21.3 Structural Revision

Structural revision is the stage of the novel revision process concerned specifically with the arrangement, sequencing, and organization of a manuscript's scenes and larger sections, addressing questions of what belongs where, in what order events should occur, and how the manuscript's constituent parts should be divided and combined into chapters and sections. It is closely related to developmental revision but is distinguished by its specific focus on arrangement and organization, as opposed to the broader developmental concerns of character arc completeness, plot logic, and overall pacing.

Distinguishing Structural Revision From Developmental Revision

Developmental revision asks whether the story's content, its plot logic, its character arcs, its overall pacing, is sound. Structural revision asks, given that content, whether it is arranged in the most effective order and divided into the most effective units. The two are closely related, since a structural rearrangement is often the mechanism by which a developmental problem is corrected, moving a scene earlier to fix a pacing imbalance, or splitting one chapter into two to better manage tension, but structural revision can also be undertaken independently, reorganizing material whose content is not itself flawed but whose current arrangement does not present that content to best effect.

Core Concerns of Structural Revision

Scene Order

A central task of structural revision is evaluating whether the sequence in which scenes currently appear is the most effective order for the reader to encounter them, independent of the chronological order in which the events themselves occur within the story world. A scene may need to be moved earlier to establish necessary context before a later scene depends on it, moved later to delay a reveal for greater effect, or relocated relative to another scene to create a more effective juxtaposition between the two.

Scene Necessity and Redundancy

Structural revision involves assessing whether every scene in the manuscript earns its place, whether a scene serves a distinct function not already accomplished elsewhere, and whether scenes that cover similar ground could be combined or one of them removed. A manuscript produced through extensive drafting, particularly nonlinear drafting, may accumulate scenes that were useful for the writer's own discovery of the story but that do not, in their current form, serve a distinct purpose for the reader.

Chapter and Section Division

Structural revision determines where chapter breaks and section divisions fall, a decision that affects pacing and the reader's experience independent of the underlying content, since the same sequence of scenes can feel markedly different depending on where it is divided, where a chapter ends on a moment of tension versus a moment of resolution, and how long or short individual chapters are relative to one another.

Subplot Integration

In manuscripts with multiple storylines, structural revision addresses how those storylines are interleaved: whether a given subplot's scenes are distributed through the manuscript at intervals that maintain the reader's engagement with it, whether the timing of a subplot's developments aligns appropriately with developments in the main plot, and whether any storyline receives too much or too little presence relative to its importance to the overall novel.

Transitions Between Units

Structural revision considers how one scene or chapter connects to the next, whether the transition provides the reader with adequate orientation, and whether the juxtaposition of adjacent scenes, particularly across a point-of-view shift or a jump in time or location, is handled clearly and to appropriate effect.

Common Techniques

Scene Mapping

Producing a compact representation of the manuscript's existing scene order, such as a numbered list or a card for each scene noting its content, point of view, and function, allows the writer to examine and manipulate the manuscript's structure without needing to move the full text of each scene, making it easier to experiment with alternative orderings before committing to a rewrite.

Physical or Digital Rearrangement

Using index cards, a corkboard-style outlining tool, or a digital equivalent, a writer can physically or visually reorder scene summaries to test alternative sequences, evaluating the effect of a new arrangement before undertaking the more labor-intensive work of actually moving and reconnecting the full prose.

Timeline Reconstruction

For manuscripts with nonlinear chronology, multiple point-of-view threads, or a framing structure, reconstructing a strict chronological timeline of underlying events, separate from the order in which they are presented in the manuscript, helps verify that the chosen presentation order is a deliberate structural choice rather than an unintended consequence of the order in which the material was originally drafted.

Relationship to the Broader Revision Process

Structural revision is typically undertaken alongside or immediately following developmental revision, since decisions about a scene's necessity, its content, or a character's arc often have direct implications for where that scene should appear and how it relates to the scenes around it. Like developmental revision, it precedes scene-level and line-level revision, since a scene that will be moved, cut, or merged with another as part of structural revision does not yet warrant the finer-grained attention that would otherwise be spent refining its internal pacing or prose, work that would need to be redone or discarded if the scene's place in the manuscript changes as a result of structural decisions made afterward.