On Revising with Flashcards

Photo credit: freestocks.org on Flickr

While working on The Rising Gold revisions, as you all know I am doing, I decided to try something a little different. I was going to do my revising in passes method, as I usually do, but I wanted something a little more concrete than my usual Evernote list to help guide me through the different issues I had to focus on.

So I pulled out my flashcards.

On each flashcard, I wrote down the main issue I needed to fix, then the way(s) I intended to fix it. So, for example, one flashcard might say:

THIS IS A PLOT HOLE

• Fix scene A by xyz
• Add scene B where abc
• Cut mentions of THIS DOESN'T MAKE SENSE

Except, you know, with specifics to the manuscript and what, exactly, I'm fixing. 

Once I had a stack, I organized them by difficulty. So the most difficult issues I needed to fix—the ones that required multiple steps to fix—I put up top to tackle first, and the easy issues I put at the bottom. How you prioritize is up to you—sometimes I like to put easy ones first to ease myself into the revisions—but this time I wanted to get the more difficult things over with so they weren't hanging over my head as I worked. 

As I made adjustments, I'd check off each bullet point, and eventually when I'm completely done tackling the issue I'll check off the whole card and start a done pile. Then I'll get to watch my issues pile shrink while my progress pile grows, which I think will be nicely gratifying. 

I haven't used flashcards like this before, but I like it so far. It was the extra little something I needed to visualize my revisions and feel prepared enough to dive into the work.

Have you ever used flashcards for revisions in a similar way? 

Twitter-sized bites:

Not sure where to start with revisions? @Ava_Jae suggests planning with flashcards. (Click to tweet)