How to Revise a Novel: Six Passes, Biggest Problems First

Pass One: Read It Without a Pen

Wait first. Stephen King’s number in On Writing is six weeks, and the aim is to come back as a stranger. Then read the whole manuscript in as few sittings as you can bear, in a different form from the one you wrote it in: printed, or on an e-reader. Changing nothing is the hard part. Keep a notebook beside you and write down only big things: I was bored from the funeral to the ferry. Why does she trust him here?

Note where you skimmed. You’re the most forgiving reader this book will ever have, so if you skipped it, everyone else will too.

Pass Two: Fix the Structure

This is where the reverse outline earns its keep. Go through the draft and give each scene one line: who it follows, what happens, what has changed by the end. It takes a morning or so, and you’ll learn things. Here is part of one, from an invented novel about a family ferry company in Pembrokeshire.

Scene	Whose	What happens	What changes
14	Nesta	Visits the ferry office, hears the bank has called	Nothing. We knew from 11
15	Nesta	Argues with Davy about the money	Davy admits he sold the second boat
16	Davy	Drives to Fishguard, thinks about their father	Nothing
17	Davy	Meets the buyer, who wants the licence too	The sale is worse than he told her
18	Nesta	Finds the boat gone from the slip	She learns what we learned in 15

Read down the last column. Scenes 14, 16 and 18 change nothing for the reader, so each has to earn a new job or go. Scene 16 can be folded into 17. Scene 18 is sadder if it comes before 15, and then she has a reason to start the argument. That’s three lines of work that would have taken a month of rewriting to discover from inside the prose.

Also look for:

• Long stretches without a turn. Mark every scene where something irreversible happens. Are there any 50-page gaps?
• Absences. Plot each main character’s appearances. A person who disappears for 90 pages has either wandered off or belongs in fewer scenes before that.
• Causation. Between each pair of scenes, try “therefore” or “but”. If only “and then” will fit, you may have a list of incidents.
• Ending. Does the climax settle the question the opening asked? If you’ve drifted, it’s usually the opening that should change.

This is the moment for big decisions: cut a subplot, merge two characters, change the point of view. They’ll never be cheaper. Save a copy of the book before each, and keep cuts in a separate file. You’ll hardly ever open it, but knowing it’s there makes it far easier to press delete.

Quiller-Couch’s advice, in the 1914 Cambridge lecture people still misattribute to Faulkner, was to murder your darlings. He was talking about showy prose, but it applies here too: the scene you love that does nothing is the first thing the reverse outline will expose.

Pass Three: Make Each Scene Work

Now go scene by scene. Three questions will find most of the problems.

Where does it start? Most scenes can lose their first paragraphs. People arrive, sit down, say hello. Cut to the moment the disagreement begins.

What does the character want when she walks in? If you can’t say, the scene will feel like a conversation in a corridor. Give her something small and immediate, even if the scene’s real business is elsewhere.

Where does it stop? Leave as soon as the change has happened. Writers often add a paragraph of reflection after the good line, as if the reader might have missed it. Renni Browne and Dave King, in Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, reduced this to three letters: R.U.E., resist the urge to explain.

This is also when you add. If you underwrote, the draft will have summary where a scene should be. If a reader will care how Davy tells her about the boat, that gets a scene, not a sentence.

Now is a good time for readers, when the shape is right and the sentences aren’t yet precious. You’ll hear about pages you thought were fine.

Pass Four: Follow One Thread at a Time

So far you’ve read the book in order. Now read it sideways. Pick one character and read only their scenes, start to finish, as if it were a short novel. You’ll see the arc jump, the mood that changes for no reason, the opinions that swap. A person who is funny for the first third and then forgets how isn’t a character development, just a writer who got tired.

Do the same for each main character and each subplot. It’s also the point at which to check dates, ages and who knows what, because the structural changes in pass two will have broken things. The continuity guide has methods. Checking earlier would have meant doing it twice.

Pass Five: Work on the Sentences

Now, finally, the prose. Some targets, in the rough order they repay your time:

• Psychic distance. John Gardner’s term for how close the reader sits to the character. Watch for unplanned lurches, from inside her head to a view from the ceiling and back.
• Filters. “She saw the boat turn” can usually be “The boat turned”. Search for saw, heard, felt, noticed, realised, wondered. Gardner warned about this one too.
• Your own tics. Every writer has them, and yours are invisible to you until you count. Search for the words you lean on. Everyone’s characters nod, sigh and shrug more than people do.
• Rhythm. Read it aloud. Flaubert did this at volume, in what he called the gueuloir, and the Académie française gives the word a dictionary entry on the strength of it. You needn’t shout. You’ll hear the three sentences in a row built the same way, and the line of dialogue nobody could say with a straight face.

Stephen King’s formula, second draft equals first draft minus 10 per cent, is a good target if you overwrite. Cutting to a number forces out the things you’d have defended one at a time.

Pass Six: Proofread as a Different Person

Your brain knows what the sentence means and will read that, whatever’s actually there. So make it unfamiliar: change the font, print it, have your computer read it to you, or read the chapters backwards so the story can’t carry you along. Do this last, on as close to the final text as you can, since every edit brings new errors with it.

If you’re paying for help, the trade’s four kinds of editing line up with these passes. A developmental editor works on passes two and three, a line editor on five, a copy editor on four and five with a style sheet in hand, and a proofreader on six. Hiring them in reverse order is expensive.

How You Know It’s Finished

There’s a line usually credited to Oscar Wilde, as most lines are, about spending the morning taking out a comma and the afternoon putting it back. When your changes have stopped improving the page and only make it different, stop. It won’t be perfect. It will be a book someone other than you can have an opinion about.

Whatever you use to keep track of passes will do: a printed checklist, a folder per draft, a spreadsheet. Shiro’s revision passes give each one a name, a checklist and a colour, if you’d like them in the same place as the text.

The Questions People Ask

How many drafts should a novel have?

There’s no correct number, and writers count drafts differently. A better question is what kind of change you’re making. When your edits stop improving things and only make them different, you’re close.

How long should I wait before revising?

Long enough to read it like a stranger. Stephen King suggests six weeks. If you have a deadline, even a week on something else helps.

When should I show my novel to beta readers?

After you’ve fixed the structural problems you can see yourself, and before you polish sentences. Otherwise you’re asking them to find what you already know, and polishing passages they may tell you to cut.

What is a reverse outline?

A list of the scenes you actually wrote, a line each, made after the draft. It shows you what the book does, as opposed to what you remember it doing.

Last revised November 2026.