Hi friends!

It’s another craft course review today! So a bit about how I write – my first drafts are what Anne Lamott would call “shitty first draft” because I’m a discovery writer. I’ve read some books on plotting, I’ve tried that, but it doesn’t work. I need to put everything down in the first draft to know what the whole story is about and that means revising is super important to me.

When it comes to characters and the general direction of the book, I’ve found Supercharge Your Story to be very helpful. But, I still have an issue with my scenes and it was my attempt to master that bit of the revision process that led me to buy How to Revise Your Book.

What is How To Revise Your Book about?

Although Mark Dawson’s name is prominently displayed, this course is actually conducted by Jennie Narsh. Jennie takes us through six modules:

1. Stop Thinking Like a Writer – on the editing mindset
2. Build a Model of your Novel – the core of the course, in my opinion, is the Inside-Outline model that Jennie introduces here.
3. Prioritise Your Problems – another key part of the course is to colour code the problems into red for the major ones and orange for minor ones.
4. Execute the Fixes
5. Polish Your Story
6. How Do You Know When Your Book is Ready to Publish?

Each module consists of multiple lectures, including detailed examples where Jennie goes through the Inside-Outline of James Blatch.

Who Is This For?

I can think of a few people who might find this helpful:

1. You can’t really plot so you need to have your revising skills down pat before you even hand the manuscript to an editor
2. You’re trying to avoid the developmental edit by doing most of the editing yourself.

On the other hand, you should not be doing this course if:

1. You already have a plotting strategy that results in a very clean first draft with very little need for major edits
2. You’re already work with a good editor who gives you feedback on the structure, character development, and pacing of the book.
3. You can’t really see the flaws in your story and you need a third party to point it out.

Concluding Thoughts

As someone who cannot plot at all, I found this course to be very helpful. The Supercharge Your Story course helped me in nailing the theme and character motivations for the book, and How to Revise Your Book complemented it by giving me a structure to do systematic edits. I have used it for my current WIP and I found it made the revision process a lot less stressful than it’s traditionally been.