Developmental Editing

Once you have a whole draft of your project, before you start correcting spelling mistakes and grammar, it’s a good idea to revise the draft for the bigger elements, like plot and character and point-of-view. Because you have just written that draft, sometimes it is difficult for you to see these kinds of problems, and that’s why it’s a good idea to bring on a Developmental Editor.

As a Developmental Editor, I will look at the major structural components of your project and let you know how I think it’s all working, and where I think it could be working more effectively for you. A strength that I bring to this work is that I won’t encourage you to write to a particular formula. I will, however, help you better understand the structures used by readers to make meaning of stories. Without sufficient attention to some basic elements, you can leave your reader feeling confused or unsatisfied. Let’s not do that.

These are some of the things I might address in a developmental edit:

  • Overall Structure - even if your story doesn’t unfold in linear time, does the reader’s experience have a beginning, middle and end?

  • Pacing - are the key elements of structure placed where they feel like they should be, or are parts of the story stretching things out, or rushing them along?

  • Characterization - are your characters consistent in motivation and behaviour throughout the story? Do the most important characters grow or change in a meaningful way over the course of the story?

  • Point of View - Is the story’s point of view consistent throughout the story?

A Developmental Edit includes an Editorial Letter, offering a summary of the editor’s major observations about the manuscript, a line-edited copy of the manuscript with in-line notes for the author, and an optional video call. Developmental Edits take approximately a month to complete.

Pricing:

Developmental Edit (incl. Editorial Letter, Line-Edit, and optional video call): $180 CAD / 10,000 words.

Examples:

  • If your manuscript is up to 10,000 words, it would cost 180x1=$180 CAD.

  • If between 10,001-20,000 words, 2x180 = $360 CAD

  • If between 60,001-70,000 words, 7x180= $1260 CAD

The fee will be payable in three instalments via PayPal payment request. The first will be due when we agree on a booking, the second when you send me your manuscript, and the third before I send you the edited manuscript.

Booking:

To book, use the Get In Touch form in the footer to reach out.

If writing a book were like building a house …

… Developmental Editing would be like having an architect/engineer come to your house after you’ve got it roughly framed up. There’s a house there, you can see the overall shape of it, how it will look when it’s all decked out, but it’s still a skeleton right now.

At that point, you can check to make sure there’s enough structural support to hold up the upper floors and the roof, and that the plumbing runs in the right places. You can still change the configuration of the rooms if you want to—make this one larger or another a little narrower. You can move walls and decide to add extra windows.

You might realize as you walk through that the real entrance to the house, the one it makes the most sense to actually use, isn’t the front door but the one at the side, so you make it a little bigger and add a closet.

But these are not decisions you want to make after the drywall is up and the flooring is in and the walls are painted, because you would have to throw all that hard work away getting back to the studs to move the structure around.

But after you’ve consulted with your architect/engineer, you know nothing’s going to fall down, the mechanics are all going to work, and the flow of the spaces will serve your needs. Then you are ready, in the next phase, to dress it up with drywall and flooring and siding and nice stylish windows.

Once the structure and point-of-view of and characterization in your novel are sound, you can dress it up as you move towards a Copy Edit, paying closer attention to language and style, confident that you won’t spend time making perfect paragraphs that you’ll have to take out when you realize that your book actually begins in chapter two.