Fiction
Beautiful sentences can hide a book that is not moving
Literary fiction gets a harder structural read from me than anything else, because it is the genre where craft at the sentence level most easily disguises a story that has stopped. A manuscript can be a pleasure to read line by line and still be four hundred pages in which nobody wants anything.
Where literary fiction usually goes wrong
- Prose quality can mask structural stall for a hundred pages at a time
- Interiority has to earn its space rather than substitute for events
- Beginnings are almost always in the wrong place, usually too early
- The ending is where the book's real argument becomes visible, so it gets read first and last
I read the last fifty pages first
On a literary manuscript I read the ending before anything else, then the opening, and only then the book in order. The gap between what the ending is arguing and what the opening is promising is where nearly every structural problem in this genre lives, and it is much harder to see once you have been carried along by the prose for three hundred pages.
What I have edited in literary fiction
Novels and story collections, including work placed with independent presses and in literary journals.
Every service, for literary fiction
From literary fiction clients
★★★★★
Sample Edit“She sent back ten free pages that were more useful than the six hundred dollars I had spent on a different editor the year before. That is when I stopped shopping.”
★★★★★
Book Coaching“I had been at sixty thousand words for two years. Someone expecting pages on the fifteenth turned out to be the entire missing ingredient.”
★★★★★
Workshop“I signed up for the workshop to test the waters and hired her for the whole manuscript in week three.”
See the edit before you buy the edit
Send your first ten pages and I will edit them properly and send the notes back, free. Not a summary of what I would do, the actual marked-up pages. If those notes are not worth having, we both learned something cheaply and you owe me nothing.
Other genres
Writing literary fiction?
Send the first ten pages. I will edit them properly and send the marked pages back within a week, free.