Multiple major clues were planted and then utterly ignored by both myself and the characters, and the whole thing never got resolved at all.

Making this list is one of the toughest and most un-fun parts of the entire revision process for me. It’s about taking a hard, honest look at your story through as impartial a lens as you can muster, and forcing yourself to give voice to your own mistakes. But there’s also something very liberating about it, especially once you start to envision how much better the story is going to be once you fix this stuff.

Still, you could probably use something fun right about now, right? Let’s do something fun.    

3. Revise your character and worldbuilding documentation

However you keep track of details about your characters and world, it’s time to revisit it. Pull out your maps, character sheets, carefully curated encyclopedia of magical things, and whatever else you have, and get to fixing stuff! There is likely a lot to fix, especially if you wrote a lot of this stuff down toward the beginning of the last draft. Things always change as you’re writing, no matter what draft you’re on, and you likely have some details to add or update.

Write down all the fun details you discovered about your characters as you wrote. Sketch out how you picture the locations in your book now that you’ve actually spent some time there. Get to know the characters and world of your story from scratch, and fall in love with them all over again. This is not only productive, but will probably help you reconnect with the things you love about your story, and get you excited about spending time with those things again.

4. Create a thematic outline

It’s time for themes! It’s always good to revisit these from time to time, but now is an especially good time to check in and make sure the changes you’re planning on align with what you want the story to say. My favorite way of doing this is to create a high-level outline of the story that is heavily focused on the themes.

Here’s how you do it. At each major point in your story – the inciting incident, each of the major conflicts, the midpoint, the darkest hour, the climax, yadda yadda – write a little blurb about what’s going on with your major characters and plot elements. Focus as much as you can on the emotions driving each turning point in the story. Think about the deeper meaning of what your characters are going through or how the world is changing at each point, and how it ties into your themes. Now look at the whole thing as one unit and ask yourself, does this hold together? Is what I’m saying consistent across the entire story, or am I contradicting myself?

This is helpful not only for making your story feel more cohesive and meaningful, but also for double-checking that everything and everyone has a reason for being there. I mentioned earlier that I had to cut a character from Nothing Is Here, and although I had a hunch about this earlier in the process, the thematic outline was what really clinched it. This character’s presence in the story meant absolutely nothing to the themes of the book, and her subplot contributed nothing to the message I was trying to convey. It was just fluff, with no deeper meaning at all. That’s not to say that everything has to have a deeper meaning or a thematic reason for being there – it totally doesn’t! But if you have a hunch something doesn’t quite fit, or that something is missing, this step can help you figure out what and why.

5. Take it for a test drive

You probably have an idea by now of a few specific scenes that will look very different in your next draft. Try writing them! Even if you don’t yet feel prepared to dive back into the entire book yet, it doesn’t hurt to try on your alterations and see if they fit. Pick one or two scenes that are going to be really, really different in the next draft – like, totally unrecognizable – and try writing them. Don’t overthink this too much. Give yourself maybe an hour at most and just throw some words down. This isn’t the version that’s actually going in the book. You’re just checking to make sure it’s even possible to get what you want out of the scenes in question with the changes you’ve made.

For me, this is often the beginning of the book, and Nothing Is Here was no exception. I had a scene where several major characters – including the one I cut – all got introduced at once, and I wanted to check that it could still make sense without her presence. The voice of my POV character also usually changed pretty drastically throughout the process of a first draft, and it was fun to go back and see what the beginning sounded like in the new voice I had settled into by the end. I also wanted to revisit the early stages of that mystery subplot, and try out a different way of setting it up. Bits and pieces of these test scenes have so far ended up in my second draft, but not the entire thing. Still, I gained a lot of confidence in the changes I was making by doing this, and had a few good ideas as I went along too.

6. Flesh out your outline

You already have that loose, thematic outline from step 4 – now let’s make it bigger and better. Go back and add in more detail about specific plot points, including the in-between scenes, minor characters, and anything else that got left out of the high-level stuff. If you like to get down to the chapter or scene level with your outlines, now is the hour for that. Basically, make it an outline outline: a set of instructions to follow that will actually result in a book.

If you don’t like outlining your first drafts, you might be quite upset right now, and that’s fair. Outlining is not everyone’s cup of tea. If you’re revising something, though, you really do need a plan. The trick is to find a way to make it work for you. An outline is a very personal thing, and you shouldn’t strive for a specific method of outlining just because another writer said it worked for them. Think about what would help you understand the overall flow of this story best, and how all of its tiny little pieces fit together. Use whatever tools feel natural – pen and paper, a word document, mind-mapping software, index cards pinned to a bulletin board with copious amounts of red string – whatever floats your writerly boat. You’ll thank yourself later.

 7. Get hyped

This is another point in the process where not everyone is really having fun, and it can be useful to take a moment to reconnect with the stuff you love about your story, without worrying about thematic consistency or character arcs or plot holes or any of the rest of it. So let’s have some more of that!

Close your outline, take some deep breaths, and go let your brain play. Make a new Pinterest board or playlist. Rewrite your favorite scene. Fill out those fluffy character questionnaires you’re pretty sure are useless, and let yourself have fun puzzling over what your main character’s favorite food would be. If you’re feeling up to it, get a trusted friend or writing buddy to do a positivity read of a chapter or scene of your story (basically, a critique where they focus entirely on the good things: the things you’re doing right, the stuff they liked, and the things you’re good at as a writer).

Basically, get excited! It’s almost time to start actually writing again.

8. Treat it like a brand new book

It’s time to write! But with a new draft of an old story, you might feel like you’re dragging some heavy baggage behind you. Give yourself permission to put that baggage down, and approach this like a completely new book – just one you happen to have an eerily detailed outline for, and a lot of déjà vu. For me this is mostly about mindset, but maybe for you that means starting a brand new blank document and not even looking at what you wrote last time. Maybe once all your notes are nicely typed up, you can cleanse your book by ritually burning the printed-out first draft under a full moon or something. Do whatever you’ve got to do to banish the ghosts of your book’s past, and stop focusing on what you did wrong last time.

And that’s it! You did it. You got through the nasty middle part between one draft and the next. There’s nothing left to say, but happy writing.