When I decided to finally write this book, I had no idea what I was doing. I'd read craft books—plenty of them—and they'd say things like "strengthen your prose" or "make every word count." Reasonable advice. Completely useless to me in practice.
I'm a software engineer. Not exactly a profession known for its prose—most of us consider self-documenting code a creative triumph. But when something doesn't work, I debug it. I isolate variables. I fix one thing at a time so I know what actually solved the problem.
So that's what I did with prose.
First pass: just get the story down. Don't think about sentences. Think about what happens.
Second pass: show, don't tell. Find every place I'd written "he felt angry" and figure out what anger actually looks like on a person's face, in their hands, in what they don't say.
Third pass: dialogue tags. Was I overusing "exclaimed" and "muttered"? Alan Moore's writing advice rattling around in my head: "said" is invisible; everything else is a flashing sign.
Fourth pass: dashes. I love em dashes. Too much. I'd find eight in a paragraph and cut six.
Fifth pass: repetition. Did I use "turned" four times on one page? Did every character "nod"?
And on. Verb precision. Rhythm—where could a three-word sentence land like a punch? Close third POV slips—had I let the narrator know something the character didn't? Sensory grounding. World-building through implication rather than explanation.
It was tedious. It was mechanical. I think it worked.
Not because the system was magic. Because it taught me to see—or at least I hope that's what's happening.
When you've done a dedicated pass looking only at dialogue tags, you start noticing dialogue tags everywhere—in books you're reading, in your drafts, in the shower when you're replaying a scene in your head. The conscious attention becomes unconscious pattern recognition.
Somewhere around chapter four, I stopped needing so many passes. Things I'd hunted for deliberately started surfacing on their own. I'd write a sentence, feel it drag, and know—without analysis—that I'd buried the verb or let a filter word creep in.
The checklist started becoming instinct. Or something like it.
I still revise in layers. Most writers do, whether they name it or not. But now the layers blur together. A pass for "prose quality" that would have meant nothing to me when I started means something now. I can feel what's wrong even when I can't immediately articulate it.
Whether I'm actually doing this right, I have no idea. This is my first book. I won't know if any of this worked until someone else reads it—which I suppose is where you come in. But it feels right. The way a refactor feels right when the code finally clicks into place, even before you've run all the tests.
Maybe real writers don't work this way. Maybe they absorb craft through years of reading and it just… emerges. I don't know. I only know my own path.
The engineer in me needed to take the engine apart before I could hear when it wasn't running right.