Behind-the-Scenes of Revising a Romance Novel (Part 2)
Developing the characters, story, and romance: a deep dive into my process of revising Project Reality (a contemporary romance novel)
One of the fun parts of revising a novel is getting to know the world you’ve created on a deeper level. (It makes up for all the not-fun parts.) In this second installment of my revision series, I’m diving into the meat of the editing process: further developing the story, characters, and romance in my second-chance contemporary romance novel, Project Reality.
In part one of Behind-the-Scenes of Revising a Romance Novel, I covered my revision approach, how my manuscript has evolved over each draft, and what I’ve learned from the process. Check that one out if you haven’t yet!
As a reminder, full access to this series is a thank-you to my paid subscribers. Most of my writing journey is shared publicly, but since I go so deep into my process in this series, I wanted to keep most of it within a more intimate circle of readers. 🤍
In this segment of my revision deep dive, I’m covering:
How I’ve discovered the main characters’ voices and developed their arcs
How I’ve identified core themes and heightened the stakes
How I’ve balanced the romance with the plot and amplified the tension
In the next post in this series, I’ll discuss mindset and how I’ve managed reader feedback. There’s a good (probably obvious) reason I paired the mindset chat with the feedback one. Can you guess?
Is there something specific you’d love to know about my revision process that I haven’t covered yet? Let me know in the comments!
Revisions Deep Dive (Part 2)
Character development
As discussed in part one, I love working in layers to stay focused and gradually travel deeper into the story with each draft. That includes character development.
It’s okay to struggle to nail a character’s voice in the first draft. Or feel like there’s an aspect of their motivation you’re missing. Or not entirely understand how they would react to some of the events in the story yet. Some of them exist to make your life more complicated; it’s their kink.
Though I start out feeling really close to my characters, I learn something new about them with each draft. It’s like building a relationship with someone—the more time you spend with them, the more trust you cultivate, and they gradually open up more, revealing new sides of themselves.
Each revision pass brings new surprises and more clarity.
Nothing is “wasted”
Never stress over “wasting time” on a scene or chapter you end up deleting. Every single one is worth the time and effort—even if they don’t make it into the final draft. Why? Because they revealed something about the characters and story to you.
In Project Reality, I changed the entire second draft to first-person present tense (after writing the first draft in third-person past tense) and changed it all back in the third draft. (Yeah, it was a pain in the ass, but worth it. I’ll explain what I gained from this in the next section!)
In the fourth draft, I also cut several scenes that existed in previous drafts.
Writing a novel isn’t a straight, clean path. It’s a winding journey with detours and dead ends and sometimes not enough clean places to stop for a bathroom break. But each experience gives you important information that you take with you. Sometimes, you have to try things to gain more clarity on what you don’t want so you’ll have a better grasp on what you do want.
If you gain one piece of insight—however small or seemingly insignificant—from a deleted scene, it was worth it. It all adds up. You may not realize at the time what it’s revealing to you until you get further down the road. Trust the journey.
Finding their voice
There is no quick, “one size fits all” approach to finding a character’s voice. (I know, shocker.) For me, some fall into place quicker than others, but it’s always a process.
Project Reality started as a single POV (the female main character or FMC) and eventually became a dual POV (incorporating the male main character’s or MMC’s perspective) in draft three. While I knew a lot about the FMC’s personality, motivation, and interiority, it was a textbook understanding initially. I needed to step into her shoes and go through the story with her to understand her more intimately.
Switching to first-person present tense in the second draft particularly helped me with this. While third-person is infused with the character’s voice, first-person is even more intimate. It’s basically like writing a journal from their perspective (that’s another great exercise for discovering a character’s voice, by the way: writing actual journal entries as them). Her personality really came to life in that draft, and I gained new insight into the inner workings of her heart and mind.
While first-person present tense ultimately didn’t feel right for this project, I’m glad I tried it because the character development I gained from it was well worth the trouble.
The MMC came more alive in the third draft when I finally figured out how to incorporate his POV. Diving deeper into his motivation, arc, and the inner workings of his side of the story helped me understand him a lot more. His voice got stronger through that process, too, but since your girl works in layers—and the third draft was focused on fleshing out his side of the story—developing his voice further became a priority for draft four.
MY FAVORITE EXERCISES FOR DEVELOPING CHARACTER VOICE:
Write scenes from first-person POV (bonus points: write in present tense to really ground you in the moment)
Write journal entries as the character
Write flashbacks from critical moments in the character’s history— not necessarily to include in the manuscript, just for your own personal use to help you understand the character on a deeper level
Try throwing them into extreme scenarios to see how they react—again, not to include in the manuscript (unless you decide you want to) but just to explore different facets of the character
Going deeper
Characters are kind of like trees—you can learn a lot about them by studying them on the surface, but as you start digging with each draft, you discover an even richer root system underneath.