I once met a writer who said, very proudly, 'I write a first draft, send it off, and that's it.' He wasn't someone I'd ever heard of to be honest. Most of us end up doing two kinds of revision for our work. One is pre-delivery, in other words before it reaches and editor. The other is post... when they've had a look and come back with some suggestions.

Both sets of revision are, for me, very important parts of the editorial process. I'd hate it if a first draft felt 'good enough'. I never feel that about my work. Given the chance I'd rewrite everything, including the book that's about to come out. That's how I am. But there is a big difference between the pre- and post- revisions. I'm not going to talk cerebral stuff here, just plain practical advice. Here's how it goes...

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The first thing has to be said about revising is that it's best to aim for what audio and video people call 'non-destructive editing'. In other words you should be able to hack and change to your heart's content knowing that if you go too far you can always get back to the original. The simplest way to do this is to work on a copy of your original. When I do my first revisions in Scrivener, the software I use for writing the book itself, that's what happens. One of Scrivener's many wonderful tricks is its ability to let you rework the timeline of a narrative very easily -- dragging scenes around to see how they look if they go somewhere else. I once made the mistake of finishing a very rough draft of a book then exporting it into a word processor and doing the final polish there. This is fatal. You can guarantee someone will come back and say, 'But wouldn't scene five be better split, with one half going there and the other there?

And they'll be right. <em>And</em> you'll discover just what a pain that is in an ordinary word process. So now all pre-editing takes place in Scrivener and stays there until I'm absolutely sure there will be no changes in the flow of the narrative.

At that point I move to something else. It could be Word, and I've still written more books in that than anything else. But these days I prefer Apple's Pages and here are some reasons why.

As with Word, non-destructive editing can take place within the same document. You simply turn on 'track changes' and the software keeps an eye on what you change and excise, shows you the edits and lets you go back or merge them with the new material. I prefer Pages over Word because what I'm looking for at this stage is speed and easy editing. Pages does all that brilliantly. Here's what the track editing looks like in action.

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<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/screen-shot-2009-12-31-at-10-09-43.png"></a>Yes, you can do this in Word too. But it's a lot more clumsy and hard to follow. In Pages I can see very quickly what I've changed and what I've deleted, go back to the original version, write something entirely new... the choice is mine. I can also make quick notes in the margin to myself too.

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<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/comment.png"></a>I do this for those passages I'm still not entirely sure about. So when the first or second revision is done I go through, reread these sections, and see if they need a little more.
Screen work is, of course, the second part of the process. The first is printing out the entire manuscript and reading it myself, in a chair somewhere, away from the computer and the phone, trying to see it as a reader will one day. You can't beat a piece of paper and a red pen as a starting point for the revision process. Once that is done I go back to the computer, work my way through each section, rereading it with the notes at the screen, and make the changes I want (which are not always the ones written in red biro -- this is a fluid process).

And that really is revision for me. When there are no more nagging comments in the margin I export from Pages to a Word file and send off the revision to my editors. One point is worth making here though, since I get it a lot at writing classes. Word is designed to be an office revision medium in its own right, allowing editors to make notes directly into the document so that you, as the writer, can see them in place and deal with them there. Pages will read those Word comments too so you could, in theory, still edit your book in Pages from a Word file with editor's annotations.

Over the last fifteen years I've only dealt with one editor who works like this -- returning to you a Word document with the notes in the text. Most will give you a manuscript with stuck-on notes or a document referring you to, say Page 30, line 3. No point in moaning -- that is just the way many editors work. If you are one such, though, can I point out one possible gremlin. It's dead simple: your Page 30, line 3, may not be mine. In Europe we use A4 paper and in the US you have US letter. Fonts, page sizes, different kinds of printers often seem to dictate that manuscripts print differently in different locations. So a clue to the content that will allow a writer to find the spot you mean through a simple search is much appreciated -- Page 30, line 3, 'Fred is turning into an elf...' for example.

Just a thought. The revisions for <em>The Fallen Angel</em> are now done. It's on to the next book.