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Whether you’re working on your own revisions on yet another draft, or you’re completing revisions after your editor has had their way with your manuscript, it’s easy to feel like you’re not doing it in the right amount of time. If it’s taking longer than expected, you might think that you had too many changes, so you must be a bad writer, or perhaps that your editor was too heavy handed, so they must be a bad editor. You might think you’re too slow or even too dumb. If revisions are going too quickly, you might assume that you’re missing things, that you hired a crappy editor that didn’t catch enough, that your book is still gonna suck.
None of these thoughts are fact. The truth is, there are so many variables when it comes to completing your revisions (just like completing your first draft, or your second!), and none of them mean anything about your intelligence or your capabilities as a writer. So what CAN affect the time it takes to do revisions? Here are a few of those variables:
The length of your novel
This one might be the most obvious! The length of your novel can absolutely affect how long it takes to complete your revisions. If you wrote a 150,000-word epic fantasy, it will take you a whole lot longer to comb through it than if you wrote a 30,000-word novella. Even if you know your novel like the back of your hand, a revision that is thorough should be expected to take some time, so try not to rush yourself or become frustrated if it’s not done in whatever amount of time you expected.
What draft you’re on, or what level of editing you had completed
The amount of time it takes you to complete revisions will also largely be dictated by what draft you’re on. If you’re on your second draft, you’re likely to have more to clean up than if you’re on a third or fourth draft. Likewise, the level of editing you had completed can really affect how much work you have to do. A developmental edit might require heavy plot or character changes, which might take longer to plan out and weave throughout your full manuscript. Copy editing, even with a heavy hand, might take quite a bit less time because it’s more straight forward, and often doesn’t require a lot of preplanning on your part. And even more obvious, proofreading should really only be catching typos and small errors, so it should be the quickest of all the revisions.
Your writing experience level
Now, this doesn’t have anything to do with intelligence or how good of a writer you are. The truth of the matter is that if you’ve written and revised many times, you’re going to be faster at it than if this is the first time you’ve done so. When you revise multiple projects over time, you naturally develop a system that increases your efficiency. Likewise, as you keep writing and revising, over time, you start to understand your own voice and style, so you already know what your weaknesses might be, and what areas to focus on. It’s only natural that as you gain experience with writing, your revision process goes faster and faster each time.
What else is going on in your life right now
I can’t emphasize this one enough. When all is said and done, if your personal life is extremely busy, you likely just won’t have as much time to write or revise. This is true whether your writing is a hobby, a side hustle, or your full-time gig. Our personal lives can easily take over our writing life, not only time- and schedule-wise, but by hijacking our mood. If we’re having a bad day, it’s a lot harder to dive into a rom com that you’re trying to revise, so you can’t always predict how long revisions will take. There’s just too much life stuff that can interrupt.
So stop berating yourself for not revising fast enough, and give yourself a little grace. You’ll be done in due time.
