NOTE: This was one of the many locked entries posted here for the supporters of Open Design. I've made it public because sharing one's pain is good for the soul.

It's a bit of a rant, but that always happens to me at this stage. I need the adrenaline for that ruthless edge that takes a manuscript to where I want it.

Why Writers Get Paid

Here I am again, trying to close down a first draft that keeps slipping away from me, and realizing that the second draft is actually going to be fairly ferocious on this beast, and the maps are not all drawn and I think there are still some monsters that suck. Or at least need major surgery.

Welcome to the muddle in the middle. In any large project (or even with smaller projects for newer writers), this is the stage where it all goes wrong. It goes hideously pear-shaped. The project is beyond recovery, it’s all trash, ohmigod it’s so much WORK to make it not suck.

Ah ha. This is why writers get paid.

The early stages of a project are always sunshine and unicorn giggles, laughter and frolic, all the tasty outer frosting of the writing cake. I love the early stages. I don't have to make any hard choices yet. I don't have to yank entire sequences, or worse, rewrite them to fit new continuity. No, there's just the Good Parts of writing: making stuff up, setting NPCs in motion, doing up the fun stat blocks and the clever bits of readaloud.

Unfortunately, at some stage the Good Parts dry up. Every writing cake, as it turns out, has a railroad spike hidden in it, and you have to each the whole thing. Once the frosting is gone, there are dull dry bits of iron left, and even those don’t fit together. Allow me to count them for you.

1. The minion stat block with the template that doesn't quite work.
2. The spell selection that needs tweaking. Because it's boring.
3. The backstory that isn't going to untangle itself.
4. The backstory that needs to be cut in half.
5. The shiny intro that … isn't working.
6. The missing encounters. Where are they?
7. The sections of city detail that are all in your head but still not on paper.
8. The flavor text that has no flavor, but only clichés that need to be terminated and completely replaced.
9. The big finale that you've put off writing because you know exactly how it's going to work. Except that you haven't written any of it.
10. The mechanics that playtesters flagged, and they are right.
11. The map that is functional but not exciting.
12. The monster write up you kept MEANING to fix.
13. NPCs who seemed engaging but are, in fact, completely lame.

And oh so many more. Drawn completely at random. Completely. At. Random, I swear. Stop looking at me like that, senior patrons.

This is when most people give up. Only stubborn pigheaded bastards continue to bull through the grind of fixing things, smoothing out all the inconsistencies, adding the connecting bits, checking that the logic mostly works (mostly), and that the worst holes are spackled over thoroughly.

Writerly Tip: If the spackle isn't quite heavy enough to do the job, I recommend mortaring recalcitrant text in place with chains near a cask of amontillado, then bricking them into the wall with courses of stone. That'll learn 'em.

Anyway. Toward the end of a project, there tends to be less fine craftsmanship and a lot more covering things up with paint and glitter, but the point is that there's always a stage where writing is ABSOLUTELY NO FUN. No kittens, no frosting, no unicorns. Certainly no oversexed half-fiendish sorceresses. And just because it's no fun, that is not the point where you stop and send it in.

On the contrary, this is the point where you dig in twice as hard.

Because if you're a good writer or hope to become one, you know the manuscript's every weakness, every hard choice you dodged, every shortcut you took saying "I’ll fix it in the rewrite" (O fateful words!). The mojo is weak and you know it needs work. Now, this self-loathing is perfectly normal and it can be overdone. It's possible to print a manuscript and go through with a red pen and fix it. That seems hard, and the fixes can take long hours where no word count is added and many of your favorite bits are cut.

Sometimes you do this revision once or twice, if your first draft was sound. Sometimes you do it eight or nine times, if you are perhaps a perfectionist with lots of spare time. And writers who don't revise or even read back through their work aren’t fooling anyone. (See the Erik Mona interview in Kobold Quarterly if you don’t believe me; he's seen both sides of this fence.)

