Editing Myself

As previously mentioned I don't usually work with an editor, so I have to do it all myself. And again: This isn't best practice. The point of an editor is having a second set of eyes to look at your manuscript and spot problems you might've missed or suggest changes you wouldn't have considered to improve the work. Also to tell you the truth. If it's good, if it's bad, if it's really bad and should never see the light of day, an editor worth their salt will tell you. That attention and honesty from a second experienced person is valuable. I'd even say it's not possible to edit yourself. You can revise your own work like I do, but to actually "edit" as it's understood in the industry you need someone else to dig in with you. (Get an editor and listen to them.)

Also important to understand: Editing isn't proofreading. You do fix any errors you find as you go, but editing is focused on the content and style of the work, not small things like typos.

When I edit (revise) my work I rely on my sense of taste. It's not good taste or bad taste, it's my taste. A definite and distinct sense of what I like and want out of my writing that lets me make changes confidently. Developing taste is vital, but takes time and effort. You have to go out of your way to experience a wide range of things in order to really decide what you do or don't appreciate. My taste is the product of years spent writing, reading, talking with folks, and absorbing wisdom from my editor friends. Because I have it I can easily decide what feels right and commit to it in my work.

I also make a point to take time between writing and revising. Patience really is a virtue when it comes to work like this that requires flexibility and attention to detail. When I finish writing a draft I set it aside to ferment for at least three days. Two if I'm on a roll. The wait gives me an opportunity to step back, let possibilities bounce around in my head, and forget exactly what I wrote so I can see it with fresh eyes when I come back. If I jump right into revising without that time for reflection the momentum of what I just wrote makes it easy to miss things.

When it's time to revise I sit down and read the draft all the way through, being honest with myself about the quality of it and what could be better. There's always something I could improve. No draft is perfect, not even the final one, so I look for the weak spots and what needs the knife. Once I've read it I set it aside, make a cup of tea, and think about why the things I noticed weren't right and how to fix it. This is where my taste and gleaned editorial wisdom come into play. It usually doesn't take long to make a plan, then I go back and start making changes.

Since I work in analog for everything up to the final draft this means getting a different color pen so the changes will stand out and going through the piece like a surgeon. I'll cross out words/lines/entire sections, cram new material between lines or in the margins, rework phrases/passages/paragraphs that I like but are missing something, whatever needs doing. If it doesn't serve the overall piece it changes or gets cut. (And working in analog I can see everything together, revisions and original text, and judge if it really is an improvement.)

The major things I look for while revising are:

Consistency
Does everything fit the tone/conceit I chose for the piece? (Ex: Dry and academic, technical, in-world, conversational, etc.) If something doesn't mesh I'll rework it so there's consistency throughout the entire thing. I made a choice in how to present the ideas, it's important to commit to the bit.

Passive voice
Get rid of it. I try to avoid writing anything in passive voice, but we all make mistakes. There are situations where it can be appropriate, but usually not and if I see it I remove it.

Over-explanation and unnecessary words
I try to keep things concise. Only the most load-bearing words make it through to the next draft. The ones that are vital for clarity and conveying the essential flavor of the piece. That means filler words like qualifiers (just, very, likely, only, etc.) and extra adverbs get cut unless they actually serve a purpose and fit the tone. Otherwise it's the knife. I also cut sections that are too specific about minor details. When a passage is overly precise and dictating particulars that I could leave to the reader's imagination, it goes. It's important to trust the readers. I believe in you. You don't need me to hit you over the head with exactly what I've envisioned. I trust you to interpret what I've written into something fun for your table, so I'll let go and leave you to it.

Flow
Does the sentence and paragraph structure read smoothly? I check the timing and pauses while reading and make changes so it feels natural. The goal is to arrange the piece so it won't sound stilted if it's read aloud. It usually comes down to breaking up long sentences that don't serve a purpose, repositioning or nixing commas to set pauses in the right rhythm, and removing accidental repetition. Repetition has its use as a reinforcing device, but if I'm overusing a word/word fragment for no reason then I need to change it up.

Word choice
I try to keep a healthy and entertaining balance between purple and beige. If there's a spot where a different word or synonym would convey what I'm trying to express better than what I've got, I make the change. My vocabulary is my most effective tool. I have an entire arsenal of obscure, archaic, and niche technical terms on standby and I love using them. Words are fun. The challenge is making sure I've used exactly the right ones to capture the nuance of what I'm going for without breaking the tone and flow of the piece or vomiting a thesaurus onto the page. It's another thing that comes down to taste. The right word will click into place in a sentence, slotting in among the other words in a way that sounds natural. It doesn't matter if it's an oatmeal-hued single syllable job suitable for everyday use or an excessively ultraviolet flourish that would be over the top even in an 18th century love letter so long as it's the right word. It's the only word that can do the job perfectly, so of course it belongs there. Refining word choice is the most important step in my revising. As a writer my words are all I have to work with. They're the pins holding my dissected imagination open for you to view. They have to be correct and placed precisely.

After the major things are taken care of I double check for grammar, spelling, punctuation, and other proofing minutia. By then everything is mostly in shape and the only rule breaking is intentional. (You can warp or bend any writing rule if there's a specific reason for it, but it has to be intentional and good. Doing something on purpose doesn't mean squat if it's a bad choice or poor execution that doesn't serve the work.)

Then I read back through the marked up pages and once I'm satisfied my revisions feel right and everything is there for a reason I transcribe it all into a clean copy that will be my next draft. After another two rounds of revisions I've usually got something I'm happy with and willing to send out into the world.

