Writing Process: Part 4 - Revision

Revision is crucial when creating content. Player's will not run into the need to revise beyond perhaps changing the direction for their character. A game master (G.M.) will, for they need to come up with a general outline for their campaign. The amount of writing done will depend on a G.M.'s particular amount and form of preparatory work. As such, I will go over the general act of revising.

Revision means to alter or change. In terms of writing, revision refers to large changes to the overall piece. Fixing a few spelling errors or removing a sentence is more in-line with editing rather than revision. To change the content or to alter multiple paragraphs in a piece would be revision.

It is a loose definition; therefore, in Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) revision could be used when the G.M. needs to alter an encounter at the end of a session because the players reached an area of the dungeon they were not supposed to. Revision could also be the players consistently getting off track and going to deal with another task, so the G.M. decides to begin tying that content in with the overall story or simply join the players in abandoning the original story.

An example would be with my first campaign. The players were initially meant to be hired goons for a noble, but they continually decided to focus on building a cult to the cleric's god. As such, I tied their attempts to create a cult into the story by having the more established religions of the area attempt to hinder the players. I revised the campaign to include what they wanted to do.

Within the same campaign, the players kept doing murder-hobo (just mindless killing) acts. I changed their alignment (morality in game) and put them on a new story line where they would become villains. In this instance, I revised the campaign by doing a massive change of the story.

Let's consider revision for my first post in this serial—Writing Process: Part 1 - Rambling. The post was shared—see Writing Process: Part 2 - Sharing—for the comments made on it. Based off the comments it needs to be considered how the piece is improperly organized, which makes sense from it being a freewrite. What will help in organizing will be the exclusion of  some of the questions posed.

Two big topics I discussed were, "what does immersion mean in D&D," and, "making a webcomic to go with this site." These are both topics worth exploring; however, they are too different to include in a single post. For this part of the revision, one has to be picked and the other excluded.

I will pick the question, "What does immersion mean in D&D?" Exploring that topic sounds far more interesting to me. The big issue people run into with this aspect of the writing process is how it restarts the process. Once the revision occurs, a new draft is made that must be shared and examined for potential revision again. The first part of the writing process [brainstorming] can occur during revision too as you will need to come up with new ideas for the piece; it is mainly for large revisions.

It is for this reason the act is termed the Writing Process, for it requires numerous recurring steps to make a final product.