When writing a novel, the revision process never ends, unless your manuscript gets published, or you throw it in the trash and never look at it again. And nothing tends to cause a writer more fits than the opening of a novel. Here is one of the earliest versions of my first book that I wrote years ago. I cringe just reading it.
If you’ve never written a novel before, you may not grasp what it means to revise a manuscript, especially one over a thousand pages long. Some people think revision is going back through, checking typos and fixing misplaced punctuation. That’s proofreading or copy editing. A more appropriate term for revision might be rewriting. You see, writing the first draft of a novel is relatively easy. Once that first draft is finished the work has really just begun. Now I can’t speak for authors whose craft has been shaped and polished over a career of writing and publishing several books or more as their revision process might be quite different.
