About a year ago I stumbled upon a blog that mentioned a revision technique I found very intriguing. It was something I wanted to try then, but wasn’t conducive to the book I was working on so I shelved the idea. But recently when it came time to do revisions for my next book I read up on the process again. It’s my understanding that the concept was developed by a children’s book author and is presented mostly to workshops for other children’s authors. And while the books I write are a tad longer than a picture book I figured the process was worth a try. Here’s what I did:

Basically you take your manuscript and you shrink it down so that it can be laid out on the floor and all examined at once. I managed to get my 300+ pg manuscript down to 44 shrunken pages. All the text is sort of smushed together so that you can read it enough to see what scene that is, but clearly you wouldn’t want to sit down and read the whole book this way – you’d go blind!

So I sat at the table with my 44pgs of tiny text and got our my highlighters and post-it flags. First I came up with a list of things I wanted to track – like point of view scenes (whose head I’m in in any given scene), action-driven scenes, major plot points, romantic plot points and then I wanted to track where I could add a new subplot I wanted to include. I assigned each of these items either a colored flag or a highlighter and then I went through and marked the entire 44 pgs. It didn’t take more than an hour, I don’t think.

Next I placed all the pages on the floor, 4 rows of paper and I sat back and examined what I saw. Right away I could see areas where I needed to add a more action-driven scene, places where my villain had simply disappeared and long stretches between my romantic plot points. I got out my post-it notes and began tagging the areas with instructions on what to add. I found places to add that secondary plot line. And as an added bonus, seeing the manuscript shrunk up like that really highlighted the areas where I too much white space. I’m a dialogue-heavy writer anyways, but seeing all the white space clearly revealed scenes that could benefit from another layer of detail and texture.

Frankly the whole process was pretty darn amazing. And I think if time allows I’ll use this technique on future books as well.

So how about you? Have you tried anything new lately? Do you normally like to try new things, like new types of food, new recipes or perhaps a new hairstyle? And fellow writers, what is your revision process like? Any favorite tricks you can share?

To read more about the shrunken manuscript revision technique, visit the following links:
http://kmessner.livejournal.com/9135.html
http://wow-womenonwriting.com/31-FE3-NovelRevision.html
http://sarahmillerbooks.blogspot.com/2008/10/incredible-shrinking-manuscript.html