Revise Like an Editor: A Complete Self-Editing Guide for Fiction Writers
$49A complete self-editing system that teaches you to run a real developmental edit on your own novel — plus the ten templates to actually do it.
This guide is the property of Lauren Kay Writes and is for personal use only. It should not be resold or redistributed.
What's included?
The complete self-editing process, walked through beat by beat on one sample novel from first diagnosis to agent-ready
Ten fillable templates — including the reverse outline, scene audit spreadsheet, stakes map, and a complete sample editorial letter to model your own on
A step-by-step revision roadmap — the exact order to fix problems so you never waste effort polishing scenes you'll later cut
How to diagnose the big issues that make agents pass — a saggy middle, flat characters, low stakes — and pinpoint exactly what's broken
Before-and-after passages showing structure, character, and pacing problems getting fixed, plus examples from the TV show “Gilmore Girls”
And parts of my own editorial process with a Big 5 publisher — the three biggest notes I got on my 6-figure debut, and exactly how I addressed them
Most outlining advice is either too rigid — dozens of beats locked in before you write a word — or too vague to actually use.
This guide teaches you the 7-Point Plot Structure: seven landmark beats that give you enough structure to stop getting lost in the middle, but enough flexibility that your story still feels alive. It's the framework that quietly underpins almost every novel you've ever loved, and once you can see it, you can use it — to test an idea, to outline from scratch, or to diagnose a draft that feels close but kind of off.
You'll learn how to use structure as both a planning tool and a revision tool, how to weave character arc and subplots through your beats, and how to adapt the framework for your specific genre.
The guide includes seven genre companion documents — each walking through the 7-Point structure using a bestselling novel in that genre, plus an auto-calculating beat sheet spreadsheet so you can map the structure to your own novel and word count.
Whether you're a planner, a pantser, or somewhere in between — if you've ever stalled at 30K words, abandoned a draft, or finished a manuscript that feels close but not quite right, this is the guide that will tell you why and what to do about it.