I’ll be honest: revising a novel after a beta read is probably my least favorite part of the writing process. Compared to the adventure of coming up with a plot and writing the first draft, post-beta revisions tend to be something of a chore. By that point, you have your plot and your characters pretty well nailed down, so most the changes you’re making are mundane tweaks and typo-fixes. And, vital as they may be, it’s hard to get fired up about moving commas and adding dialogue tags. True, you do get to write the occasional new scene, but such creative bursts are usually few and far between at this late stage.
I think I may have figured out a way to make the revision process a little bit less of a hassle though. Since most of my beta readers made their comments using Word’s track changes feature, it occurred to me that I could merge all their changes into one master document. This makes things a lot tidier since you don’t have to have a gazillion documents open at once. Also, since Word allows synchronous scrolling when you’re viewing two documents side-by-side, it’s easy to keep track of the line-by-line comments.
Some of my beta readers made their comments in a separate document instead of using the track changes feature and I ended up having to go through and add them to the master list manually. For simplicity’s sake, I think that from now on I’m going to request that everyone make their comments alongside the text itself.
Now that everything is set up, I’m cautiously optimistic that I’ll be able to move quickly through the revisions. With any luck, they’ll be done within a week to ten days. Then I will probably have a very limited gamma read, largely for the purpose of hunting down the last remaining typos. Once that’s done, it will be time to declare the writing process finished and start sending out query letters.
Codex Lochianus 