I’m making slow progress with my novel revisions

I’ve posted all the comments from my novel’s beta readers on the wall, I’ve posted the entire novel on the wall, and I’m working through the comments by scribbling page after page with yellow marker and red pen. I use the yellow marker to highlight where I explain and/or use expository language to tell rather than show (a lesson learned from the Writers Digest tutorial, Revise for Publication: Revision Strategies That Will Improve Any Draft). And, I’m actually rewriting with the red pen, with special emphasis on clearing up inconsistencies like one of my characters has a black bushy beard in one scene and a light brown beard in another improving on the quality of my verbs, and further developing my characters – while making sure I describe them consistently throughout.

I storyboarded my memoir when I worked on its revisions as well. However, this time I actually saved time, wall space, and printing costs by reducing the size of the book to  single space rather than space and a half. Rather than posting the book on more than ten foam boards, I only needed to use six. And I was pleasantly surprised when my pinning job, using push pins, took just over an hour rather than the whole day I thought I needed.

However, those little shortcuts will not help me with the daunting job of this revision. The examples above are just the tip of the iceberg of things I need to fix. So my plan is to mark up this copy on the wall, moving pages around as necessary, and then go back to my computer to implement the changes. I’m sure I’ll find more changes to make as I go.

I’ve always heard that revision is much harder and takes much longer than the actually writing. The revision job I have in front of me proves to me that it is.

from Writer’s Digest Tutorial, “Revise for Publication: Revision Strategies That Will Improve Any Draft”