editing & critiquing services

In the fiction shed, it’s understood that writing fiction is a difficult and often messy process, with many false starts and dead ends. We know how it sometimes feels as though your manuscript will never get there. That maybe there isn’t even a ‘there’ to get to after all.

But the fiction shed is also a place where help is at hand - help in the form of principles of good fiction which, like good tools, if applied correctly can enable your draft to find itself. Usually, this process isn’t about polishing a manuscript. It’s is about letting the thing buried in there gleam through all by itself. Though I provide standard copy-editing and proofreading services to trade publishers and other organisations, I rarely end up providing these services to individuals who are trying to finish their manuscript with a view to sending it out to agents or publishers, or to self-publish. This is because in my experience, these manuscripts haven’t yet reached the point where they’re ready for such a service. Instead, a critique and/or a developmental edit, or a mentoring session, marks the best next step.

For me, fiction is personal. Perhaps the most useful guiding mantra for my work - as editor and writer - is this:

‘A story is a linear-temporal phenomenon. It proceeds, and charms us (or doesn’t), a line at a time. We have to keep being pulled into a story in order for it to do anything to us.’ George Saunders

It’s not about big ideas or brilliant climaxes or twists, it’s about charming the reader, one sentence after another, all the way to the end.

CRITIQUE AND DEVELOPMENTAL EDIT

This developmental editing / critiquing service is for novels or short story collections. It is an in-depth process. For short stories, it’s provided to the entire manuscript. For novels, it’s provided to the first 20-25 per cent of the manuscript only. This is because beginnings are the hardest part to get right, and only with a good beginning can you hope to write a good middle and end. It involves:

• detailed, in-depth and specific, page-by-page suggestions and comments throughout the relevant section of the
  manuscript, using Word’s track changes and Comments functions;

• a c. 1,000-word report that identifies strengths of the ms. and that makes suggestions;

• a Zoom call during which you have the chance to seek clarification and ask questions on the feedback.

CRITIQUE ONLY

This service involves an in-depth critique of your manuscript, in which strengths are identified and suggestions are made regarding structure and plot, character and point of view, the treatment of time, as well as description and dialogue. It also includes a Zoom call.

Note: Once I’ve conducted a critique or developmental edit of a manuscript, I never reread or provide a critiquing service a second time to the same manuscript. This is because I’ll have said everything that will ever occur to me to say about the manuscript, and if those issues are addressed, then I won’t have anything constructive to say at all! It will probably be a waste of your money to have me read it a second time.

If you feel stuck on some aspect of your writing, and wish to talk it through, my one-hour mentoring session might be the best service for you. You can either send me an extract of your work-in-progress in advance, or you can use the session to focus on a broader aspect of your work, such as structure or plot, or even how a scene works.

I provide a similar mentoring service via the Irish Writers Centre.