Why Are Revisions the Worst?

A five-step guide to triaging feedback and getting your life back

Hi friends,

I love spring. Lots of new ideas buzzing around. It’s the beginning of ApWriMo, less than a month til the launch of my book workshop, six weeks til our Mexico City writing retreat, and my book launches two months from today. So many exciting things are happening around here! Also, the weather has finally gotten nice here at least some of the time, and so we’ve been escaping to the beach on the weekends to learn how to fly kites. And yet, there’s still work to be done.

I will preface this by saying that this piece might not be for you right now. If you’re in the early stages of writing and don’t have any sticky feedback to process, then maybe bookmark it for later and go eat ice cream in the park or something.

But, if feedback feels vexing, and you’re hiding from your dissertation advisor’s latest round of comments or have a zombie R and R buried on your desktop because the reviewer comments seemed to daunting, let’s go!

Why are revisions the worst?

Having been on both sides of the editor/client relationship over the past few years, I can safely say there’s a real emotional chasm between giving and receiving feedback.

When I, an editor, send a memo or revised manuscript back to the author, I am genuinely so excited to see what they’re going to do with it. I love editing! I love my clients! We’re collaborating! This awesome thing they wrote is closer to being in the world! I have so many ideas about how they can nudge the argument or craft the sentences to really connect with their readers, and can’t wait to give them the tools they need to get published.

When I, a writer, receive a memo or revised manuscript from my editor, I…pretend like I didn’t see the email for a few days? …open it up and feel my heart sink at the number of changes? …feel like I just paid good money to invite reviewer 2 into my life and my mailbox? All of the above? To be clear, the editors aren’t the problem. It’s me (Hi. I’m the problem, it’s me.) But why? What can help? I wrote this piece a few months ago about how to reframe the feedback process, and I’ve been thinking more about the how piece of this.

We need a process!

Last week, I got an email from a client. We’ve been working on transforming her dissertation into an amazing book, and it’s in the final, pre-submission round of edits. I sent her line edits for each chapter, she got a set of edits from her dissertation advisor, and then sent me an email essentially saying “so…I’m feeling a little overwhelmed…is there a checklist for how to process only partially overlapping complex feedback from two people on an 80,000-word manuscript?” What a great question!

I realized that I had been doing getting my clients only halfway to the finish line by providing comments and then no guidance about what to do next. So here it is: a checklist (and a handy infographic!) for how to process complex feedback, whether from multiple peer reviewers, four different members of your dissertation committee, or from your (lovely, well-meaning) editor and an outside reader.

Round one: Micro comments

When you’re writing, I advise people to save line-level questions for last. When you’re processing revisions, I like to start with these first. They’re easy, it gives you a global sense of what’s going on in the document, and it clears away a lot of the visual clutter that make revisions feel overwhelming.

If you’re resolving multiple sets of comments, choose one governing document to work from (whichever has the most changes). Change the title of the document so you don’t get confused.

1. Any changes that you can just accept…accept. Spacing, changing hyphens to em-dashes, etc—don’t think, just do.

2. Then, go through the document again. Any changes that you can deal with in under 2 minutes (like when if your editor says "I would rewrite the sentence this way" and you agree with that rewriting and can just copy/paste), just do all of those. 

3. Any line-level changes that you think will take you more than 2 minutes, make a comment for yourself that says "LL: ..." and write what the change will be. (The LL [line level] tag is so that you can search through the comments). 

4. If you’re working from two sets of revisions, go to the second version of the document, and open the two side by side. Do the same thing: if a change can be integrated in less than 2 minutes, just make that change, and then otherwise leave yourself a LL comment about what the change will be.  

It's up to you whether to then move on to round two, or to go through the LL comments and resolve them—I might do a combination of both, depending on how you're feeling. 

Round two: Macro comments

After you've done all of the line- and language-level edits that you want to tackle for the time being, I would then focus on the big picture. I would read all of the big picture/conceptual comments, and use them to make some decisions about what changes you need to make to the structure, organization, argument, framing of the piece.

I would process multiple sets of comments like this:

1. Convergence: if multiple sets of feedback make the same or similar comments, that is probably something that will confuse the reader is worth addressing. 

2. Divergence: if readers say conflicting things, I would just decide who you agree with. A lot of time conflicting advice means that something isn't working, so I'd spend a little time thinking about why it conflicts before you resolve it.

3. Uniqueness: If there are things in either set of comments that only one reader brought up, I would consider it carefully, but not feel beholden to making the change. 

Once you've processed the comments in this way, make yourself a list of things you need to do to implement these changes across the chapters, since this level likely affects every, or almost every, chapter, at least in the framing.

I'd spend time working through those conceptual changes before you move to round 3, because it will help drive those decisions you make on the paragraph and section level. 

Round three: Processing the mezzo comments 

Once you've done the easy stuff and the conceptual stuff, now you can focus on the paragraph and section level. I'd follow the process of convergence/ divergence/ uniqueness from above, but now you have some conceptual choices that can guide your decision making. 

Like before, I would read through the comments made by both readers, and then resolve the ones you don't agree with, process the ones you agree with and can dispatch quickly, and then label as "ML ..." the ones that you need to spend some time thinking about. 

Round four: Resolve the comments

Now, jump between rounds 1 and 3, addressing and resolving comments. When a comment seems hard, skip to the next one! Is your brain tired? Handle sentence-level stuff, and come back for conceptual-level edits later. What I like about this routine is that it gives you a menu of choices of things to resolve, and so you can toggle between hard things and easier things. If your brain doesn't want to think about analysis in chapter 3, you can rewrite some sentences in chapter 5, and visa versa. 

Round five: Full read through

I suspect that this process will help you clean up a lot of patterns of error, like addressing passive voice. At the end, I'd do one final read through with the whole thing printed out where you can look for things you didn't catch. 

What if this seems too hard?

For a lot of us, revising is hard. (It also, unfairly, takes so much more freaking time than writing does). If chunking up revisions like this (or chunking up the drafting process in a similar way) doesn’t help, I would bring in support. Ask your editor if they do follow-up calls. Ask a friend or colleague to read the different memos and help you synthesize them. If these are reviewer comments, consider hiring an editor or consultant to help you read them and design a revision strategy.

And if you realize that the article or book needs to go back to the drawing board, you’re not alone. Find a writing community that can support you, hire an editor or coach who can provide the support you need, and keep writing.

Write all the things!

Kelly

A few last reminders…

So You Want to Write a Book is my book writing workshop that will start in May. This workshop is designed to set you up with all of the tools you need to get your book written and into the world, whether you’re just starting out, or stuck on a draft. There are only three spots left, and I anticipate that these will fill soon, so if you’ve been thinking about registering now is your time!

Editing and Coaching: Do you have a manuscript you want to get out the door? Job or promotion materials that could use another set of eyes? We have spring and summer availability! Let’s set up a 30-minute time to talk about your project, and get you on our schedule.