Here are two wonderful little tricks for making sure you make the most of that all-important revision process. The first is to put a status mark on each document in your book. There are presets for the status feature you’ll find in the Inspector. But you can add your own. Just choose the edit option in the status dropdown.
Then you can choose the status options you want and create your own.
My own preference is to have three stages of revision, first revise, final draft, then a final, final one called ‘Done’. The reasoning by this is summed up from this slide from a talk I gave at CraftFest in New York a couple of years ago.
There are only so many times you revise your own work. After a while the law of diminishing returns kicks in and you will start to make it worse then loathe the thing.
At least that’s the way it works for me. You may be different.
So I change the status of each chapter/scene in the book as I rework it. And if I forget whether I’ve revised something or not? There’s a failsafe here. It’s this…
The Inspector keeps a record of when you created a document and when you last modified it. So if you find yourself looking at something and wondering whether it’s been edited or not you can usually find the answer here.
Small things. But revision is about small things, hopefully with big results. So it’s worth paying attention to them.
David Hewson 