Today, I’m editing the second episode of the second season of Life’s a Battle, the Fantasy Adventure podcast I host with my family. Find it wherever you get your podcasts lol, and ideally and eventually, this website I pay for. But as a technologically challenged person with a lot of other stuff going on, beautifying my blogging/podcast website isn’t high on the list of my priorities.

Now, a productivity-oriented person might scoff at my priorities, and to some effect they’re right. To best grow an audience, the perception of polish is essential, as we naturally have an eye for Quality and refinement as conscious beings. Plenty slips through the cracks, but more often than not, we support what we think is beautiful, good, or whatever other synonym slips into place. I’m focusing on the creation aspect of my endeavors, however, building habits of creative diligence and muscle memory before honing the administrative details of my work.

It is Table Talk Tuesday, so let’s talk about editing creative endeavors, specifically a low-budget, homebrew D&D podcast.

With the advent of actual play podcasts and shows like Critical Role and Dimension 20, tabletop roleplaying games are experiencing more love and reaching more folks than ever before. This brings me so much joy, and I cannot overstate how much respect and gratitude I have for these programs as they carve our own niche into popular culture. There is a game and show style for almost every person, and while I don’t always love aspects of these shows, they certainly are the standard within this new D&D show style.

The reality of a small creator is much different than any of these shows, however, and there is a huge misconception with content editing in general. Firstly, editing is just a hell of a lot of work. For every hour our show runs, I probably put in between three to five hours of work. While I’m sure seasoned professionals move faster, the fact remains that content editing is a much larger effort than most people realize. Even Tik Tok creators probably put in more effort than most people realize.

This is of course exacerbated by our mid-grade hardware and recording material, but that’s the reality of starting a project from the ground up without a preexisting fanbase or budget. Critical Role had the administrative support of Geek and Sundry from the start, Dimension 20 is the golden child of what was once College Humor, and even Dungeons and Daddies benefited from Freddie Wong’s subscriber base of over 9 million followers on Rocket Jump and other affiliate YouTube channels. Many of these folks don’t do a lot of the admin work themselves (Dungeons and Daddies not included) and all of these programs are based in LA, you know, the content center of the world.

This doesn’t take away from any of the incredible stories they’ve told or the work they’ve all put into their shows, but it does serve as an important distinction. The average content creator does all of the work. In another field of podcasting, consider the podcasts famous comedians host versus the one your buddy does in his garage. They have teams of professionals whose entire job is that show, while your buddy records once a week on a Sunday, editing and promoting the pod between working and when their kid is taking a nap.

And the hustle is part of the journey, to be sure, but a lot of people who haven’t worked in an audio or visual capacity don’t realize that. It isn’t the art or the creation that’s exhausting, it’s the work of refining the art and making it something that’d you’d want to listen to yourself. Any writer should be absolutely triggered by the analog this has to writing first drafts versus the pit of revision.

The whole goal, I think, is to get to a point where you can outsource the work that doesn’t bring you joy, but before that happens, you gotta fall in love with it. That means finding a flow state in an editorial capacity, not checking analytics and emails every six minutes. How to do that? I don’t know but let me know if you find out. Here’s what editing my podcast looks like.

The first season of Life’s a Battle, I had the players record their audio separately (we record remotely) and then send me each file. I would combine them and edit the show from there, but this method proved finicky and inefficient, as I would have time dilations between tracks, and one small error could magnify to weird laugh timing or nonsensical dialogue. So, this season, I downloaded software that rips the audio from our Discord chat, allowing me to edit one track that is naturally timed instead of multiples. The more work you do in preproduction, the easier postproduction will be.

From there, I download all of my tracks into Audacity, timing my intros and breaks as I edit the show. I’m fortunate to have been in a band that recorded music, so I have access to a few copyrighted songs that I can use at my own behest. I edit out umms and ahhs, big silences, any interactions that make players look especially awkward or ignorant (within reason), and excessive and boring rules explanations or arguments. I adjust the sound transitions with crescendos and decrescendos, and finally, I add my pre-episode message and my post-episode shoutouts. After which I do my double-checks, reduce background noise, and normalize the audio.

It’s a lot of work, but I do have a certain pride having taught myself this skill. And even if nothing becomes of it, how cool is it to have record of my adventures with my friends?

And that’s the glow that keeps me going. It can be hard to remember, but whenever I finish an episode and listen back through it, I can’t help but have a little pride that I’m bringing our stories to life.

Anyways, this went a little long, but feel free to ask me about editing a pod or anything Dungeons and Dragons in general. I’m never too busy to talk D&D with the homies. So, play a game this week, or teach yourself a new skill, even if you are just a beginner. To get good at something, you have to suck at it first, as frustrating as that can be.

May you find humor and humility in your failures. Stay frosty, word nerds. 🙂

Schaboi,

Kbizzle