Nothing I've outlined here is new. This is just how writing in drafts and revising them works. Even if I was working with an editor I would still be doing these steps before I sent my manuscript off to them.

I take the time and make the effort to do multiple rounds of revisions because I think it's important to release the best work I can. If I'm going to do something I'm going to do it right. That means accepting that there's always room for improvement and being willing to take a machete to my work in order to reweave the shreds into something better.

Nobody writes a perfect first draft, especially not me.

How I Write

My dark secret is I don't usually have an editor. This isn't best practice. (You should hire or set up a work trade with an editor and listen to them. An editor will absolutely improve your work.) To compensate I have a process for organizing my ideas and writing drafts to catch as many things as I can. It's not a revolutionary new way of writing, it's just the amalgamation of small things that help me start writing and keep writing to get the ideas down and refined.

Here's what I do:

0 Voice recordings

I don't always make recordings, but sometimes while I'm out walking I'll spitball ideas aloud and record it. Hearing concepts spoken aloud is helpful when I'm trying to decide if an idea is something I should continue with or if it's actually just dumb and a dead end. When I'm done with my walk I'll go back through the recording and pick out the good bits.

1 Notes
These are the raw ideas that lead to other things. Single words, sentences, chunks of lists in progress, and outlines that get scrawled on the page as they occur to me so I won't forget them later. They go in the little notebook I carry with me and lack any real organization.

2 First draft
The first draft is ugly, too long, and cumbersome in ways I won't notice until later. That's fine. The first draft is where I get words on paper and turn the ideas from my notes into full sentences. At this point it's more important to get the bones of something on the page than it is to be elegant about it.

I write first drafts on any sort of paper in pen and have no qualms about crossing things out or cramming edits between lines and in the margins. Once it's done I let it sit for a few days and ferment, that way I have clear eyes when I come back to edit it for the second draft.

3 Second draft
This is where I start editing. I read the first draft, have tea, then read it again. Then I mark the hell out of it in a different color pen. I try to be as merciless as possible with my editing and usually end up rewriting a significant portion of the draft and cutting out big chunks.

Once I'm satisfied with it I copy the edited version onto fresh loose leaf in pen and let it sit to ferment again before I go back for a third draft. (I specifically use loose leaf because it makes neat stacks. That way it doesn't look like a messy, discouraging pile if I can't get back to writing for a while.) The first draft goes in the recycling.

4 Third draft
I go through the read-tea-read sequence again to catch things I missed in the second draft and the things I decide I'm no longer happy with. Then I copy the new version into a composition notebook in pencil. The notebook is my semi-archival storage. It's durable, compact, and reliable. If my hard drive ever fails or my backups get wonked I'll still have a copy of what I've done that I can type up again and restore. It may not be exactly what the lost final digital draft was, but it's close enough that I can recreate it.

5 "Final" draft
I type up the third draft, usually making a few last changes along the way, and prepare the digital version to be published. The file gets saved as a .txt, copied to a thumb drive, put in cloud storage, and saved onto at least two other devices. Once the text is thoroughly backed up I start prepping it for a blog post, send it off to be included in a zine, or start doing layout. (The 'final' is in scare quotes because there's always some last-minute changes to make before it's actually published, but it's close enough.)

Doing it this way lets me catch most errors and produce the best work I can. There'll always be something I only spot after the PDF is exported or the blog post is published, but as long as it's not in physical print that's fixable.

The key thing is being willing to put in the time and effort to write multiple drafts, let them sit between editing rounds, then step back from what you've done and say "this could be better."

(Seriously though, get an editor.)

Project Ampersand

I've picked up an old project again: I'm un-writing a book.

This is something I started in the spring as a personal challenge and experiment to work on when I ran into blocks on other projects. I'm taking the fifth iteration of the world's best-marketed RPG and editing it for length and clarity. The goal is to see how much I can excise and still have the game feel like the original when you play. So far it turns out I can cut a whole lot. (Page 23 in my working document is the info that's on page 60 in the original text.)

My goals for the experiment are:

1) Determine how much of the 317-page original text is unnecessary padding that doesn't affect the underlying mechanics.

2) See how much of the original game's success comes from the rules and how much is what the players bring to the table with their creativity and enthusiasm. If the pared-down skeleton of the rules plays the same as the original, then the key ingredient is the players.

My process is:

1) Cut out all setting lore and fluff. Anything that's not rules text or something you'd reference while playing is gone.

2) Clean up the remaining text by rewriting it. Remove padding, passive voice, and awkward rule descriptions. Fix whatever's left to be as concise as possible.

Things that are important to maintaining the feel of the original game are exempt. The goal isn't to make the tiniest game I can, it's to make the tiniest game possible while still preserving the original's flavor. If that means it ends up being 100+ pages long, so be it. I'm trying to distill the game to liquor, not evaporate it completely.

I'll do several editing passes before the new game's ready to go. Right now I'm still hacking away at fluff and doing rough work. It's forcing me to take an in-depth look at the game and consider the rules more minutely than I have before. In the past I've always just flipped to the sections of the book I needed and only gave the rest a cursory skim. Going over the entire text line by line has made me realize that hot damn the writing is awful, but there actually are some very good bits buried in the word slog. I just need to dig them out and dust them off.

When I'm done I'm planning to release the distilled version as a free PDF. It'll likely be a way off because while this is an interesting project, it's also exceptionally tedious and time consuming. There'll absolutely be breaks for other writing.