Hello all! Duhop here, back again with a devlog for March.
This month, me and the team have been hard at work on artwork, visual scripting, asset planning, and editing for Alex’s Journey to the Grave.
Not all of the work has been for Act 2 specifically (we’re quite ahead on background art, excitedly!), but we’re still grinding hard to catch up and get it playtest-ready soon! (Game devs often say the last 20% of polish takes 80% of the effort, and right now I’m definitely feeling that 😅)
Most recently for myself, I’ve been spending my time on a deep-dive editing pass for Act 2. I know player feedback could prompt further, possibly large-scale changes, but there were just too many points in the script I still had personal unresolved issues with.
Anyway, there’s a lot I have to say about the process, so let me get right into it.
Editing Is Writing
As a preface; I don’t actually know exactly where the technical definitions of writer and editor end or start, and I’m sure that a lot of what I refer to as “editing” is work that would typically be handed back to the writer after feedback from their editor. The line is so blurry, though, I imagine it’s tough to draw clearly or consistently even in the most professional of settings.
For the purposes of this devlog, my personal definition of “editing” is as follows: The process of correcting, rewording, reworking, rewriting, or making interpolated additions to existing text.
Now, even with a definition that broad, you might still assume that editing is easier than writing because it’s iterative, rather than original. However, that would probably stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of why editors even exist in the first place.
You see, writing is not necessarily editing, but editing is, in fact, writing.
And what does an editor write, exactly? Well, of course, the most difficult sections in the text; the parts the writer struggled with the most! They say nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution, but in writing, it’s an editor’s job to challenge that.
So, while editing any given text is almost certainly less work than writing it, it is also almost certainly far more difficult work.
That is, for the original writer, at least. Editors exist to provide a fresh perspective, with unique writing strengths that (hopefully) fill the gaps between your own. Finding the perfect editor is like the writing equivalent of finding your life partner; you want someone that shares at least some of your interests, yet mirrors and compliments you habitually. You don’t want someone identical to yourself who will only enable and worsen your mutual bad habits, or with tastes so different to your own they’ll start to muddy your artistic vision.
Of course, compromises can be made, much more so given this is a professional relationship and not actually a romantic one. If you end up working with an editor that has tastes extremely different to your own, it’s likely you have the advantage of their habits and perspective differing widely from your own as well; you just have to stand up for yourself and your own creative vision, making sure you understand (and that they’ve explained clearly!) the motivation behind their changes/feedback.
Personally, I’ve found plenty of community in the game dev world, but the writing world is one I’ve failed to make many strides in. I’ve yet to close in on anyone that seems like they’d be a good fit to edit Alex’s Journey to the Grave, and even if I had, Violet Horizons does not have the budget to pay for 100,000 words of quality editing.
So basically, I’ve been forced to get good at doing it on my own. If you’re in a similar boat yourself, here are my tips for you:
1. Get good. (Obviously)
If you’re being forced to self-edit, your writing and language skills quite literally need to be good enough to achieve the level of polish you’re going for. I could probably write multiple full devlogs just on the topic of improving your writing, so I’m gonna have to keep this brief, but it is by far the most important factor when it comes to finding success with self-editing.
A. Read, a lot.
And yes, books, but not just those. If you’re here reading this devlog, there’s a good chance you’re not writing traditional novels, so consume whatever type of media you’re working in as well. Movies, TV, anime, video games, whatever! They all have writing, written by writers, and while you’re having fun enjoying them, you can get something more than just inspiration out of it by being conscious of that writer’s perspective.
Think carefully about what the writer is doing, how and why they’re doing it, and critique them. What did they do well, what did they do poorly, and what would you do differently? Ask many, many questions. I could list useful examples for hours, but you should learn to come up with them on your own.
Make sure you think about it at every level. From basic prose to long-term story arcs, and everything in between.
B. Write, a lot.
This seems obvious, but it so often heeds repetition.
For many new writers, their hurdles are simply symptoms of pure inexperience. At first, maybe a strange sort of mental barrier to simply putting text on a page. After that, perhaps a struggle to create flow that actually feels natural; the paralyzing slog of knowing prose could be better, and actually being able to fix it, just not any faster than a determined homicidal snail.
The only—and I mean only—way I know to get over these problems (among many, many others), is to straight up just write more. (Rhythm gamers, this should sound familiar XD)
Do this after doing at least a bit of step A, and think about what you’re doing in a similar questioning manner. What are you trying to do, why are you trying to do it, and how should you be doing it? That way, the lessons you learn there will actually transfer over here. And if you’re struggling with something here, you can go look for answers there directly!
One load you can lessen when it comes to getting lots of writing in for practice purposes is the anxiety of your work not being good enough to share with others. All you need to do is… drumroll please… that’s right, not share it!!
