The Gap Between Writing Craft and Revision

I’ve never stopped to count the number of books I have on the craft of writing. They fill 3 bookshelves in my 5-shelf book case. And I admit, I haven’t read them all, nor I have finished all the ones I started. Does that mean they aren’t good books? Not at all. Just means I got busy applying the concepts as I read about them, and somehow never got back to the book.

And, in total transparency here, I find concepts and theory aren’t always easy to understand or apply—in writing and in revision. I think it was a post on Cecil Murphey’s blog that helped the concept of “show don’t tell” finally make sense to me because he gave examples.

Writers know a lot about writing—more than they give themselves credit for (we’re famous for second-guessing ourselves). But knowing the craft (theory) doesn’t automatically translate to knowing how to write our book or how to determine what parts of our book need revision. In other words, knowing what a strong scene is supposed to do doesn’t automatically help you see whether your own scene is doing it.

What rarely gets talked about is how different it feels to evaluate your own writing than to understand writing advice in the abstract.

Let’s look at this from another angle.

You can instruct someone in how to float, but floating isn’t something you learn, it’s something you become aware of within your own body. That’s the difference between theory and application: theory describes outcomes; application requires perception.

It’s why I realized that what I needed and what other writers needed was a way to evaluate their manuscripts. They aren’t stuck because they’re doing something wrong; they’re stuck because no one taught them how to evaluate their own work.

Knowing craft is important. Learning how to evaluate your work—where it’s strong, where it’s weak, and what kind of revision it really needs—is what bridges the gap between theory and application. That realization is what led me to begin developing practical evaluation tools for writers, because knowing what should work is different from seeing whether it is working.