That problem at this stage is that most would-be game designers want the process to be fun all the way through, and that's a recipe for failure. A big part of success in the field is sitting down and working over rules, math, and text for core rules design. For adventure design, it's writing, weighing playtest results, and rewrites. The important element is that you try to improve your text enough that someone else can read it and enjoy it. You're manufacturing joy for other people. That doesn't mean joy for you, necessarily. Or even often, at this stage. It's joy for them because you've honed that joy out of a bitter slab of granite.

But the thing is, most people don't ever get through this stage. For me, I have music that helps, uptempo stuff, cheeseball 80s tunes, Britpop, and worse. No, I'm not proud that Mike Oldfield's "Moonlight Shadow" helps me get in a writing groove, but there it is. For other people it's booze (not recommended) or massive caffeine or staying up late surrounded by heaps of pens and notebooks. Recite the immortal words of that hack Dr. Ben Jonson: "No man but a fool ever wrote but for money". Whatever gets you hitting the keys.

Everyone finds their own way to a writerly discipline. But until you do, you will fail to design to the standards you set for yourself, you will not meet deadlines, and you may get queries accepted, but you will fail to follow up on those queries in a timely way. You will not publish.

(That last point, by the way, was initially a source of much consternation to me as a young editorial assistant. At TSR we always sent out twice as many acceptances for queries as we could use each month, because we knew half of them would never result in an article. This drove me crazy for a while, especially because some of the queries that went missing were for really cool stuff. I learned that I should never reject myself, which is what those writers were doing. If you are fortunate enough to get a query accepted, write it and send it in. It's the editor's job to accept it or reject it. Don't do the editor's job, especially in the rejection department.)

Anyway, game designers, artists, and writers are all creative people. Doing our best work is demanding because there's a level of craft to learn, and a level of self-control to try to be reliably productive even on off days. And it requires a level of willpower to face the problems with your manuscript and be absolutely ruthless about fixing them.

Everyone will have advice for you about how you should proceed and what you should fix. But at the bulldog stage, you need to ignore everyone and just maintain momentum on the things YOU know are broken, and that you can improve. The editor will weigh in with other issues; fine. Plowing through the ugly late stages of a draft is about persistence and self-confidence in the face of rising insecurity. Can I make this character work? Can I meet the deadline? Can I keep it remotely near the requested wordcount? Yes, yes, and yes. Be ruthless at throwing side plots and distracting shiny design overboard.

I wish I had some really pithy Pollyanna platitudes at this stage to say that working hard on the draft will make you feel better about it and your editor will hail you as a genius and your work will surely be published to great acclaim. That doesn't happen.

You may get a sense that the manuscript is as good as you can make it. That's a fine place to be. You probably won't love the manuscript at that point, and you're way too close to it to know whether anyone else will either.

If you wait until you're 100% happy with a manuscript, you'll never stop fiddling with it. At some point, you will be sick of it, but … somewhat content, I suppose. The damn thing doesn't compel you the way it once did, and you've worked all the magic on it that you know, and it's still not exactly what you might wish but… It's ok. The editor will probably like it well enough.

Yeah, I know, this is not exactly a rousing endorsement of second and third drafts. But in your designer brain, at some point you may find that you’re just tinkering with the adventure, that all the big problems are fixed to your satisfaction. You're probably still not satisfied with it, but if you catch yourself tinkering just to tinker (like messing with fonts, or punctuation, or Craft skill points), then it is definitely time to shove it out the door.

So that's my advice. Finish it, and send it in. Hell, I should tape that over my monitor, right next to "Zeal never rests" (motto of HMS Ark Royal).

And will you look at me, I've just procrastinated for over an hour. Enough talk about grinding through it: Back to the keyboard! I have many design sins yet to atone for, and I fully intend to bury the biggest ones as deep as I can.

Ok, maybe that came across as cranky. No one loves rewrites. Tough it out.