Artists should be familiar with that concept. Most do plenty of practice work; not meant to be showy, never meant to be published anywhere. Writers can benefit a lot from taking that as a lesson, and I can sure attest to that personally. I’ve found I’m able to have a lot of fun with it as well, since goofy or provocative writing comes out much more naturally.
C. Socialize with writers.
This is something I’m pretty bad at personally.
I’m so invested in the local game dev community at this point, I don’t really have the social energy left in me to go pursue the writing community as well. They tend to be older, have less in common with me, and be harder to talk to… I think the solution is probably to find a more relevant community somewhere online, but my introvert battery is being kept way too drained to spend any extra energy on that.
If you’re lucky, you might have some fellow writers in your own community, since pretty much all creative industries require them. Unfortunately, my local game dev scene is extremely sparse on writers, and I couldn’t really tell you why. I guess the usual genres are less writing heavy, so it sadly gets treated as an afterthought…
Anyway, to get to my point here, it is extremely valuable to be able to discuss your writing with other writers. Even if you’re less experienced, it’s still likely that they’ll find value in having you give your thoughts on their work, and be willing to provide feedback on your work in return. Talk to them and see what they think!
You don’t know what you don’t know, and not knowing what you need to improve is the most likely reason to end up not improving it. An outside perspective can fix this, and they know that too.
Obviously, though, you can’t ask them to be a full-blown editor for free. That’s a whole different ball game.
2. Make yourself less self.
Before you do the editing, become the editor, and get your perspective as far away from the writer’s as you can. Try your best to make the “self” in self-editing as small as physically possible.
The easiest way to do this is to simply sit and wait. Your future self will always be less of the person who did the writing than your current self.
Don’t edit your work right after you write it. In fact, don’t even edit it after waiting. Wait longer. As long as you can.
Obviously, this has some limits. Deadlines n’ stuff, of course. But the minutia of prose becomes easier and easier to detect problems with and rework the fresher your perspective is.
The intuitive way to make it work is to simply finish writing your entire story, then go back and edit it from the start afterward. The problem is that this has the potential to make way more work for you, because if you identify any larger over-arching story issues or plot holes, guess what; you’re going to have to redo huge chunks of what you’ve already written!
To avoid that issue, I personally plan out my entire story with an outline before writing any prose, and validate that outline carefully. Before starting any drafts, I make sure I’m happy with it (a first round of self-editing, pretty much just for the overall story arc and world/character details), and start to employ the technique of the following tip number 3.
3. Get feedback from whoever you can.
Editors are good because they’re experienced with the intricacies of writing. They’re good at sniffing out problems, and they can provide specific, detailed feedback.
Having an editor that isn’t yourself is good because they have a fresh, unique perspective, and don’t hold all the hidden context in their head like you do.
So to become an effective self-editor, you need to emulate both of these two aspects. The first we covered in tip number 1, but the second we’ve only begun to address with tip number 2.
To take adopting new perspectives as a self-editor further, there is no choice but to self-inflict heavy cranial trauma and give yourself amnesia employ the minds of others.
You already have the first aspect in yourself, so the ones you ask don’t really need to have deep writing knowledge. It’s nice to have if possible, sure, but you can still get a lot out of someone with nothing but an appreciation for storytelling.
That’s probably your target audience, after all, so if they all love everything about what you’re making, who even cares what a real editor would tell you anyway?
Weeeeell, I would be careful about that. When you’re asking random people for writing feedback, there are some common pitfalls you need to watch out for:
A. Toxic positivity.
This can be a hard one to avoid, because the people who are most likely to be guilty of this are also usually the easiest to ask for feedback in the first place. Think friends, family, employees, team members, co-workers… anyone that might not want to hurt your feelings.
It’s easy for them to give positive feedback—to find something good about your work, no matter how terrible it might genuinely be—but there’s an emotional hurdle they need to jump over in order to say anything negative.
To alleviate this, make sure you’re clear that critique is what you’re looking for from the get-go, and if there’s anything in particular you have concerns about, ask for their opinion on each point directly. It is far, far easier for them to give an opinion on an existing concern or self-criticism than to bring up something new that they don’t know how you feel about.
P.S. If you’re ever on the other side of this, a good way to go about giving criticism is the feedback sandwich. Start with a genuinely positive comment, give your constructive criticism in the middle, and then finish it off with a second piece of genuine positivity.
B. False confidence.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, you’ll encounter those who are a little too eager and decisive in their criticism. They will state with absolute certainty that X is bad because of Y and Z would make it better.
Sometimes (though rarely), they are actually correct. But even if you think it might be so, you shouldn’t act on such criticism until you’ve thought things through yourself and brought your writing experience into it.
