Chapter 1 is done. Where do you start fixing it?

In the last lesson, we wrote a 5,005-character chapter 1. It needs at least one round of fixes before it goes live. But it's hard to see your own writing clearly right after you've written it, and it's hard to find someone to read every chapter.

This lesson revises chapter 1 inside TypeTak. First you check the whole page, then you pick from what got flagged, and last you polish a single sentence.

1. Get feedback on the whole page

Open chapter 1. In the editor toolbar, open the menu next to Proofreading and click Feedback. Feedback starts appearing on the right. It goes point by point through the writing's strengths and weaknesses, and also flags anything that contradicts the lore you've organized in the World.

When the feedback is done, the sentences to fix are underlined in the text, with Revision notes underneath. This chapter 1 got five, and we'll look at two of them here. Apply the ones you like, one at a time, and dismiss the rest with Close. You can also apply all five at once.

2. Revision note 1 — The same mockery, three times

This is the scene where noble students laugh at Clay in the exam hall.

“Isn't that kid a commoner?” “Like the mana stone's even going to react. Can't believe they let someone like that take the exam.” “Sure, if a commoner had loads of mana, maybe. But with a face like that…”

Here's what the revision note said.

All three jabs do the same job: confirming how shabby the commoner looks. Make one student's gaze and actions a bit more specific and cut back the other reactions, and the contrast will be sharper later, when that student backs down.

The replacement cuts the three lines down to two and puts one student's action between them: “A student in the front row looked from my hands to my worn sleeves and back. One corner of his mouth tilted up.”

This note matters because of chapter 1's twist. Chapter 1 ends at the moment contempt flips into fear. The person laughing has to be one student with a face, so that the scene where he backs down after the verdict lands.

3. Revision note 2 — Leave a clue only the reader can see

This is the scene where the judging stone announces Clay's attribute.

[Attribute…] The voice cut out. What came next was mangled, like metal twisting. [Heuk… ma…]

(As Lesson 1 explained, in Korean heuk is the first sound of both “earth magic” and “dark magic.”)

The revision note pointed out:

Right now the stone stops at “Attribute,” dark magic comes out right after, and Clay writes it off as a pronunciation problem. Put a short hint in Clay's thoughts that the stone's worn-out voice couldn't tell earth from dark, and readers will understand the error while the people around him still get it wrong.

In a comedy of errors, the laughs come from what the reader knows and the characters don't. The replacement adds one line to Clay's thoughts: “The worn-out stone couldn't tell earth from dark, and seemed to have spat out the nearest sound.” With that line, readers know the truth, while everyone in the exam hall has still heard “dark magic.” The comedy engine set up in Lesson 1 has made it into the prose.

4. Swap a sentence you don't like for a different one

After applying the revision notes, one sentence still bugged me: “After a noise like twisting metal, the stone forced out a single syllable.”

Put your cursor in a sentence and a speech bubble pops up at the end of it. Open Rephrase from the bubble, and you get candidates that say the same thing in different words. If none of them work, you can move on to the next batch.

I picked the third candidate, “Through a noise like tearing metal, the stone barely managed a single syllable,” and the original sentence changed right away.

The order for fixing

1. The whole page first — use Feedback to see strengths, weaknesses, and anything that contradicts the lore
2. Pick from what's flagged — revision notes come with a reason and a replacement. Apply only the ones you agree with
3. Sentences last — for a sentence that bugs you, look at the candidates in Rephrase and pick one

Next

In the next lesson, we show the polished chapter 1 and the organized worldbuilding to readers. Sharing the manuscript and the World puts the story and its story bible behind one link, and then we export a file to upload to your serial platform.