Craft Writing; Ideation and Revision
Introduction
I’ve been reading Peter Elbow’s Writing With Power and have just finished Ursula K. Leguin’s Steering the Craft and there are several topics within these books that I think apply particularly well to my own experience doing module writing for adventure games. I’ll paraphrase the understanding of writing Elbow lays out in his book and then sort out some best practices I’ve identified in my own writing that have helped when writing in this mode. At the very end is a list of things I’ve found pretty helpful or formative in my own writing thus far. I might go back in a few days and add more stuff as I think of it. Or maybe not.
The Two Halves of Writing
Writing is, in my experience, separated into two halves; ideation and revision.
Ideation is the creation and expansion of ideas, thoughts, and concepts. Things like brain dumps, free writing, and having conversations or arguments with other people all help with ideation. Ironically, this is the easiest part of writing. Having ideas is pretty damn easy, and writing them down is a relatively easy skill to learn. Carrying around a notebook and jotting down thoughts and ideas you have, taking notes of interesting quotes or conversations, and writing a few sentences a day about what you’ve done and how you’re feeling are all steps you can take to get better at putting your thoughts down.
Revision is the harder of the two and for good reason. It encompasses everything else about writing. Revision, when approaching a complete work, typically starts with broad scope changes like manuscript evaluation — comments like “this is where your piece is strong, this is where it’s weak” — and structural editing — “Really, I think switching these two sections and reworking the argument to flow that way would lead to a better conclusion” — and moves into line and copy editing. The two are often used interchangeably, but copy editing usually means asking questions like “is this grammatically correct” and line editing is more along the lines of “is this what we’re looking for on a stylistic level?”. You can see pretty clearly how these might overlap; breaking grammatical rules might be an intentional stylistic choice or a crime of passion caused by a late night writing session that desperately needs amending.
This sounds like a lot (and you’re right!) but I’m saying all this to enunciate what it actually means to write. Clever readers will notice that my paragraph about editing was prefaced with “when approaching a complete work”. Writing is the conjunction of both of these processes. If you’ve ever written half of a sentence and deleted it because you came across a better sentence halfway through the current one, you’re doing both halves of writing at the same time.
Nothing about doing this is inherently bad form, but it can lead to some problems. In my own work, sometimes I’ll experience “Writer’s Block” which in my amateur opinion is more aptly named “Editorial Cockblockage”. Sometimes I’ll be overflowing with ideas but be unable to write because my editorial half, overloaded with judging the quality of the unfinished manuscript half-formed in the brain, is constipating the whole process.
Separating these things is something I’m still working on, but the results have been fruitful enough that I wanted to share my own practices for those of you who might be suffering from a similar affliction.
Ideating
Everything I mentioned above when talking about ideating holds true, but I’ll reiterate some stuff here that’s helped me for the sake of completeness:
- Conversation and Argument: good for understanding your feelings on something, or coming across tensions you want to highlight in your piece. Helps if you have someone particularly opinionated to argue with
- Freewriting: just write whatever comes to mind. It doesn’t have to be particularly inspired or unique or even a complete thought. You can also use this as a mindfulness exercise if you’re honest enough to write down everything that comes to mind
- Connections: Good ideas come from comparison and contrast; write down any interesting thoughts you have that compare unlikely things.
- Commonplace Books: Anything someone says or that someone writes that provokes a feeling in you, write it down. Quotes, phrases, etc. are all good for this. Some of my recent ones include: “Socratic Toddler”, “Neoliberalism is secular Calvinism”, “Algorithm, Son of Logarithm” and “/[a silly question] is like asking if you can take your shoes off at the beach”. The point is to collect a little collection of phrases to muse over and turn to for inspiration.
- Exploration: Part of creation is having a well of inspiration to draw from. Read widely, outside of your preferred genre or form, and consume media in a wide range of types. I’ve been trying to read some Bukowski poems each morning and watching short films and animations in the afternoon before bed. Reading within your medium or mode of choice is good, but if you only read the work of your peers you won’t have much particularly original to say in your work.
Revising
Revising is the trickier part, since lots of people do it naturally either before the words are written or immediately after. When I get distracted, I’ll scroll further up in an article and change a few words that stick out to me on a skim and then go back to writing. It’s better to wait until you’ve got a nearly finished draft before you start to change things, or at least to stop writing new material entirely while you’re looking over your work. This helps separate ideating and revising as processes you do while you’re writing. Some other tips I’ve found helpful:
- Rereading Work: Reread everything aloud. If you don’t want to read it aloud (or risk being branded as the crazy person on public transit for looking at your notebook and mumbling) mouth the words. This helps you transition from the writing, ideating mode to the revisionary mode. Most people speak more than they write, too, so you’ll notice awkward or incorrect phrases more easily than you would while reading them normally.
- Emotional Distance: The longer you spend working on a project and the more you’re invested in the work, the harder it can be to edit it with a clear head. That’s why professional editors have jobs, and that’s why you ought to try and separate yourself from your work as much as possible. If I have the time, I simply leave it to simmer in a folder on my computer for a week or a month or until I remember it again. If I don’t have the time, I change the font size, the font, and read it in the reverse order that I wrote it (starting from the oldest lines and proceeding to the newest ones).
- Share: Sharing your work is crucial, and I don’t mean just for criticism. Divorcing the act of sharing from the act of criticism makes you confident in putting your work out for others to see and makes the act of receiving criticism less daunting. Get some writer friends together and read your work aloud (without commenting or criticism). I started a prose Instagram account about a year ago that I post on regularly to practice sharing.
- Deconstructing Works: Take a small piece (this blogpost is a good start) and deconstruct it, moving from big picture questions to line by line analysis. Why does it work? Why does it fail? How is it organized? Would you change anything? The goal is to build up the ability to take apart writing and identify why it works.
- Detachment from Deletion: Cutting words can be painful, especially when you felt really clever writing them and want to share that cleverness with everyone. No one likes your brand as much as you do. In addition to getting emotional distance from the work, sometimes saving phrases or sentences you cut from your work in other places can serve as further inspiration later. You’re not deleting it, just saving it for a better place.
Further Reading
I’ll try to keep adding stuff here as I read it.
Adventure Game Related
- Ten Tangible Tips for Editing your RPG Manuscript If you only read one thing from this list, read this.
- What Does a Work Not Need?
- In Praise of Legwork
- On People Centered Adventure Design
- Bullet Points vs. Prose
Writing as Craft
- Writing With Power by Peter Elbow
- Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Leguin