A Late Revision Technique

    I’ve been revising a novel that’s going to be published early in 2014 by Foreverland Press as an e-book (hard copy to follow).  This book is really finished, and was given an excellent editing a while back by my then-agent.  Still, this was an opportunity to go over it one more time, and I tried a technique I’ve advocated but never actually used myself.
    This revision technique is only for the end stages of writing a big project.  The idea is not to get caught up in the momentum of your own story.  Simply put, you go over the final chapter, then go over the penultimate chapter, then the one before that. I did Chapter 29, then Chapter 28, then Chapter 27, and so on all the way back to the beginning. When you do this, you tend to be annoyed by anything extraneous– you’re less likely to skip over things.  I’m a big fan of moving forward fast as you draft, but now I wanted to do the exact opposite: to slow down and find as much as possible of what was wordy or unnecessary.  I didn’t find a huge amount to cut and correct, but plenty to make me glad I’d done it.
    One interesting thing I noticed was that the end of the novel seemed richer and stronger than the beginning, which I had, in fact, polished a lot more. This suggests to me that my novel got better with the accumulation of what had gone before.
    It’s a good layer of revision.  For more  layers of revision, see my article in The Writer.