44 minutes.
Have you been where I sat? You finally have the time and the motivation to revise, yet somehow, you can't. You know the story isn't finished or anywhere near great but you can't change anything? No ideas are coming to you.
What do you do?
In my experience, two things have helped.
Step One: email the manuscript to yourself - or transfer it to a USB drive - and put it on another device. If you wrote it on your laptop, transfer it to your tablet. If you wrote it on your tablet, try revising on your smart phone. Or print out the manuscript and go back to good old pen and paper.
Why does this help the revision process? Because you're seeing it through different eyes. Sometimes the ones we wrote the story on need to be swapped out before we can begin revision. By transferring it to another device, you trick your brain into reading the story differently, and can speed up your revision process.
(Note: some writers also claim that changing the font can help them revise because the story looks different. Try it and see if it works for you, but I didn't have luck with this method. I was too preoccupied studying the curly letters than reading and evaluating what was on the page.)
Step Two: go somewhere new. If you wrote the story at your desk, revise on the couch. Did you write in the dining room? Shoot for the garden. If your whole house is a black hole of writing, go to a friend's house, the gym, a coffee shop, or the library.
Getting away from your normal environment, much like transferring devices, helps you to think differently. Now, you're not associating that purple pen with a beautiful metaphor in your story, you're reading the metaphor for what it really is. Does it still hold up?
So, next time the revision process has you staring, dumbfound, at your screen, wasting your precious free time, try mixing it up. Take your typewriter to the park. See what happens next.
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