The Editing Passes: A Complete Catalog
·We now have over 25 specialized editing passes. People keep asking what they all do and why there are so many, so this is the reference post. If you haven’t read The Authoring Loop and Ten Focused Passes first, start there – they explain how we got here.
The short version: we tried editing chapters in one big pass. It was bad. We tried six passes. Better, but later passes undid earlier work. We broke it down further. Each pass now targets exactly one dimension of craft, runs an audit of the full chapter, lists every violation it finds, and fixes them surgically. The compound effect across all passes is what produces the final prose.
Here’s every pass we currently run, roughly in the order we run them.
Phase 1: Content and Structure
These passes make sure the chapter is telling the right story.
Structure (pass-structure) – Does the chapter match its outline? Are the right motifs planted? Are the right plot points hit? Does it maintain continuity with the chapters before and after it? This is the sanity check before any prose-level work begins.
Paragraph Weight (pass-purpose) – Every paragraph must be for something. A theme, a contrast, a motif, a character’s arc. If a paragraph can’t be anchored to anything the story actually cares about, it gets flagged. We wrote about this one in detail in Paragraph Weight.
Humanity (pass-humanity) – Characters need private pleasures, involuntary tells, humor, mess. This pass fights the tendency for AI-written characters to become thematic delivery vehicles. It makes sure non-POV characters have specific physical details, that nobody speaks in themes, and that the central relationship between Andrzej and Erzulie lives in avoidance and involuntary physical response rather than declarations.
World Taxonomy (pass-taxonomy) – Generic flora, fauna, weather, food, and light get replaced with details specific to the actual location, season, and POV character. Andrzej sees Haiti through European strangeness. Erzulie names things directly. Napoleon abstracts everything to strategy. Leclerc experiences the world through fever. We covered this in World Taxonomy.
Phase 2: Narrative Control
These passes control what the reader knows and when.
POV (pass-pov) – The narration must read as filtered through one character’s consciousness. The pass loads the POV character’s file, generates an imagery palette from their profession, obsessions, and perception patterns, and then checks that every description, every noticed detail, every metaphor comes from that palette. Topics the POV character cares about get direct dialogue quotes. Topics they don’t care about get reported speech. No POV breaks.
Withholding (pass-withholding) – Removes over-explicit information. Delays backstory, object significance, character motivation, narrator meaning-making. Fragments information across chapters so the reader assembles it themselves. The hardest pass to get right because it has to know what to protect – political context the reader needs, essential plot mechanics, motif placements that only work if they’re visible.
Active Teasing (pass-active-teasing) – Plants hooks that announce secrets and refuse to explain them. A character mentions a name the reader doesn’t know yet. An object carries weight nobody comments on. A behavior pattern goes unexplained. The hooks must pay off in later chapters, so this pass references a cross-chapter proposition document. More on this in Active Teasing.
Dialogue Density (pass-dialogue-density) – Finds narration that’s doing the work of exposition and converts it to dialogue-as-friction. The information survives, but now two characters disagree about it. The facts come with relational subtext. We wrote about this in Dialogue Density.
Phase 3: Thematic Depth
These passes make sure the novel’s themes live in texture, not lectures.
Privilege (pass-privilege) – Andrzej’s relationship to imperial messaging must be correct for where he is in his arc. Early chapters: he believes it. Middle chapters: he’s absent from it. Late chapters: he recognizes its cynical use. Final chapters: he names it. The pass also enforces that Leclerc is sincere (not guilt-wracked), Rochambeau is cynical (not oblivious), there’s no white savior dynamic, and no Black seductress trope. We covered this in The Privilege Proposition.
Broken Patterns (pass-patterns) – Characters rationalize. They use self-sealing syllogisms, imagined offenses, whataboutism. This pass makes sure those patterns appear at the right phase of the story and are visible to the reader but invisible to the characters using them. Leclerc models them sincerely. Rochambeau deploys them cynically. Erzulie models alternatives through behavior, never lectures.
Oppression (pass-oppression) – Gendered dismissal, Polish expendability, commodification – these dynamics must be rendered through texture, not narration that names them. Visible in what the POV character observes without being articulated. This pass is optional per chapter; it only runs if the chapter has natural touchpoints for these dynamics. We wrote about this in Social Texture.
Contrast (pass-contrast) – Empire spaces carry decadence and power in their texture. Non-Empire spaces feel earned, sparse, natural. When parallel objects from both worlds appear near each other, the contrast registers. The dead are treated differently by each side. Time feels different. Napoleon’s map of Haiti is not Haiti.
