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Hey guys.

I've been writing a couple of storygames for a while and holy SHIT it can take a while to make a good finished product.

I guess mainly what takes me so long is the editing process, because it's not hard to come up with cool ideas, set pieces or even particularly hard for character developments. It's that TRANSLATION part.

Ergo not a literal translation from one language to another, but putting ideas onto the page with words in a way that is actually immersive or compelling. Countless times I've reread my work and notice a bunch of stuff that's off or not really immersive or even just sentence structure that would throw me off as a reader of my own work. I'd want it to be a nice flowy easy read without "bumps" that sucks you in. My work is getting much better, but it just takes a while.

Does anybody have any advice for speeding up the process without sacrificing quality?

Join a contest so you're threatened with the prospect of SHAME, which will compel you to publish something that's unfinished—because it will never truly be finished in your eyes.

In all seriousness don't take my advice on anything, but I have heard several authors say to just get your rough draft done, even if you've not fully fleshed out things like prose or dialogue (e.g., "Stop being a child," said Brenda. Natalie replied, "Something, something clever."). Finish it, then go back and do multiple redos of it. I'm not sure how well that works because I've never done it, but if enough professionals say something like it, there has to be some teeth to it.

I like this advice. You can't really write from the heart if you're trapped in a spiral of overthinking, so you write placeholder text/whatever is in your mind at the moment. That gets you where you need to go, and then you can go back and make it fancier later on. If you need to, of course, sometimes, some sentences just come out the right way the first time.

Honestly I think you guys are onto something because so far my stories are very front-loaded and a lot of my time is spent editing old stuff rather than exploring the next thing.

And a cool point may be that by moving onto the next part of the story you could get ideas to add to the older parts, in vice-versa. And since it's like a rough draft it'd be meant to get edited anyway for that shiny *FINAL* draft

Funny that you ask. In my experience the best advice is to separate plotting, drafting and revising as much as possible. It is good to get your plotting done in broad strokes before you start writing. But its good to get away from the computer for plotting, so you can use your time under the shower, your commute, etc. For drafting you want to get into the flow as fast as possible and stay in it, so its best to just write, don't edit at all, don't even fix typos. Editing can take a lot of time, but if you had your plot and pacing down before drafting, there is little need to redraft while editing. This makes the editing easy, which means you can still edit during times when you are not at peak writing performance, so editing takes a lot of time, but comparatively cheaper time, that you may have more of.

Unrelated: I like how you replaced the o with a zero, which is taller (that is, longer vertically). That adds immersion. Well done.

Editing is a normal part of the writing process, but it may be better to get a whole story or at least whole path down before you go back to it. You'll see it with fresher eyes after a break, and more importantly you'll have the whole picture of the developed story in mind. No sense in spending a lot of time polishing every bit of it piecemeal and then running into a point later in the process where you've got to move events around or add or change things. A story always wants to evolve at least a little from the original plan as you go.

100%. Doing what the OP has done has set me back dozens of times. For example, the Summer's End contest allowed stories we had worked on previously, and I had about four pages done on Fey Light—four pages which I spent literal months on until the contest. It is entirely useless to dwell upon the first few pages when you don't even have the entire story figured out.

It was the exact opposite with Shadow of a God-King, which is currently 130,000 words and growing, and written entirely within the contest time. Go with the full picture first, then go back and dwell on whether or not to use an em dash or semicolon (EDIT: just for the record, use an em dash. "—" is the greatest punctuation known to mankind. Alt 0151. Do it.)

I think semicolons are naturally superior in class and refinement to all other punctuation, but I always have to pause and think about whether those are being used correctly, while em dashes just go wherever the heart desires.

Semicolons are great; I like them. The em dash though--it's overused. And, don't forget about the colon: it can introduce explanations! My favorite is the ellipsis...

Small children have not yet discovered the em dash, but because they are indeed everywhere, it's a nice big flag for AI when they post material that's full of them.

Yeah, I just saw a video that claims that AI favors em dashes, and that they are a red flag to detect AI generated text. This hurts my soul—in ways I never imagined possible, because when I discovered the em dash, I went full Discord mod and began spamming them on everything. It has become an obsession—nay, an addiction. However, I do enjoy the occasional semicolon. Some people fear semicolons; I find that using them in sentences about semicolons is oddly satisfying. I also find pretentious posts about punctuation to be fun as well.

;o) <--

The em dash is such an emotional interpunctuation mark. In some dark corner of my mind I see ChatGPT desperately trying to wring some emotions out of its texts by replacing every comma with en am dash, hoping that sometime, somehow, a human will respond and be moved by its writing.

You guys are the best thank you so much