November 2025
Revising: My First Chapters
If given the choice, I’d probably rather scrub toilets or give my dog a bath than sit down to rework a chapter. And yet here I am, writing about revision… mostly as a way to delay doing it.
Why? Because revision is hard.
I tell my students this all the time. I hear it from other writers. And I feel it in my own work whenever I’m told, “This isn’t quite working—you’ll need to revise.”
Why is revision so difficult? Part of it is that writing is personal; we’ve poured our heart into those words. To hear they need to be changed feels a little like being told we need to be changed. Another part is that many of us put our best effort into a first draft, which makes it hard to imagine how to make our best even better. And sometimes we’re just told, “Revise,” without any clear sense of what or why, which can leave us feeling like lost hikers with no trail map.
Because of all this, I devote my EN101 semester to revision. I believe it’s one of the most important writing skills my students can carry with them. Far beyond college papers. Honestly, it’s easier to teach it to others (and sometimes more fun, especially when I pull out Play-Doh for middle schoolers) than to face revision myself.
But I’m not as opposed to it as I once was. In fact, I’ve learned to embrace feedback as a tool for growth. Back in January, I received comments from eight Beta Readers. Their insights guided four solid weeks of revision on my manuscript, and my writing was better for it.
Now, almost a year later, I’m hearing back from agents. More than a few have told me my query letter and story concept are “intriguing.” But those same agents have also said the first pages of my manuscript feel “underwhelming.”
That’s feedback worth paying attention to.
So here I am again, staring down the daunting task of re-seeing my opening chapters, imagining new ways to pull a reader into the world of my story. It feels big. It feels exhausting. But it also feels necessary. Because being a writer means committing to the whole process, both the parts we love and the parts we’d rather avoid.
So I take a deep breath. I remind myself of what I tell my students. And I open the manuscript.
If I can do my hard thing today, then so can you. Revision may never stop being hard. But maybe that’s the point. Hard isn’t bad. Hard is where growth begins.
We can do hard things together.