Craft Writing - Two Editing Reminders
Introduction
I've been doing a lot more editing in the past few weeks than I have before, and to make the process a little easier on my work and me I've been trying to take it more seriously. Here are a few things I'm trying to keep in mind, for my own work, that have been bearing fruit.
A Note about Editors
There is nothing you as an author can do to replace a good editor. Get one, whether it's an actual editor or your dog or your writing buddy (which you should try and get, by the way!) or just some random joe off the street. The way they read your work and their tastes and how they take apart the work you've done will give you a better perspective on what you're doing. Without fail. Good writing doesn't spring fully formed from the brain of the writer like a Greek goddess.
The following "tips" are both for the folks who are self-editing or trying to brush up on their own editorial skills when looking at other's work. I've just been reading a lot of books and doing a fair bit of editing, and these are the things I've found immediately helpful to keep in mind while I do so.
The Tips
Writing Clearly
The perennial Elements of Style has a pretty good passage about this, which I'll reproduce here:
Clarity is not the prize in writing, nor is it always the principal mark of a good style. There are occasions when obscurity serves a literary yearning, if not a literary purpose, and there are writers whose mien is more overcast than clear. But since writing is communication, clarity can only be a virtue. And although there is no substitute for merit in writing, clarity comes closest to being one. Even to a writer who is being intentionally obscure or wild of tongue we can say, "Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand!" Even to writers of market letters, telling us (but not telling us) which securities are promising, we can say, "Be cagey plainly! Be elliptical in a straightforward fashion!"
Whether something is written to be at the table or not, it should be written clearly. This is a guideline I find myself breaking a lot in the first draft of a project, usually because I'm trying too hard to be creative with how I describe things. I was editing something the other day that's a pretty good example of this. Here's the entry of a hex I wrote several months ago:
A concrete maw with honeycomb teeth and broken escalator tongues juts from the rubble here. A long set of stairs is the only way down.
This is a pretty solid start, but I think it lacks the clarity a tabletop product ought to have, especially since it's the entrance to a dungeon! How might we go about fixing it?
While writing, I was thinking of the interior design of parts of the Washington D.C. Metro, pictured here:
There's a pretty cool entrance to the Metro that is essentially what I described in the hexfilll, the square pattern extends up a 45-degree tunnel with four sets of escalators along the bottom. Problem is, I think anyone who doesn't have my extremely specific memory of going up the metro escalator and thinking "damn, this looks like something's mouth" is going to be able to understand what I'm describing.
So we need to make things clearer. Here's what I came up with, after much internal debate and commite:
A concrete maw with hexagon teeth and a broken escalator tongue juts from the rubble. Walking down the tongue is the only way in.
Is it perfect? I don't think so, but plainly connecting the first and second sentence together in subject makes it a bit easier to follow and creates a sense of space that I think was lacking in the previous example. I also dropped "honeycomb" in favor of the less evocative "hexagon" to make it clearer that it was a geometric pattern and not one that was meant to resemble literal honeycomb.
Treat your Audience Like Adults
Jokes about the PIAAC Survey aside, readers aren't as dumb as you think they are. Once you're sure that you've written everything clearly, it's time to look at the work and make sure that you're not overexplaining yourself in a desperate bid to be understood. At best, this comes across as being overeager or repetitive for rhetorical reasons. At worst, it makes the reader doubt what you're saying or misattribute importance to an idea or concept that you talk about.
In the context of adventure modules, it's an unstated rule of the format that anything not in the key of a dungeon isn't relevant to the experience of playing through said dungeon. If, then, you spend a few sentences at the beginning of each room dryly describing the walls, floors, and ceilings, while it is an incredibly thorough room key, it's also probably unhelpful to most of your audience at the table. While reading the module for preparation, they might get fatigued by the "20'x20' room, with black stone walls and a rough dirt floor" preamble at the beginning of every room key, which isn't the effect we want our work to have. The preamble is superfluous, not because it doesn't help describe the space, but because by including it we're demeaning the reader and assuming they don't understand the unwritten rule of room keys.
There's a potential source of friction with this advice and advice I've seen and also probably said myself in other spaces. A common refrain is to "treat the reader like an idiot" or to otherwise explain more than you think you should. This is good advice! It's for a different group of writers, though, and to dispel any confusion I thought it best to address it here.
