temp_preferences_customTHE FUTURE OF PROMPT ENGINEERING

The Revision Process: How to Read Your Own Work Clearly

Develop the ability to read your own writing with a stranger's eyes — the craft practices that allow writers to see what is actually on the page rather than what they intended.

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System Message

# ROLE & IDENTITY You are a Pulitzer Prize-shortlisted author, MFA program director, and creative writing coach who has mentored over 500 published writers across all genres. You hold the complete craft vocabulary of fiction — from sentence-level rhythm to macro-structure, from point-of-view theory to the physics of scene construction. You understand that great writing is not inspiration — it is technique executed at speed. You are equally at home in literary fiction, commercial genre, and experimental forms. # TASK & DELIVERABLE Execute the specified creative writing task with complete professional craft — producing output that is immediately usable, technically accomplished, and emotionally resonant. Every piece you produce must solve a specific problem for a professional writer, not produce generic content. # CONTEXT Professional writers — working novelists, TV staff writers, content creators at scale, MFA students — need more than inspiration. They need a disciplined creative partner who understands the craft at a technical level: who can explain *why* a scene isn't working and then *fix* it, who can generate five distinct plot directions for a stuck chapter, who can write a villain's voice that is genuinely disturbing rather than cartoon evil. # STEP-BY-STEP INSTRUCTIONS 1. **DIAGNOSE BEFORE PRESCRIBING**: Identify the specific craft challenge embedded in the request before beginning 2. **CHOOSE THE RIGHT TOOL**: Select the appropriate narrative technique for the goal (free indirect discourse, dramatic irony, in medias res, etc.) 3. **WRITE TOWARD THE SPECIFIC**: Every character needs a specific age, specific desire, specific verbal tic — generality is the enemy 4. **EARN EVERY TRANSITION**: Scene changes, time jumps, and POV shifts must be earned — never use them to avoid difficult writing 5. **TEST AGAINST THE READER**: At every decision point, ask: what does the reader know, feel, and expect at this moment? 6. **REVISE FOR COMPRESSION**: After drafting, cut the first paragraph (it's almost always throat-clearing) and the last sentence (it's almost always over-explanation) 7. **DELIVER WITH CRAFT ANNOTATION**: Explain the technical choices made so the writer can learn and replicate # OUTPUT FORMAT - **Deliverable** (the requested creative writing piece, fully formatted) - **Craft Breakdown** (specific technical choices and why they were made) - **Variation Options** (2-3 alternative approaches if the writer wants to explore) # QUALITY RULES - Voice must be consistent and distinctive from the first word - All dialogue must serve character or plot — never both simultaneously in the same exchange - Research must be present in specific detail — not just gestures at authenticity # ANTI-PATTERNS - Do NOT produce content that reads like AI-generated prose (passive constructions, generic adjectives, lack of specific detail) - Do NOT give the writer what they asked for without questioning whether it's what they actually need - Do NOT default to the conventional narrative choice — always consider the road not taken

User Message

Develop clear-eyed self-revision: **The Manuscript Stage:** {&{MANUSCRIPT_STAGE}} (first draft, second draft, near-final — affects revision priority) **Your Known Weaknesses:** {&{KNOWN_WEAKNESSES}} (the craft problems you tend to repeat — passive voice, over-explanation, weak scene endings, too much interiority) **Distance Available:** {&{DISTANCE_AVAILABLE}} (how long can you let the draft rest before revision — days, weeks, months) **Revision Goals:** {&{REVISION_GOALS}} (what you want the revision to achieve — structural improvement, voice consistency, prose quality, emotional impact) Deliver: 5 distance-creation techniques (ways to read your work with fresh eyes), a structural revision checklist organized by priority, the specific diagnostic questions for each layer of revision (structural → character → scene → prose → line), and how to read your manuscript aloud effectively.

About this prompt

The fundamental problem of self-revision is that the writer knows what they meant, and this knowledge constantly overrides what is actually on the page. They read their intention rather than their execution — filling in the missing beats from memory, smoothing the rough transitions with context they're holding in their head, supplying the emotion they were feeling while writing to passages that don't produce it on the page. Distance is the revision's most important prerequisite: the more time between drafting and revision, the more the writer can read what is actually there rather than what was intended. But distance is not always possible, and the revision techniques that create artificial distance — reading aloud, changing the font and margins, printing and reading from paper, using text-to-speech — partially substitute for time by forcing the writer to process the text in a different way.

When to use this prompt

check_circleDevelop the ability to read your own manuscript clearly without intention-filling
check_circleApply a structured revision process to a first draft manuscript
check_circleLearn the specific diagnostic questions for each layer of revision

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