Big Changes at the Last Minute

On manuscript revision

Welcome to Speak Up! On writing, failing better, and taking up space, a newsletter about creative writing and everyday life. I’m Kate Potts, a poet, lecturer, mentor, editor and solo mum based in Stroud, Gloucestershire.

At the moment I’m finishing and letting go of a manuscript I officially started working on in early 2022 – although the project and some of the poems were growing in my mind for a few years before this. For Pretenders I interviewed a variety of people about their imposter feelings or ‘imposter syndrome’, mostly via Zoom or over the phone, and used the interview transcripts as the basis of a book. The project was inspired by Maddie Breeze’s article ‘Imposter Syndrome as a Public Feeling’ in The Sociological Review Magazine and by many, many conversations with friends.

Cover image for Pretenders, due out from Bloodaxe Books in spring 2025.

Working with interviews in this way was a logical progression from years of researching and thinking about radio voices, poetry as dialogue, and multi-vocality on the page. I found it hard, though, to figure out how to include my own feelings about the imposter phenomenon in the text. I didn’t want to over-interpret or coopt the other voices, I reasoned. But if anyone can attempt to write an entire book about imposter feelings while also very much avoiding writing about their own imposter feelings, it’s me. I took quite a while to fully acknowledge my reluctance, and to take responsibility as author, rather than curator, of the book. Writing about something so personal has, of course, been terrifying.

The visibility and exposure that comes from writing and publishing a book can be frightening, for many good reasons (Olivia Sudjic’s Exposure is great on this). I’ve often had to contend with the instinct to evade and obfuscate in my writing, but when I challenge myself to be more honest, both with myself and others, the writing is usually stronger and more powerful. Which isn’t to say that good writing is always confessional. Obfuscation can be fun, and I’m very much in favour of making things up! But the writing I enjoy most reveals or rests on some kind of emotional truth or resonance.

Pretenders is an unusual beast, a mixture of interview text, poetry and lyric essay that borrows from journalistic and sociological approaches and techniques. Writing it has taught me a great deal, but has involved a couple of really big structural rethinks and rewrites – the final one only a month or so before the deadline, when I broke up and re-ordered the interview texts and added two new voices of my own. I find this sort of radical revision impossible to make without the input of kind, sometimes heroic, friends and editors who can see the wood for the trees.

As writers I think we often feel comforted by editing at a micro-level, removing and replacing commas or quote marks, or searching for the perfect word to make a metaphor chime. But the macro-level, the bones of the work, is also essential for making it live and breathe. And surface-level issues can be caused or exacerbated by more fundamental problems.

Here are some questions I find helpful, in my own writing and in my mentoring, editing and teaching work, when reading and revising draft poetry and nonfiction manuscripts.

Aims

- What’s your motivation? What’s at stake? What might the consequences of not writing or publishing the book be? I often think of Toni Morrison’s advice: ‘If there's a book you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.’
- Who are you writing for? Who is your ideal reader? How do you imagine them responding to the book? Do you want them to feel moved, reassured, challenged, inspired, educated, entertained…?
- What did you want to learn or discover by writing this work? What do you want your readers to learn or discover?

Word cloud for the Pretenders manuscript.

Shape and Structure
- What are the recurring themes, ideas or images in the work? Seeing how often particular words come up can sometimes be helpful. Word Cloud generators can be a fun way of thinking about a manuscript’s focus[es].
- If there are particular ideas, theories, arguments or images underpinning the book or bringing the work together, are they coherent, and used cohesively? Writing is often a process of discovery, so these elements can shift as the writing progresses.
- What’s the narrative arc (or what are the narrative arcs), or how is the material ordered and arranged? Chronologically? Thematically? As a conversation or argument? A mixture of these?
- What’s the balance like between specific and more general, close description and summary, concrete and abstract?
- Does your work pose questions and then answer them, or set up expectations and then meet them? Or perhaps it purposefully sets out to challenge or reconfigure the reader’s expectations. Does the end of each chapter or section point towards the next? You may be writing something innovative and unconventional, but it’s still worth thinking about how you’ll take your reader on a journey through the book.  

As Charlotte’s Web author E.B. White noted, ‘It is no sign of weakness or defeat that your manuscript ends up in need of major surgery. This is common in all writing...’ And it’s also not at all unusual, as someone who works in film animation reassured me recently, for big revisions on creative projects to happen at the last minute.


For more support with your writing life, find out about my teaching and mentoring and developmental editing or get in touch at poet@katepotts.net.