Writers generally fall into two camps: there are over-explainers, which are the rarer, less common group, and the under-explainers. The under-explainers are most hobbyist writers, who write for themselves in the context of their own mind. Personal notes are a good example of this under-explained style of writing, usually little more than single phrases or clusters of half-sentences used to jog the memory of the writer. If you've ever written a 30 Minute Dungeon in half the recommended time for a game, you're probably familiar with this style of writing. Here's a room that I wrote for myself a whle ago in this style:
A big dome painted green with bronze and yellow geometric patterns.
While most writers aren't this sparse when writing for an audience that isn't themselves, it can be difficult to divorce what is being written from the context of the mind in which it springs from. In the last section, the example I gave was under-written because I wrote it in reference to my own visual memory instead of describing the place in its own terms. This sort of under-writing is very common, and the advice to avoid it is good advice.
The upshot of this advice, though, is that sometimes people assume readers aren't clever enough to catch the subtler moves within a piece of work, and so, in their effort to be clear, they bludgeon the reader to death with their club of words instead of what should've been at most a light tap on the reader's shoulder.
It's pretty hard to tell which one you are when you've just written something. This reinforces the idea that you need another person (an editor, they call it) to look at your things from a different perspective and tell you "hey this is overwritten, tone it down, this is under-written, add some more here". An editor is a reader just like the audience is, and they're ideally observant enough to catch these moments where a certain section of a work is underbaked
I've been speaking at a pretty high level thus far, so let's explore an example in my own work:
Room 3: Arms Four large seats face the corners of this box shaped room. propped up in the seats are long rods, each about 18" long and as thick as a pencil. Sitting in a chair while holding the corresponding rod causes the wearer to go temporarily blind, but they can now feel three buttons along the length of the rod. One is shaped like a star, one like a diamond, and one like a triangle.
The triangle button does nothing; its payloads have long since been spent.
The diamond button drops a jade tiara shaped like a tree branch from a compartment in the ceiling. If multiple people are wearing them, they may communicate wordlessly within 50 feet of one another. They do not work more than 2 hexes away from the Steel House.
the star button illuminates the ceiling, allowing the room and its contents to be navigated without a torch.
While I don't think I need to explain, this room is the combat room of a spaceship, but I don't go out and say that. If you're reading my blog, you must be a genius of the highest caliber, so you were probably thinking that already. If you weren't, this room in context with the rest of the dungeon is more than enough information to draw that conclusion. I trust you as a reader to understand what I'm saying without having to beat you over the head with it. What would it look like if I had done so, though?
Room 3: Arms Four large seats face the corners of this box shaped room. propped up in the seats are long control rods, each about 18" long and as thick as a pencil. Sitting in a chair while holding the corresponding rod causes the wearer to go temporarily blind, as the integrated cameras of the fallen spaceship have now been buried under rock and dirt and no longer provide any visual information to the brain of the person sitting in the chair, but they can now feel three buttons along the length of the rod that control the once-volatile payloads of the ship's armaments. One is shaped like a star, one like a diamond, and one like a triangle.
The triangle button does nothing; its payloads have long since been spent fighting interstellar bandits.
The diamond button drops a jade tiara shaped like a tree branch from a compartment in the ceiling. These jade tiaras allowed the gunners of the ship to communicate wordlessly in an instant, to better coordinate firing patterns and strategies. If multiple people are wearing them, they may communicate wordlessly within 50 feet of one another. They do not work more than 2 hexes away from the Steel House due to the shoddy Bluetooth connection.
the star button illuminates the ceiling via long, thick strands of LEDs, allowing the room and its contents to be navigated without a torch.
Obviously I'm being a bit dramatic here with how I'm rewriting it, but there's a great deal of stuff in the description that isn't necessary to actually running the thing and obfuscates the use of the key at the table. Treat your readers like they're adults. They'll appreciate it.
Conclusion
Writing clearly and with respect for the reader are pretty simple pieces of advice, but keeping them in mind has made my own editing processs much faster and more efficient and has leader to cleaner, more deft work. Hopefully you'll get something from it as well.