The Concierge (Blog)

One of the lessons I’ve learned over many years of editing is that you have to let the manuscript teach you how to edit it. Every manuscript is different and every manuscript needs a different touch. Even when an author does something I’ve seen many times before, I have to edit for that particular manuscript,…

Writers often use setting like a painted backdrop to their stories, rather than as an integral element of their storytelling. As DEs, we can help them make the setting come to life. If we think of Wuthering Heights, we think of the Yorkshire moors. When we think of Moby Dick, it’s a whaler on the…

I’ve heard developmental editors talk about “sensing” that a story isn’t working, even going so far to say that “sensing” problems is their job. And sensing that something is going wrong is a useful skill for a developmental editor to have—all of us do, to one degree or another. But developmental editing isn’t about “sensing”…

The other day, I wrote a Facebook post about a challenge I encountered upon moving to Spain and someone responded, “You’re so lucky you live in Spain now!” And I just about sprained my eyeballs rolling them. Sure, some luck was involved. Luck is involved in everything. But moving to Spain wasn’t a random gift…

Typically in a manuscript evaluation or developmental edit, I focus on what I perceive to be the three-to-five most important concerns I’ve noticed in the ms. This is the approach I teach my editing students. Editing too many problems at once overburdens the author In any given ms, there may be ten or fifteen developmental problems…

Newer freelancers sometimes come to me in a panic because a client has approached them to do work that’s outside their typical scope. Commonly this is something like the freelancer offers copyediting and developmental editing but the client wants coaching. What should they do? They don’t know how to coach, they don’t offer coaching services,…

The first few pages of an author’s novel are crucial. Once the novel is published, readers will judge whether they’re interested in reading the story based on the first few pages, even the first paragraph. If authors don’t get this right, their novel is unlikely to sell to readers. And even if it does sell,…

Copyediting and line editing both focus on the sentence level, but they are not the same thing. Copyediting is about ensuring consistency across a manuscript, correcting egregious errors, making sure the manuscript conforms to a specific style guide, and otherwise smoothing the prose so the reader doesn’t encounter any sentence-level hiccups as they read. Example…

Because writing a novel manuscript takes place over a long period of time, character inconsistencies can crop up. Maybe in Chapter 1 the author says that Joe has never been in trouble with the law but in Chapter 12 he has a history as a felon. As the editor it can sometimes seem puzzling to…