From Shitty First Draft to Published McSweeney’s Piece
A case study on how I edit a rough draft into a tight comedy piece
Today I have an insider look at how to edit a humor piece for McSweeney’s.
Last week, I published a retrospective post on my decade in humor writing.
One little nugget that came up was taking a crappy, super rough draft from my early days as blogger, revisiting it a couple years later, and turning it into the McSweeney’s piece, My Minimalist Lifehacks.
I’ve gotten consistent feedback from many of you that you want to see behind-the-scenes editing of comedy pieces, showing how you can mold some raw material into a published piece.
So, let’s do that. We’ll get nitty gritty. I’ll show you a step-by-step and line-by-line case study.
“My Minimalist Lifehacks” is a good example because it started as a really rough not very good blog piece, albeit one with some comedic promise.
Happily, I have my draft revision history, from Mac Pages and Google docs, so we can look at each successive draft
I re-wrote this draft four or five times, but for practical purposes let’s look at three drafts: the shitty first draft, a middle kind of better one, and the final polished draft.
At each step, we’ll see what’s working comedically and what isn’t.
Here we go.
Let’s start with my earliest first draft of the piece.
This is what I published as a blog post around ten years ago.