Afterword — How This Book Was Cut

Every book is made twice — once as the over-produced thing the author hoped was the book, and once as the thing that survived the cutting. This one was made the same way the studio now makes products. I think it is honest to say so at the end rather than pretend the work arrived on the page by the usual routes, because the shape of the method is, in the end, the shape of the argument.

The first draft was not typed. It was spoken. Across eighteen months I had long, wandering conversations with David Kravitz about what had changed in the studio, what had not, and what we were both failing to name when we tried to describe our current work to a prospective client. Those conversations ran in the car, on video calls that stretched past their scheduled hour, over dinners in Kraków and over coffee in Auckland on the one trip back. I transcribed them using VoiceInk, an open-source voice-transcription tool that runs locally and does not send audio to a remote server. Most of the raw text that eventually became this book was, in its first version, David and me talking over each other and correcting each other, with the transcription engine doing its best and me occasionally pausing the recording to remind myself what we had actually meant by some piece of studio shorthand. I did the same thing on client calls when the client had consented, and on three long walks where the only recording was my own voice arguing with itself about a chapter that was not working.

From those transcripts came a first draft that was, to put it politely, over-produced. Roughly eighty thousand words, longer than this book turned out to be, full of passages where the same observation was made three different ways because three different conversations had reached it by three different routes. The job of the second pass was not to add anything. It was to cut. Almost every week for six months I sat down with the current draft and a chisel, took one chapter at a time, and subtracted. Sometimes I subtracted a paragraph. Sometimes I subtracted three pages. Sometimes — this was the most useful pattern, if the most painful — I subtracted a passage I was proud of, because the passage was doing the work of another passage that was doing it better. The book got shorter every week for twenty-six weeks, and it got clearer every time it got shorter.

Claude Code, the Anthropic command-line tool, helped draft chapters from the transcripts and outlines, then helped me review and revise them. I used agents to draft passages, flag repetition, audit references and check the voice rules. I chose what to keep and took responsibility for the final text. The cartoons and cover also used AI image generation, with Google’s nano-banana-pro for the initial artwork and OpenAI’s GPT Image 2 for the shipping illustrations. The production record includes both drafting and editing; those uses belong in this account of how I made the book.

A handful of other tools sat in the loop in smaller ways. Obsidian held the working drafts and the chapter outlines. Pandoc converted the Markdown manuscript, and WeasyPrint typeset the PDF. A small collection of custom scripts, all written with Claude Code’s help, did housekeeping work like counting banned phrases, auditing reference citations against the text, and checking that the voice rules (we for studio practice, I for personal observation) were being held consistently across chapters. I used these tools for drafting, review and production, and kept responsibility for the book.

The book you have just read is the result of that method. I owe David Kravitz, explicitly, the single largest intellectual debt it carries. Most of the sharpest observations in it started as something he said on a call that I then argued with for a week, and many of the passages that survived the cutting are the ones where his voice and mine had already merged into a common position. Any studio practice named in the book as ours is ours because David has been building it alongside me for seventeen years.

I want to close on a practical note, briefly, because readers who are themselves in the middle of writing something about their own work sometimes ask me what I would do again.

The stack. Voice transcription first, typing second. VoiceInk for transcription (open-source, local); Obsidian for the working drafts; Claude Code for drafting, repetition detection, reference auditing, voice-rule checks and line editing; Pandoc for the final conversion; a short shell script for the pre-commit banned-phrase check. The stack is worth naming, and worth dating. In eighteen months at least two of these names will have been replaced. Readers who come to this book in 2029 should substitute their equivalent of each category — a local transcription tool, a plaintext writing environment, a capable coding-and-editing agent, a format-conversion layer, a pre-commit lint — and the method will still work.

The method. Talk to one person about the thing for longer than is comfortable. Transcribe. Draft from the transcript rather than from scratch. Cut weekly, not at the end. Read aloud at the close of every pass. Keep a list of phrases you will not use, and run a check for them before each save. Credit the people whose voice you are carrying; carry them well.

The book was the last block we sculpted.