M.Y. Khan
asked
Steven Campbell:
Sir, I love your work and can’t wait for the next installment, but in the meantime I wanted to ask what your writing and editing processes are like. Do you have a fixed schedule? Do you come up with the story ad-lib or do you make a guideline? And the editing. You mentioned listening to it in order to work out the kinks. What is that like? I would really appreciate it if you could shed some light on your process.
Steven Campbell
I'm no sir, I work for a living.
I go a-z reading. I'm concentrating on word usage, readability, plot. I have a thesaurus open and a graphical word sentence outliner that works maybe 50% of the time.
I have my own quirks. How stuff appears on the page, matters. Having he said, she said back and forth also gets tiring. And that's another thing, I have to make it sound real because it will go to audio book. Like I just changed a sentence where four guards did something and it could be heard as FOR guards. So I changed it to five and no one will ever know.
It takes about an hour or so to do one chapter and there are around 75 chapters. I just get burnt out on it. If you read it all the way through it will like be a 10-11 hour book. But I'm reading the same sentences over and over.
My next edit will go to a professional who does a proofread with some light copyediting.
I'll then edit that and print it out with a full hard copy and check into a hotel somewhere and just unplug. Those are when i really cut out whole pages.
Grammar isn't science. A few of my quirks in style is that you will never see dialogue start after description. "Steven said." <--like that wouldn't exist. All dialogue starts on new lines because it makes it pop out. There can be detail after it and more dialogue within.
!" She exclaimed
?" she questioned
," she wondered
." Then she left.
Sometimes I do an arbitrary upper/lower based on the sentence preceding it. But it makes sense to me.
All of this stuff is in the computer of course.
Pre-Writing, I invariably put myself in a hotel somewhere to daydream. I'll get ideas and flesh them out. Major milestones. Then do a lot of walking to it coherent. Still, vast amounts of stuff changed. When I'm in the scene, I write what would really happen, now what I had outlined 3 months ago. I'm not even looking at that stuff.
I go a-z reading. I'm concentrating on word usage, readability, plot. I have a thesaurus open and a graphical word sentence outliner that works maybe 50% of the time.
I have my own quirks. How stuff appears on the page, matters. Having he said, she said back and forth also gets tiring. And that's another thing, I have to make it sound real because it will go to audio book. Like I just changed a sentence where four guards did something and it could be heard as FOR guards. So I changed it to five and no one will ever know.
It takes about an hour or so to do one chapter and there are around 75 chapters. I just get burnt out on it. If you read it all the way through it will like be a 10-11 hour book. But I'm reading the same sentences over and over.
My next edit will go to a professional who does a proofread with some light copyediting.
I'll then edit that and print it out with a full hard copy and check into a hotel somewhere and just unplug. Those are when i really cut out whole pages.
Grammar isn't science. A few of my quirks in style is that you will never see dialogue start after description. "Steven said." <--like that wouldn't exist. All dialogue starts on new lines because it makes it pop out. There can be detail after it and more dialogue within.
!" She exclaimed
?" she questioned
," she wondered
." Then she left.
Sometimes I do an arbitrary upper/lower based on the sentence preceding it. But it makes sense to me.
All of this stuff is in the computer of course.
Pre-Writing, I invariably put myself in a hotel somewhere to daydream. I'll get ideas and flesh them out. Major milestones. Then do a lot of walking to it coherent. Still, vast amounts of stuff changed. When I'm in the scene, I write what would really happen, now what I had outlined 3 months ago. I'm not even looking at that stuff.
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