The Nine-Step Self-Edit

A Disciplined Editing System for Fiction Writers, with a Claude AI Skill You Build Yourself

By: Kumar Luv

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

You can see what's wrong with your own writing. You can't fix it all in one pass. That's a sequencing problem, not a skill problem.

This short book gives you a fixed nine-step editing process that solves it. Run the steps in order, one at a time, and your manuscript moves from rough draft to publishable prose without the chaos of editing-while-revising. Each step audits one specific lane: clarity and style, dialogue and description, consistency, grammar, facts, format, read-aloud sound, outside feedback, and final proof. The discipline is the order. The result is a manuscript that has been seen through nine different lenses, each one isolated from the others.

The book has two halves.

Part One teaches the nine steps as a manual discipline. A single sample passage evolves through every step, version by version, so you can watch the process in action on the page. You see what each step catches, what it deliberately leaves alone for later steps, and why running the sequence in order is the entire game.

Part Two turns the discipline into a Claude AI Skill. A workflow file you build once and reuse forever, encoding the same nine steps into software that never gets tired and never skips a step. The appendix includes a complete, copy-paste-ready SKILL.md reference you can install in your Claude environment and use on your next manuscript.

Written for fiction writers who already chat with Claude or ChatGPT but have never built an AI Skill. No prior technical knowledge required. If you can follow a recipe, you can build the Skill.

If you have ever finished a draft and not known where to start editing it, this is the answer.

By the time you finish, you'll have two things: a disciplined self-editing method you can run on any manuscript, and a working AI Skill that runs the same method for you when your eye is tired and the deadline is close.

Short read. Practical. Designed to be used, not just read.