Deb's One Rule About My Drafts

Deb reads almost everything before it goes up here, not because I need permission, but because I asked her to years ago and the habit stuck. She’s not a gamer, she’ll sit in on a Wednesday session occasionally if the group’s short a player, and she reads maybe a third of the books I review, mostly the fiction, rarely the philosophy. So she’s not fact-checking my opinions about Foucault or my read on whether a faction is balanced. She has exactly one rule, and it’s this: if a sentence sounds like I’m performing for an audience instead of actually talking to her, it gets cut.

I didn’t understand how often I was doing that until she started flagging it. Early drafts of reviews I’d written had this tendency to reach for a bigger, more declarative voice than how I actually talk, sentences that wanted to sound like a verdict handed down rather than one guy’s honest reaction after a Wednesday night. She’d read a paragraph out loud back to me, flat, no inflection, and ask if that’s really what I meant or if I was just reaching for something that sounded more impressive. Nine times out of ten I was reaching. The plain version was almost always the truer one, and almost always better writing besides, once I got over wanting it to sound important.

The test has gotten specific enough now that we don’t even need the full read-aloud most of the time. She’ll just say “that’s a Deb line” about a sentence, meaning it’s the kind of thing I’d actually say to her across the kitchen table rather than something I typed because it sounded like what a reviewer should say. I trust her on this, more than I trust my own first draft at this point, because she’s not invested in the review sounding smart, she’s invested in it sounding like me. The panopticon essay went through three rounds of this before she’d sign off on it, mostly cutting places where I was explaining Foucault to sound clever instead of explaining it because it was actually relevant to what happened at the office.

I don’t think this makes the writing less honest, if anything it’s the opposite, cutting the performance is what gets you to the honest version underneath. But I’ll admit there’s something a little strange about needing someone else to catch me lying to myself about my own voice, over and over, in a hobby I only ever meant to do for fun. She says she doesn’t mind. I believe her, mostly because if she minded she’d have told me the same plain way she tells me everything else, and there wouldn’t be a “that’s a Deb line” comment attached to this sentence either, if I’d let her read it before I posted it.