A fundamental rule of style is that you should avoid the verb “to be,” preferring instead strong, descriptive verbs that show, rather than tell.

As an example, instead of writing, “The light was bright,” you should prefer, “The light blinded her as a hot-white flame,” or some such. So every time you use am, is, are, was, were, be, been, or being, that’s a signal that you need to rephrase…

EXCEPT...

As it turns out, this common rule of thumb oversimplifies the issue, sometimes to the point that confusion can result.

No less a writer than Holly Lisle gives a misleading example, on her web page about one-pass manuscript revision:

Is your scene full of weak words? How many times have you used is, was, or were?… Eliminate forms of the verb “to be” wherever you find them, rewriting the sentence with a stronger verb. “It was raining,” becomes “The rain slashed down, tearing up the gardens and ripping leaves from the trees.”

But the verb in that sentence is not the verb “to be”!

I’ve experienced the same thing, as a musician, whenever I give a big musical performance. As you prepare for the big event, you practice, you plan, you’re running on adrenaline. The big night comes. You perform beautifully. The burn of the spotlights, the adulation of the crowd, the feeling of accomplishment. You’re floating on air.

The next day, you crash, hard.

I always plan to take the next day off after a big performance. My father, too, when he was pastoring a church, Monday was his day off, because he had prepared all week for Sunday, and after it was over, he needed to decompress. And I experience the same thing after finishing a big writing project.

Once the manuscript is revised and put to bed, I start coming down off that adrenaline high. Up until that point, I’d been barreling through, planning, creating, writing, then revising, amazed at how good it feels, to read my own story, to have it excite me, the fulfillment, the psychological reward. And then, sadness.

Recently, I joked on my personal blog about how (not) to revise your novel, a trying process involving sweat, tears, and numerous trips to the office supply store. And all just so that you can see, in black and white, how crappy a writer you really are.

But seriously, revising a novel is a lot of hard work. And in your first draft, you probably did do a crappy job, because that’s what revision is for, to un-crap-ify it. You’re basically trying to fix everything you goofed on while you were writing your first draft. Melding all those multiple character personalities into one; pruning all those lost plot threads that go nowhere; unifying the story’s theme.

For From the Ashes of Courage, I used Holly Lisle’s one-pass manuscript revision process, exactly as she describes it. I’ve always used a variation of this process, going from first to final draft in one pass (more or less), but this is the first time I’ve done everything she recommends, exactly as she recommends it. I found it workable, and even enjoyable. In particular, her advice to write down the main theme and sub-themes of the story, before you start revising, I found that to be invaluable.

Even though it was fun to work on paper, I don’t think it was really necessary—for me—to print out the manuscript, as she recommends, because I didn’t really make any changes that wouldn’t have been easier right on the computer. This may have something to do with how I write. Unlike Holly, for example, I do not tend to throw in new plot ideas while I’m writing my first draft. I would more likely do that while I’m writing my zero-draft. And because the first draft is a rewrite of the zero-draft, the plot holes that result usually don’t make it into the first draft. Likewise, I didn’t have many scenes that I had to throw away. (There was exactly one, and I know how it got in there in the first place, and it’s now less likely that a similar scene would make it into a future first draft.) Yes, there were lots of plot points, scenes, partial scenes, and so forth that I moved around, recast, and threw away, but they were all in the zero-draft, and I made those changes while I was writing the first draft. That probably made the revision process much less intense than it otherwise would have been.

Even so, I ended up—and I should have done this a long time ago—compiling a revision checklist, all the things that I was checking for. In software-development terms, these are my acceptance tests. These are how I know I’ve done my job correctly, or how I know what’s wrong with my story. If any of these tests fail, it indicates that I need to fix something wrong in the manuscript.

I will no doubt add to this list in the future. For now, here’s my revision checklist:

As a writer, I often get asked, how do you revise a novel? Actually, I don’t get asked that. Someone does often ask me what word he wanted to use, as though I as a writer should have a command of words. (I don’t. But that’s a different post.) Of course, if I knew what word he wanted to use, then he would have already put his his thoughts into words for me, and he would already know what word he wanted to use, all by himself, without me telling him.

But no one ever asks me how to revise a novel. Yet it’s a process every great novelist needs to master. And as I happen to be in the middle of revising my latest upcoming novel, I thought I’d spend a little time today demystifying this essential process for you. Fortunately for all budding authors, revision is as simple as 1-2-3, if you just follow the following steps.

Revising a novel can be an exciting and trying process. Exciting, because you get to see a story you’ve been working on for weeks (or longer) finally taking final form. Revision is also when you finalize the themes in your story, because the characters’ story arcs have reached their final form, and you get to see them told through the story. In my case, I started with a hot list of issues I needed to address throughout the manuscript. But as I began reading, I saw that I had already been addressing them, even from the first chapters.