#this is the original draft. only edited in a minor way for clarity and typos

[house-of-mirrors]

Happy 15h birthday, Fallen London!

To celebrate, I have to share with you all the first fic I ever wrote. It's from way back in January 2021, written about a month after I started playing. How far have things come in the years of development the game and myself as the player have had?

My good friend @an-archival-assistant introduced me to Fallen London. This story focuses on our characters in this brave new world.

The Modest Bartender saw all of this, and more, in his tavern tucked in a back alley on Ladybones Road. The Modest Bartender sometimes learned of things he wished he could forget, though he’d never dare touch bottled oblivion. In his years of business, he came to determine one rule for himself. He would question nothing under any circumstances.

Sammy... you were the beginning of it all Sammy

Read it here!

[weekendwritingmarathon]

Editing Your Own Work

Writing Behind the Scenes is a weekly Q&A feature about writing. Submit your writing questions as an ask to get your own question answered.

QUESTION: How do you edit your own work? What methods work best?

@unforth-ninawaters I’ll start with the second question first. There is no editing method that works best, just like there’s no writing method that works best. Finding what works best for YOU as an individual creator can only be done by trial and error.

That said, I approach editing my own work differently depending on whether it’s original fiction or fanfiction. Flat out, I write fanfiction for fun, this is my hobby, and I don’t put nearly the same degree of effort into editing fanfiction because I have zero incentive to do so. But honestly...I’m not sure my method of editing fanfiction would work for me if I hadn’t learned how to edit my own work better by doing my original fiction method, so I’ll talk about that. I finish a first draft. I then reformat it to have small text to minimize how many pages it takes up and print it out in “view comment” format so I have a wide margin to take notes in. Once I’ve got it printed, I stuff it in a binder, grab a colored pen, and read through the manuscript carefully WITHOUT making changes. This is when I flag “big stuff” I need to fix - plot issues, inconsistencies, etc. Once I’ve done that, I go back to the beginning, grab a red pen, and butcher the story. I consider myself a failure as an editor if I don’t find SOMETHING to change in every single sentence. Everyone can be better. While I’m doing this I often rewrite whole sections, and I make sure I address as many of the plot issues, etc., as I can, and mark anything I didn’t fix that’s still an issue.

Then I do it again. And then usually again. And then I send it to beta readers, and then I edit it AGAIN.

Even so I know of about a half-dozen errors in my self-published novel. It’s really hard to get things perfect.

For fanfiction, I don’t bother printing or anything. I just read through from the beginning, catch what I can, and post. If there are minor errors, extra words, or plot inconsistencies...well, it’s fanfic, and while I want to do a good job, folks get what they pay for… <3

@tellthenight Editing is the process after you know your fic has all the pieces you need, those pieces are in the right order and go the right direction. It is NOT rewriting/revising. Editing is another area where people do all sorts of different things, so my editing process may not be your editing process.

On the first pass, I highlight and put comments in my draft without making very many actual changes. I’ll fix a typo, correct grammar, or make simple changes for clarity, but most everything gets a comment. I comment on every single thing I notice, even if I might not end up changing it. I look for clarity issues, making sure the vocabulary of each character fits, blocking issues (how did they suddenly get outside???), etc. We all make silly errors in first draft--that’s what drafts are for and why everything you post should get at least a cursory look before it goes public.

Next, I go through those comments and solve those problems. Sometimes I skip the ones that require more thought and get through the easier stuff first. After I’ve resolved my comments, I go through again looking really closely at my word choices, focusing on verbs, clarity, and vocabulary. I search for my “bad habit” words (so, just, etc.) and get rid of most of those.

When I think I’m done, I usually give one more look for wayward punctuation, spelling, and common word swaps (they’re/there/their, etc.) to make sure there aren’t any glaring errors.

@ltleflrt I have two methods of editing my own stuff.  The first is to put time between the first writing and the editing.  The longer I go between writing it and then reading over it, the less my brain tends to fill in the blanks and I’m more likely to notice an error.  I only use this for fics that I’m not posting a chapter at a time, so like for Big Bangs and other challenges, and I catch quite a bit before I finally send it to be beta read.  My other trick is to start from the bottom and work up.  Because I’m reading things out of the order that I wrote them, I have to concentrate harder on each sentence and I catch more errors that way.  This is my most common method since I usually post things pretty quickly and don’t have patience to wait very long to re-read it.

@treefrogie84 You know that kid back in high school when you were peer editing each other’s papers who would sit there and add in every single comma you were missing and instead of just writing “awkward” or “flat out wrong,” would fix it for you? Yeah. That was me (that’s still me).

Short version: I edit my fic the same way I beta anyone else’s. Except moreso, because most fics I beta only get 2-3 passes and I’m working on pass 10 for my current longfic. I even use the suggestions feature of Gdocs the same way.

The first pass is the big stuff: that passage doesn’t work, that entire scene is unnecessary, what the hell does that sentence even mean. Actually, punctuation fixes are a constant thing. If I know how to fix it, I’ll go ahead and insert the correction into the doc. If I don’t, I highlight it and comment with what’s wrong (I’ve made comments before with ‘just… no’ as the reason or just question marks). Anything to tell me what needs to be fixed when I’m coming back to it in a few days (weeks, months). Once I’m done with the pass, I go through and accept the changes on the easy stuff. To save myself some tears, any deletions over about a paragraph in length get moved to a separate document so the hours of work put into it aren’t just gone.

The comments and suggestions that aren’t accepted because they’re harder and/or require more brain power stay put until I can come back to them. When I do come back to them, I move back to suggestions and just… poke them until they’re better.

Rinse, repeat. And again. At some point, when I have a clean draft, I send it over to my beta. Then he pokes things with a stick, doing much the same process, and sends it back. It’s pretty rare he doesn’t look over things at least twice, sometimes more.

I don’t know if this method will work for anyone else. This is the process that I’ve worked out over years and years (and making my English teachers hate me). I actually prefer using paper for the first pass, but that gets awfully expensive, so I’m adapting to not doing that anymore.