Empire (pass-empire) – Empire isn’t scenery. It’s an active force with objects, textures, and a tonal register. Epaulettes, sealing wax, imported wine, proclamations on good paper. The pass makes sure these objects carry weight, that Empire pressure registers tonally in the prose, and that the Empire shows its civilized face in early chapters and its true face in later ones.
Wit (pass-wit) – Undercutting power, exposing self-deception, earned gallows humor, structural irony. Not jokes. Not modern sensibility. Not winking at the audience. The pass assigns each chapter a triage score (0-3) based on how much capacity it has for humor, and the wit targets Empire and complicity, never suffering.
Phase 4: Dialogue
These passes make characters sound like themselves.
Dialogue Mechanics (pass-dialogue-mechanics) – Speaker changes mean new paragraphs. Two speakers maximum per paragraph. Multi-paragraph speeches formatted correctly. Dialogue flows logically from what came before. The formatting pass that makes dialogue readable.
Dialogue Voice (pass-dialogue-voice) – Each character’s voice must match their dialogue signature from their character file. No psychology diagnoses in dialogue. No over-explanation. No character delivering a self-essay about their own motivations. We covered this in Voice Differentiation.
Voice Differentiation (pass-voice-differentiation) – No two speakers in the same exchange can use the same sentence structure. Every character with three or more lines has a signature move. And certain patterns are forbidden for certain characters – Andrzej never asks rhetorical questions, Erzulie never deflects with humor.
Phase 5: Prose Mechanics
These passes clean the prose sentence by sentence.
Showing (pass-showing) – Remove named emotions. Remove narrator verdicts and labels. Remove anything that restates what the dialogue or action already showed. Remove editorial commentary, interior sensations, explanatory clauses, abstract testimony prose, formulaic similes. Show through action and let the reader do the emotional work.
Tighten (pass-tighten) – Cut needless words, qualifiers, redundant adjectives, passive voice, negations, long modifiers wedged between subject and verb, sprawling paragraphs, character-description blocks. The Strunk & White pass.
Imagery (pass-imagery) – Kill elaborate similes and metaphors. Kill cliches, idioms, hyperbole. Flag cross-paragraph word repetition. Limit environmental imagery to two uses. Convert negations to positive form. Prefer metonymy over metaphor.
Rhythm (pass-rhythm) – Consecutive paragraphs can’t open the same way. Paragraph lengths must vary. Fragments appear roughly once every four to five paragraphs. Emphatic words land at the end of sentences, not buried in the middle.
Style (pass-style) – The banned words audit. Every category from our blocklist: overwrought academic terms, hedge words, generic transitions, AI-tell patterns (“This is not X. This is Y.”), adverbs of manner, dangling modifiers. If it’s on the list, it gets cut.
Phase 6: Final Polish
Reintroduction (pass-reintroduction) – Known characters must not be reintroduced as if the reader hasn’t met them. No redundant biographical tags. Physical descriptions only show change, not repeat. No “a man who” syntax for established characters.
Tempo (pass-tempo) – Each chapter has an assigned pacing profile from its proposition document. This pass checks that the chapter’s tempo matches – fast, slow, accelerating, oscillating, suspended. Section-level tempos align with the macro-tempo. Transitions are motivated, not arbitrary. We covered this in Pacing Architecture.
Format (pass-format) – Final formatting and document standards. The last pass before a chapter is done.
The Passes We Don’t Run on Every Chapter
Revelation Audit (pass-revelation-audit) – A read-only pass that audits information architecture and revelation timing. Doesn’t make edits, just reports. Used when we’re planning cross-chapter changes.
Revelation Architecture (revelation-architecture) – Not a per-chapter pass. This generates a cross-chapter proposition document that maps where information is planted, where it’s reinforced, and where it pays off. The teasing and withholding passes reference it. We wrote about this in Revelation Architecture.
Implement Proposition (implement-proposition) – Implements changes from a proposition file. Propositions are architectural documents that describe changes across multiple chapters. When we design a new thematic layer or restructure how information flows, we write a proposition first, then implement it.
Why So Many
Twenty-five passes sounds excessive. It isn’t. Each pass is fast – a few minutes per chapter – and each one catches things the others can’t. The showing pass doesn’t know about privilege arcs. The privilege pass doesn’t catch rhythmic monotony. The rhythm pass doesn’t know that a character would never use a rhetorical question.
The alternative is a human editor who holds all of this in their head simultaneously. That person exists, but they’re expensive, slow, and they get tired. Our passes don’t get tired. They don’t forget the rules from pass 3 while running pass 17. And when we discover a new category of problem – which happens regularly – we build a new pass for it instead of hoping we’ll remember to check for it next time.
The system is the editor. The passes are its attention.
- Zach
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