Take Your Writing From Good to Great

Five ways to re-vision your work

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Photo: Baac3nes / Getty Images

Wouldn’t it be nice if writing a perfect post were as easy as opening up that fresh New Story page, tapping at the keyboard for a few minutes, and then hitting publish? (Cue claps, highlights, and adoring responses.) But we all know that’s not true. The more experienced a writer is, the more revision tricks they have up their sleeves. Here are a handful of great, unexpected revision tips:

See your writing with fresh eyes

As culture writer

Clive Thompson

writes, “rewriting requires me to do something that’s cognitively and emotionally tricky: I have to regard my writing with fresh eyes. I need to be a little bloodless, and see it from an alien perspective.” He has an odd trick for doing this. Thompson actually switches to an old computer to review drafts, so that the pieces really look and feel like someone else wrote them. (A lower-lift version could be changing the font, or printing a piece out and reading it on paper.)

Switching To A Different Word Processor Can Kickstart Your Writing

Make a beat sheet

Here’s a trick stolen from screenwriters: Novelist and writing coach

Courtney Maum

suggests breaking down each of your paragraphs into “beats.” Basically this involves writing out what each sentence is doing to advance the piece forward. It works equally well for short pieces and book-length works.

Why a beat sheet is the revision tool your frazzled brain needs now

Write the piece shorter. And write the piece longer.

What happens to your piece if you cut away everything unnecessary, and wrote the 100-word version? What about if you expanded it into a 3000-word version?

Casey Lawrence

uses this exercise here for a work of fiction, but we think it would work just as well for any piece of prose.

Beyond Recognition: A Writing Challenge

Start a writing group

In her advice column for Human Parts, author

Eileen Pollack

writes about the value of writing groups. This can be in person or virtual, and they can be other writers in your field or genre, or a diverse group of creative types. Having people critique your drafts can be intimidating, but there’s no substitute for getting first readers’ advice about what you should edit or revise. As Pollack puts it: “After a period of resistance — I usually feel sick to my stomach for at least a few hours after anyone critiques my work — you should find yourself eager to revise your draft to make it stronger.”

Forget the Idea That Writers Must Write Alone

Go through the self-editing checklist

Here it is. Just trust us on this one:

A Self-Editing Checklist From an Editor-in-Chief

Got a great revision strategy? Let us know in the responses.