The fox - a story about writing a story
It all started with an idea Christine had for a new story. She spent a couple of weeks sketching the storyline of “The fox” in her notebook. Now she feels ready to go for the manuscript. She opens her laptop, and creates a new document titled “The fox”.
Writing a story is hard. Luckily Christine has established a routine successfully over the years, helping her staying in the writing flow. She blocks a few hours a day, to advance her story. She’s constantly rewriting parts, deleting them, shuffling pieces around. It can get quite messy. However, one thing remains constant: She finishes one draft a day, and gives it a name.
Having all those named revisions, Christine can go back to previous ideas when necessary, but is not afraid to delete entire chapters if she wants to try a different twist at a given day.
Around 100 drafts and 300 cups of tea later, she’s reading through the text while having a smile on her face. “Now that’s pretty good, I’m happy. Time to have some more eyes on it.”.
She’s inviting Jeff and Laura, both good friends of her, and also professional writers and copy editors. She creates a new revision named “The first candidate” and shares it with Jeff and Laura.
Meanwhile Christina has a bunch of new thoughts and continues writing…
A day later Jeff is starting his review of “The first candidate” and just loves the story. He can’t believe it but could only find one thing he’d like to change.
Laura is pretty much blown away too. Just one tiny thing to add…
While Christine is writing on her document, a notification pops up that indicates Laura and Jeff have completed their reviews. Christine takes a look and is really happy about the feedback Jeff and Laura provided. She takes a look at the suggestions of both and applies them to her latest working version.
Fantastic, now it’s time to publish this piece. Christine is cooling the champagne…
Voilà, the story is out to the world.
While Christine, Jeff and Laura are enjoying their champagne, Elle came across a tweet mentioning “The fox”. She loves it! “Oh wait, there’s an evil typo. Will fix that!”
Next morning, Christine sees a notification. “Impossible — Jeff and Laura’s eagle eyes totally missed a typo.” She smiles, says thanks to Elle and accepts her change. She creates a new public revision, so that all future readers see the corrected version. However, the original version will still be available for readers, for transparency, so they can travel back in time and see how the article evolved.
This story is fiction. We are working on turning it into reality.
If you are a professional writer and want to join our private beta program, please email us at team@substance.io.
