If you’d like to receive my blog in your in-box each week, click here.

I had a consultation this week with an author about her current manuscript we’ve been working on together.

She was frustrated because despite her intensive work on revisions, the story isn’t yet coming together as effectively as it could. She was feeling discouraged, wondering if she should just scrap it and start over, or give up on telling the story the way she envisioned and hopes to tell it.

Read more: “How Not to Hate Editing Your Writing”

I told her this story: Last weekend I went shopping with a girlfriend looking for a new sofa and chairs for her living room. As pretty much always happens to me when I browse furniture stores, I got my head turned by the gorgeous displays throughout the store, so many of them deliciously inviting, carefully curated and arranged for maximum aesthetic appeal.

I got home and, also as I often do, immediately began gauging my own living room through the lens of the ones I just seen, feeling frustrated that mine just didn’t have that same aesthetic appeal.

This living room has been a bit of a vexation to me for quite a while. As I wrote not long ago, like the rest of my house it’s filled with individual pieces I love, but the overall effect isn’t nearly as polished and appealing as what I’d seen in the furniture store. The room is a slightly awkward layout, an open floor plan with a corner fireplace and a TV alcove, which limits how I can place the furniture and what size rug I can accommodate in the room.

My initial impulse was to scrap it all and start over from scratch, but besides the fact that my husband’s head would fly clean off his neck if I proposed replacing our “perfectly good furniture” with all new, I realized I already had most of the ingredients I needed to create the living space I wanted. I just had to rearrange a bit.

I repositioned the rug, making the furniture and the whole room feel less cramped. I moved the furniture—not much, just a foot or two with various pieces, and changed the angles a little bit. I did what I call “shopping the house,” where I roam through every closet and every room in search of decor items I can swap around, and relocated art, blankets, side tables, and accessories.

You don’t always need to make major changes or start over; sometimes all a story needs is a refresh.

Once I had all that in place it was easy to see what I actually needed to add or replace: some additional lighting, possibly a new ottoman, and a couple of throw pillows to tie the colors together a little more. I had originally thought to replace the area rug, currently a very bold red-orange, with something more neutral and potentially elegant, but I love that rug. It may not be to everyone’s taste, but it certainly is to mine, and it brings a lot of life and color into the house and ties together a cohesive color scheme from room to room.

Is it magazine-cover perfect? I doubt it. But it now looks more appealing and inviting—and most important, it suits me and feels like a room I want to spend time in.

Which brings me back to the author I spoke with last week. Like me, she already had most of the ingredients to create the story she wants to tell. She doesn’t need to start over; the core story is well developed, layered and complex, and deeply interesting.

She just needs to rearrange a bit.

How to Refresh and Redecorate Your Manuscript

Just as with refreshing your home, making your manuscript more effective usually starts with looking at it with a fresh eye. Before you can plunge into making changes it’s crucial to understand what you already have—the essential “editing” stage of editing and revising. What’s working really well—and what parts have always bugged you? Start there, and then see if making a few minor changes in certain areas could bring the entire thing together.

Read more: “Please Don’t Revise Your Manuscript!”

Accessorize: Rather than reinventing the story or major aspects of it, often strengthening a story involves expanding or developing more deeply what’s already there. Do readers need a keener understanding of the character’s motivations, perhaps, or more specific, concrete context on their history or current situation? Do you need to put more of a key relationship on the page—the characters’ interactions, reactions to one another, the impact they have on each other and their actions? If I had a dollar for every comment I’ve ever made that involves mining out more depth and detail in an author’s manuscript, I’d be a wealthy editor.

Declutter: Sometimes a story may have the opposite problem: There’s too much going on. An author can often make big improvements in a story by clearing some things out rather than adding more “stuff.” Where could you streamline and tighten? With past edits I’ve bullet-pointed out all the main plot points of an author’s story, for instance, to illustrate how much is going on and where the story may be losing its focus, getting weighed down, or simply feeling cluttered. You could also try making a list of the dramatis personae. In either case, could you whittle down the events or characters in the story and give the remaining ones more substance? Do you have scenes that duplicate already established dynamics or don’t move the story forward that you could cut, or ones that might go on too long that could be trimmed?

Try something new: Sometimes just changing out an area rug or painting a wall can transform a room. If something isn’t quite working in your story, consider changing a key element that might make a big impact. What if your character is actually married to her love interest, or their relationship is faltering—does that change the stakes, perhaps? What if the antagonist isn’t all bad—if in fact the protagonist feels connected to them on some level, even sharing some of their views? Could two key supporting characters be more effectively combined into one? It’s easy to get settled into what you have—ask me how many years I’ve lived with a living room that just wasn’t doing it for me. But before you take everything out and start over, see if simply making one impactful change could pull the whole thing together.

Change the focal point: One thing that can weaken a story’s effectiveness is having important events take place “offstage,” out of the reader’s view, which leaves them hearing about key developments secondhand and after the fact. Often I’ll suggest an author “move the camera”: Put the action on the page so readers can live it directly with the character, increasing its impact, immediacy, and reader engagement. Or could changing a point of view make a difference? I don’t mean the relatively cosmetic change of simply choosing another POV voice (switching from limited-third to first-person, for instance), although a change like that can sometimes bring a story to life, but also reconsidering the perspective(s) from which you’re telling the story. Once, for instance, I worked with an author who told her story from the perspectives of a sister and brother, but the story seemed to be much more about the relationship between the sister and her love interest. I suggested changing the main-POV characters to them to bring the story more cohesively together.

Rearrange the furniture: Sometimes an author may have all the right ingredients for an effective story; they just aren’t yet working together as effectively as they could. An author I worked with once transformed her story and gave it much more momentum and impact by taking what had been two completely separated storylines (one character’s story unfolding in part one and the other in part two) and alternating them instead. In various manuscripts I’ve suggested moving certain events later; moving them earlier; condensing or reworking the timeline; giving key actions to a different character; and shifting a character’s main motivation or goal, among other rearrangements.

Read more: “Anatomy of a Revision—Or, Surmounting the Suck”

Think of this kind of approach to revising a story as experimenting—nothing is lost by trying something new with your existing setup before you decide to make any major renovations, if the pieces are in good shape and you still like them. Always save iterations of your manuscript as a safety net—if you hate something or it doesn’t work, you can easily revert to the older version.

And if you need some help assessing what’s working and what might not be as effective as you hoped, you might find my extensive Self-editing Checklist helpful.

Over to you, authors: Have you felt daunted before by the prospect of revising your story? How do you approach editing and revision?

If you’d like to receive my blog in your in-box each week, click here.