Our Process

Substantive

During sub-edit, our team worked to wrangle all that content into an organized form that would retain the best of what Jess had created and provide a meaningful story shape to carry readers through the rich ideas and experiences embedded in the existing content. We also wanted to pare back some of the content that seemed to distract from the book's best work; the manuscript had gotten pretty out of control by the end of dev edits. 

We worked individually and as a team. Grace, as you can see from our blog, set the tone by coding the whole thing for themes.

I also assigned a summer editing class of 6 students to read and reverse engineer the manuscript for recurring themes; Grace sat in that multi-hour class period to eavesdrop on their raw impressions and to help lead a group analysis exercise. Those same students then each took a print-out of the manuscript (the last dev-edited version) and spent time rearranging the pages, even cutting them up and changing passages around. They each wrote up a case for their visions for the book.

Finally, I assigned each of those students to select a shorter excerpt of the book that they either really liked or found meaningful. Miraculously, their sections did not overlap, so I took the resulting ~70 pages and edited THOSE into a short book with a Foreword, 4 chapters, and an Epilogue. I titled that project Poetic Dis/Order. That particular class was taught with the students completely offline, so after we hand edited on hard copy, I typeset and printed the pages, and then we folded and sewed signatures and bound them into casebound editions. I made 2 additional casebound editions for Grace and Maddie.

The 3 of us (Grace, Maddie, and I) read that very small edition and made additional sub-edits, highlighting what we found most compelling and what felt off-putting or out of place. Then I "edited in," going back to the long last dev edit version and added back material that was relevant to what had survived. 

That process left me with a draft that was coherent, but still disorganized, without effective movement among "chapters." We hosted a beta reader group, where Grace and Maddie moderated a discussion with two additional volunteer readers. Those readers were reading the manuscript for the first time, and I worked from their impressions to continue wrangling the book into more distinct chapters, with a more structure apparatus and placeholders for transition material. 

You can read more details about these moments on our blog.

At this point, generative AI had also taken on a significant role in my professional life--I had been providing faculty training across our institution on how to write and teaching writing effectively "in an age of AI." I decided to take the manuscript for a spin with ChatGPT. You can read the prompts I played with here. I found this side quest helpful, as the AI was able to recommend strong early chapter breaks I couldn't see because I was so caught in the weeds. I found its recommendations got worse after about 1/3 of the way through the manuscript, but by then I'd been able to recognize a workable pattern for chapter length, thematic balance within the chapters, and the types of chapter ending lines that were working best, so I had a much easier time finding chapter breaks throughout the rest of the file. Once those were in place, I could identify the need for language at major transition points. I also used ChatGPT to suggest chapter titles, some of which I retained before creating original titles.

*Note: You'll be able read the 6 major sub-edited drafts here; the student drafts are all in hard-copy in my office, though I will upload some representative photos shortly. There will also be emails and Zoom calls shortly.