Why do they think X is bad, why do they think Y is the culprit, and why do they want Z? What do they understand about X and Y, what do they think is the importance of each, and what context about them either doesn’t exist in writing or was possibly somehow missed?
Compare their perspective to your own, and identify the differences. Nine times out of ten, you’ll find a problem or answer to a problem that differs considerably from what they stated, or maybe even just that there isn’t a problem at all.
Basically, this kind of feedback can be used to identify real problems, but it probably shouldn’t be taken at face value. You’ll usually have to do some psychological mining to extract the real feedback.
For example:
“The intro was kinda boring, but it did start to get interesting later. I just felt like I didn’t really know wtf they were even talking about sometimes, like what did A mean when she mentioned X? You should explain that better.”
They’re brushing off the fact that they didn’t like the intro, then confidently telling you about a specific problem they encountered later on. But you know that X was clearly explained in the intro, so it’s not hard to figure out that the real feedback to take away from this is that the intro is, in fact, boring. (To them, at least.)
The next step is to try to understand why they found the intro boring. That will tell you whether you actually need to take action on their feedback.
For the purposes of this example, let’s imagine the intro was a scene where character A is doing her makeup. You ask this individual why they found that boring, and they answer:
→ “I’m a dude, I don’t care about makeup.”
Okay, you’re making an otome game. Your target audience is women. You can probably ignore this safely.
→ “Girl, I spend enough time doing makeup in real life! Just get to the damn plot already!”
Okay, there might be something to this. Your makeup scene was not unique or interesting to a member of the target audience. Try to validate that answer with other women, and if they concur, either find an alternative intro scene or figure out how to make it more interesting. Maybe there’s a way you can turn the makeup into a tool for worldbuilding, like to show off your fantasy world’s magic system?
Finally, to give a few more hopeless examples, Steam reviews are by far the worst offenders when it comes to this type of feedback:
“I don’t like visual novels, I wish this had gameplay.”
“I’m old so this story about young people doesn’t relate to me like it definitely would have when I was a teenager, I wish it covered more mature topics.”
^ Both of these are paraphrased from real Steam reviews on our first game. Lol.
C. “I feel like…”
Thankfully, most people do approach giving criticism with a genuine desire to help you improve what you’re making, but good intentions doesn’t necessarily mean good feedback. This is most common pitfall you’ll have to navigate when it comes to feedback from the general public.
It’s essentially an extension of the new-writer phenomenon I mentioned earlier; the reader can identify that something is wrong, but not exactly what the problem is, how to fix it, or sometimes if there really even is a problem in the first place.
Usually, you will have to extrapolate real actionable feedback from it in very a similar fashion to how you would with the previous pitfall. This is a sort of good-intention-coated version of that, which is at least usually much more helpful.
“The characters are cute, but I feel like I don’t really know why A likes B. Aren’t they supposed to be enemies?”
This is a pretty good example of helpful type C feedback. You barely even have to extrapolate this; A’s affection for B needs an explanation. As long as they didn’t miss anything, and other readers concur, it’s probably safe to say you should think about acting on it.
That is, only if you don’t want that affection to be a mystery!
I’ve often found that readers will voice their concerns about yet-unresolved conflicts in the story as feedback, and it always feels great to see that they’re being strung along exactly as intended. In this case, I imagine A and B to be characters from rival factions, and A’s attraction to B is alluded to but not yet explained in order to create some intrigue.
That means whoever gave this feedback had their attention turned exactly where it was meant to be, and they were itching to find out the reason behind the mystery.
Why is A enamoured with the enemy?! Tune in next time for the big reveal!
So really, you can take that kind of thing as roundabout positive feedback, something much more common with with this pitfall than the previous.
Not all feedback will fall into one of these pitfalls, but that isn’t always obvious. Always make sure to consider feedback from multiple perspectives, and take into account the context it was given in. You might even get criticism just for the sake of criticism, especially if you put pressure on someone by specifically asking them to “please give negative feedback” as I mentioned you can do to help avoid pitfall A.
4. Plan ahead for editing and make notes while writing.
If you know you’re going to be self-editing, you know who the editor is, and from that you can decipher what you can do to make their job a little easier ahead of time. (Actually, even if you have someone else editing your work, they would probably very much appreciate you asking about and doing this anyway.)
As we’ve established, we want that editor version of you to be as far away from the current version of you as possible. That means they’re probably (hopefully) missing all that pesky context you’ve got swimming around your head, and also that they’ve probably (hopefully not, but probably) forgotten about all the problems you identified with your writing that you brushed off with “editor me will deal with that”.
When I’m writing, I’m constantly noting down additional thoughts that don’t enter into the actual writing, as well as problems or alternative options I’ve identified.
