The Editorial Process

Once you’ve been editing for a while, you tend to start rolling your eyes at the newbie mistakes writers make. They name their characters Matt, Mark, Mack, Mick, and Mike and expect readers to be able to tell them apart. They invariably start the story in the wrong place and summarize the most important emotional…

When you’re editing fiction, you’ll find that many developmental problems are interrelated: An insufficient conflict can be connected with unclear character motivation (or lack of motivation) to do something or achieve something (a goal). If the protagonist doesn’t have a goal, they can’t really come into conflict with another character who has a different goal….

It’s very common for newer editors to LOVE IT love it love it when they start booking clients far in advance. It’s March and they’re booked through to September! That is fantastic news, isn’t it? They know they’ll have money coming in for the next six months and they can breathe a sigh of relief….

When writing fiction, you’re likely to encounter problems with conflict—so the question is how to create conflict in a story. How to Create Conflict in a Story Conflict, as you probably know, drives the narrative. Consider this: Just now, I wanted a cup of tea, so I went and made one. So what, right? You…

When we write editorial queries for the author, we need to identify what the problem is and why it’s a problem for the manuscript—in other words, we can’t just slap generic slogans on a manuscript (“Use fewer adverbs!”) and think that’s editing. Effective Editorial Guidance Part of the editorial guidance we need to offer in…

Fact-Checking in the Editorial Process Fact-checking is verifying that the information included in a ms is accurate: World War I took place in the early twentieth century, production of Hummers stopped in 2010. An author (even a novelist) who gets facts wrong irritates and alienates readers, so one of our roles as dev editor is…