Kid's Book Revisions Plus Home Page
Kid's Book Revisions Plus: Resources
On this page, we post links to resources (book or web) related specifically to revision.
Books
Create This Book by Moriah Elizabeth: A great collection of writing prompts and exercises, to help you generate new material when revising.
A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation by Noah Lukeman: Thoughtful help with punctuation.
Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer: As the title suggests, this is a general guide to "style" at the sentence level, by the head of copy-editing at Random House. Will it replace the legendary "Strunk and White"?
The Imaginary World of. . . by Keri Smith: A workbook to help you build a world from scratch; a useful tool when revising.
The Magic Words: Writing Great Books for Children and Young Adults by Cheryl Klein: Klein's second book is a general guide to writing children's and YA, and includes a chapter on revision.
Make a Scene (2nd edition) by Jordan E. Rosenfeld: Though not directly about revision, this book provides interesting guidance with the building and connecting of scenes, which can be regarded as an essential building block of story.
Novel Metamorphosis: Uncommon Ways to Revise by Darcy Pattison: A workbook to use to plan the revision of a novel. Darcy Pattison has been teaching revision workshops for 20 years--this draws upon that experience.
Picture Writing by Anastasia Suen: A good general how-to, covering both the writing and rewriting of picture books, fiction, and nonfiction.
Real Revision by Kate Messner: This is subtitled "Authors' Strategies to Share with Student Writers," and teachers could use it for that, but for writers it's a great compendium of revision techniques, from dozens of published authors.
Revising Fiction: A Handbook for Writers by David Madden: A classic, now out of print but available used.
Revision: A Creative Approach to Writing and Rewriting Fiction by David Michael Kaplan: A guide to both drafting and revising, focusing on fiction.
The Secrets of Story: Innovative Tools for Perfecting Your Fiction and Captivating Readers by Matt Bird: Though the author talks a lot about movie scripts, his 122 item story checklist works for fiction writers generally, and a closing section explores revision and rewriting.
Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to Edit Yourself into Print by Renni Browne and Dave King: Covering big-picture and line-editing issues, most useful to people who like to do their own intuitive editing.
Steering the Craft: a 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story by Ursula K. Le Guin: A wonderful general writing guide, with revision ideas and approaches.
The Writing and Critique Group Survival Guide (out of print but available used on Amazon and elsewhere) by Becky Levine: The best book we've found on critique groups, which can be a great source for feedback and a big help with revision.
Writing It Right! How Successful Children's Authors Revise and Sell Their Stories by Sandy Asher: Revision is the sole focus of this collection of case studies--Asher gives multiple versions of actual published stories as they were revised, with comments, and covers short stories, picture books, and novels.
Writing Picture Books (Revised Edition) by Ann Whitford Paul: Much of writing is revision, and this how-to helps with revising many aspects--from voice to characters to story to word count--of picture books.
For even more writing guides, consult Writing How-Tos: A general list of writing guides, originally created as a resource for Harold's Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Children's Books.
Webpages
Beta Readers: Who, When, Why, and So What: Useful look at beta reader practices.
Critique Groups versus Beta Readers: A useful blog post.
Critique Groups: What to Do and Not Do: In this video, Joyce Sweeney focuses on how to respond to critique group feedback.
Debbie Ridpath Ohi's Print Ready Templates: Debbie created these templates to help her think out her picture books. Writers may also find them useful as revision tools.
Deconstruction & Reconstruction: A Primer on Picture Book Revision: Karen Krossing lays out a series of questions to ask yourself when revising a picture book.
11 Steps from Your Big Fat Mess to Your Next Draft by Audrey Kalman: A list of a variety of practical revision tools and approaches.
Emma Dryden on Revision: An inspirational essay.
Filter Words and Phrases to Avoid When Writing Fiction: A lengthy, useful guide to how to edit out "filter words" and why you want to get rid of them.
First Draft to Final Book: A website featuring interviews with creatives talking about the process they went through in creating a book. In some ways, an online approach in the tradition of Writing It Right! (see above).
The 4 Hidden Dangers of Writing Groups: Useful warnings, with a link at the top to finding the right critique groups.
Gray Space: Making Room for the Reader: Janet Fox looks at the art of leaving things out.
Great Novels Aren't Written--They're Rewritten: A revision manifesto.
How to Use a Plot Planner: This visual technique can be adapted to analyze what you ended up with, as well as used for planning.
9 Reasons to Say Goodbye to Your Critique Group: How to recognize that you're no longer benefitting from a critique group.
Revising with an Editor's Eye: a 2020 interview with Harold.
Revision Roadmap: Laurie Halse Anderson about her use of a "revision roadmap"--how she creates one and what she does with it.
Shrunken Manuscript Strategy: Darcy Pattison's famous strategy for getting a grip on an entire manuscript.
Six Questions to Sharpen Your Story Beats: Also from Darcy Pattison, these questions zoom in on the "beats" in a scene.
Ten Mistakes Writers Don't See -- a great checklist for use when revising.
Three Little Words that Will Unlock Your Revision, by Monica Cox.
What Revision Looks Like: A Very Long Story. Author Jo Knowles shows the stages of revision her manuscript went through, with pictures.
Why Your Revision Shouldn't Start on Page One, by Monica Cox.
Word Clouds: Create a word cloud to see the words you use the most. A word cloud generators: WordClouds.
Suggestions are welcome, but we may not act on all of them.