For example, when writing dialogue where a character is lying or attempting to hide their feelings, it can be extremely helpful to note down what that character is actually thinking alongside their dialogue.
This can get a bit tricky, because on their first pass, you don’t actually want editor you to see this! If they can’t discern those thoughts through context available in the actual prose, there might be a problem they need to address.
But if they’ve completely forgotten what the character is actually thinking, or that they’re even lying in the first place, how would they even know there’s a problem?!
So yeah, it gets a little complicated, but there are plenty of systems you can adopt to navigate this. Depending on your writing techniques/software, you can:
- Put notes in a different font colour/type/size, and just consciously ignore them when rereading. (This is what I do, using code comments since I just write directly in VSCode.)
- Use the comment system in google docs that can be shown or hidden at will.
- Put your notes on a separate document entirely.
Really, though, this can take on whatever form you find works for you. I just want to make sure nobody takes my advice about waiting before editing and then completely forgets what their writing was even hoping to achieve, because it’s happened to me before ðŸ˜
Also, remember when I said that editing is writing? Yeah, that means you should make or at least keep these notes up to date to date while editing as well. Because you’re going to end up editing that dialogue again, aren’t you?
Whether as part of your intended workflow or otherwise, you know it’s gonna happen eventually. Don’t let your guard down just because you’re not on the first draft anymore.
5. Strike a sustainable balance between drafting and editing.
Full disclosure, I kinda suck at this.
I constantly make the mistake of trying to make my drafts perfect, and it slows me down considerably. Not only does it end up taking me decades to write something in the first place, but I still end up spending plenty of time editing it later anyway.
I cannot stress the importance of spending time away from your prose before trying to correct it enough. No matter how much time I spend trying to get it right the first time, I will almost always find some way to make it better when I come back with fresh eyes.
It’s just how our brains work, I don’t make the rules.
right, so u shouldnt make drafts perfect. does that mean u shoud leave evything up to editor?
No, obviously not! Stupid! Bad writer, bad writer!
Err, sorry. Really, I advise against either extreme, but it’s up to you to strike the right balance for yourself. Just keep in mind, you’re the one doing 100% of the work either way, and all you’re choosing is when you want to do it.
Personally, I’ve always tried to write drafts with finalized grammar, punctuation, and spelling from the get-go, and it has saved me a ton of time when editing. And now, after so much practice, I now write like this so naturally it actually takes more conscious thought to make my writing lazier.
If I had to correct everything from drafts written like my example above… ugh, I shudder at the mere thought of it.
As I work now, the real mistakes and oversights are apparent to editor me immediately, and he can address them without having to waste time on the monotonous busywork of redoing all the lazily unfinished prose in between.
My personal recommendation is to take advantage of your skill as a writer to make your time as an editor run smoother, and win the easy battles you can while drafting. Write with proper spelling and grammar, but don’t dwell on issues you can’t solve easily; leave the real puzzles for later, because you probably won’t get them right until then anyway.
That is assuming, though, that your writing workflow looks anything like mine in the first place. As you might have picked up on, I’m the kind of writer who likes to obsess about making everything as perfect as possible as soon as possible, but everyone works differently.
If you treat drafts as nothing but a rough guide for your final prose, and intend to completely rewrite everything anyway, then of course you can get as lazy as you like with it. Such a method does have clear advantages; going for pure speed can allow you to squeeze more from inspiration before it fades.
I put most of my ideas into a higher-level outline to achieve something similar, but prose-level inspiration is harder for me to harness properly. I’ll summarize it there, but it’s just not the same.
6. Experiment, form your own opinions, and use what works for you.
Everything I’ve laid out here, to varying degrees, are just my opinions. They were hard earned through three years of grinding visual novel development and practice writing, but I’m still just some guy, and they’re still just opinions.
Give it an honest try if it sounds good to you, but don’t just blindly continue to follow my advice (or any advice, for that matter), if you find it doesn’t end up working for you. Research, learn, grow, experiment, mix, and employ findings on your own.
Because here’s a secret; that’s exactly how I came up with all of this to begin with.
Woah, dramatic!
Lol, sorry for the unexpected life advice. It feels a little pretentious, but I think it goes unsaid far more often than it should be.
No individual’s opinion, no matter how expert, deserves to be worshipped as gospel. They are all naught but mere mortals, just as you and I.
Conclusion
Fellow writers, editors, or whoever else even cares, I’d love to hear your own take on any of the advice I’ve given here! I’m still far from perfecting my craft, so outside opinions on what I could improve or consider trying are greatly appreciated.
I had a lot of fun writing this devlog, and I think it was super helpful for me to get some of these concepts down on paper. It really makes you think differently about your own techniques when you have to articulate them so vividly.
I hope somebody out there finds this helpful!
I’ll see you all next month!
-Duhop