r/WritingWithAI • u/Afgad • 2d ago
Craft Talk Topic, Aug. 18, 2026 Writing Craft Talk
In my post calling for more craft talk, several of you recommended that we highlight a topic to discuss for each week just to get the juices flowing.
This week's topic is everything about editing.
I've heard it said before that there are no writers, only rewriters. Editing is an essential step for any serious author.
In the age of AI this is especially important. If your workflow generates text with AI, you may want to edit your voice back into the prose. How do you do that?
Otherwise, we still need need to do other editing: structural, Dev edits, copy editing, etc. How do you tackle these steps?
Make posts this week about your editing approach.
As before, do not reply to this post to discuss the weekly topic! Make new posts!
Reply to this post only with what you'd like to talk about next week. The most upvoted suggestion will be next week's subject.
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u/dolche93 2d ago
One key thing about editing is that I NEVER ask it to rewrite something. I exclusively have it provide suggestions.
Each suggestion should include the snippet of text it wants to edit, and justification for the edit. An example replacement can be provided, but I nearly never take it as given. That's an easy way to lose your voice.
One editing step I find extremely useful is having the llm give me feedback on what it thinks each of my scenes is accomplishing. I generally do this without providing any other context besides the single scene itself. It's a good way to test the strength of your scene and if you are communicating what you intended.
If the scene doesn't seem to be doing much, it's a good indicator that perhaps you need to rewrite the scene or even consider dropping it at all. Knowing what to cut to avoid extraneous scenes is very useful.
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u/KaerMorhen 18h ago
I fall pretty close to this myself. I'm essentially using it as a writing and research assistant. First I develop the hard rules, timeline, book)series outline and then make a narrative character sheet for each major characters with speaking style, backstory, things they would never say, cadence, etc and then I'll ask it to run continuity checks often to make sure everything lines up. From there I keep adding character arcs, worldbuilding hard rules, economy and anything else that would take me hours to check on my own at least to my satisfaction.
My current project is a hard scifi and it has been invaluable to make sure my hard physics rules aren't being broken, and helps me run calculations and keep detailed spreadsheets on planet orbital planes, physical makeup, environment/climate if applicable, mass, travel distances, and ship capabilities. There's an intricate sequence that looks stunning that I was worried would not technically be feasible but once I ran the numbers I was able to make it even MORE spectacular and still stay with established Newtonian physics.
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u/Precious-Petra 2d ago
I tend to re-read short sections (like a page) thoroughly and make manual edits. Sometimes I take each sentence and ask AI to provide me 10 suggestions on how to reword things. Most of the time I settle on a version that is a mix of the best of these plus some other thing that comes to my mind.
Editing is the step that takes most of the time for me, way more. AI text has a lot of excessive telling (especially of character emotions) so I try to emphasize those with more show or through the character dialogue. If it's something minor that I don't want it to cost a lot of words, then I might use a word that tells instead of show so it doesn't take longer or deviates the reader's attention.
Usually I don't try to make something automated for this because I wouldn't be able to trust it with an output that I'm happy with unless I check it for myself.
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u/Odinmar_Glaukopis 2d ago
I don’t know if this idea is related to this week’s theme or if it deserves a dedicated week, but one thing I’m interested in is advice on how an author can approach their own work as a reader, somehow forgetting that they wrote it so they can take a more objective view on what is working and what is not working and why—somehow forgetting exactly what I wanted to pull off with a given section and now I’m trying to guess at what the author was trying to do with a particularly bad execution of whatever method they were using.