Stop Editing Your Novel Until You Try These Strategies

Gina Kammer Author

May 28, 2025 |

Stuck in revision? Use these 3 powerful strategies to diagnose scene issues and make real progress on your fantasy or sci-fi manuscript.

When you’ve revised your scenes over and over but still don’t know what’s wrong—and the feedback doesn’t help—it’s not that your story can’t work. It’s that you don’t have a strategy to fix it.

In this article, I’ll walk you through three deep revision techniques that will help you finally understand what your draft needs—so you can stop feeling stuck and start making serious progress toward publishing.

Strategy 1: Mirror the Page Before You Revise

Let’s start with the most overlooked step in revision—one that reveals why your edits haven’t been working.

Before you fix anything—you have to face what’s actually on the page.

So many authors revise from memory, intention, or assumption:

“I meant to show she’s afraid of being abandoned…”

But is that what readers see?

Here’s your first strategy: mirror the page. Use your scene outline or revision tool to ask:

• What actually happens in this scene, based on what the reader sees and hears?
• Am I assuming knowledge that isn’t on the page?
• Did I write what I meant to write… or what I thought I wrote?

This is a simple but powerful reset for you. You’re no longer treating your draft like a checklist of goals.

You’re holding up a mirror to what the reader will experience—scene by scene.

And from there, your revisions can become specific, intentional, and way more effective.

But it’s often hard to mirror your own draft in this way since it’s hard to forget what you intend for your story. So the way the authors I work with get around that is by trading scenes with critique partners who know what kind of feedback is actually useful during revision.

If you want help finding partners like that and a clear system for working with them, you can use the Critique Partner Program.

Strategy 2: Use the DAC to Strengthen Every Scene’s Spine

This next strategy is something I walk my clients through all the time—because it works.

We call it the DAC method, and it’s a simple but powerful tool for revising your story one scene at a time.

My authors use it extensively inside Enchant Your Readers to make sure:

• Every decision leads to action
• Every action leads to a meaningful consequence

And those connections are what pull readers all the way to the end.

I’ve seen this fix everything from sagging middles to arcs that just weren’t landing.

So once you’ve mirrored the scene, it’s time to check the spine of your story logic.

For each scene, ask yourself:

• Decision: What choice does the character make in this moment? What fear or belief is driving it?
• Action: What do they do as a result of that decision—externally or internally?
• Consequence: What changes immediately after that action? How do stakes, relationships, or emotional dynamics shift?

If any part of that sequence is weak, your scene might feel static, disconnected, or emotionally flat—even if a lot is “happening.”

Scenes without clear cause and effect tend to confuse readers or lose their sense of progress and payoffs through the story.

So this strategy gives you a built-in diagnostic tool to strengthen scene logic for momentum and character arc progression at the same time.

Strategy 3: Use the 3 Keys to Check the Scene's Reader Impact

This final strategy uses principles based in reader psychology that are crucial at every stage of the manuscript process—but it’s especially powerful when you’ve hit a particularly frustrating scene that’s hard to assess and you can’t figure out whether it’s doing what it needs to.

You can use this strategy scene by scene to diagnose those moments where things just aren’t landing—even when other revision tools or methods don’t reveal the issue, or you’ve done multiple rounds of edits and still feel unsure whether the scene is pulling its weight.

This is where the 3 Keys to Reader Enchantment come in.

These are the three things every scene—and every story—needs to deliver to resonate with readers:

• Expectations: Does the scene fulfill the promises you’ve made in terms of genre, pacing, tone, or emotional trajectory? Is it building toward something the reader is anticipating—like one of the main turning point beats or at least keeping the various established plot threads going?
• Enlightenment: Is this scene contributing to your thematic purpose and character’s arc? Is your character resisting or moving toward their arc of change? Does it help reveal a truth the reader can feel—even if it’s subtle?
• Experience: Is the emotional and sensory experience alive on the page? Are we grounded in the character’s lens—that unique character voice perspective—so that the tension, setting, and choices feel vivid and real?

Inside Enchant Your Readers, these 3 Keys are how I help authors figure out not just what might be wrong, but why it matters to the reader—and how to meet all three without losing their voice.

When you filter your scenes through these three keys, you’ll start to see exactly where the emotional, thematic, or genre-level weight is missing—and where your story can go deeper.

This way, you’re making sure your science fiction or fantasy novel is more aligned with what readers actually want from a great story.

Know What to Tackle Next

And if this process shows you more issues than you expected—don’t panic. That’s not a sign your story is beyond saving.

It’s a sign you’re finally seeing what it really needs. And that means you can do something about it and get your story closer to what you imagined.

But don’t get caught in endless revision. I’ll show you how to move forward with intention instead of overwhelm—and how to know when your story is finally ready for publishing or querying—in the next article.

Categories: : editing, manuscript stages, novel drafting, self-editing