Category: Editing

I was sitting in a windowless editing suite in Soho back in 2004, staring at a manuscript that had just cost the client three extra weeks of my billable time because they couldn’t stop circling the same three adjectives. The author had been told by some “writing guru” that repetition was a sign of a rich, rhythmic vocabulary, but in reality, it was just clutter. Most people think you can avoid it by hunting for synonyms like they’re playing a high-stakes game of Scrabble, but that’s a mistake that costs you both clarity and money. Learning how to handle repetition…

I once spent three days staring at a manuscript that looked less like a narrative and more like a brick of grey, unyielding granite. The author was brilliant, certainly, but they had treated their prose like a marathon with no water stations, completely ignoring how paragraphing guides a reader through the emotional shifts of a scene. They thought long, unbroken blocks of text signaled “seriousness” or “literary depth,” but all they actually achieved was making me want to close the file and take a very long nap. In reality, a wall of text isn’t art; it’s a barrier to entry…

I once spent a grueling forty-eight hours staring at a manuscript for a client who insisted on using semicolons like they were expensive pieces of jewelry—sprinkled liberally to make the prose look “literary” and sophisticated. It wasn’t. It was just cluttered, exhausting, and, quite frankly, a waste of my hourly rate. Most writing guides treat the semicolon as some mystical, high-brow secret, but in the real world of professional publishing, knowing how the semicolon should be used is less about looking smart and more about structural efficiency. If you’re using them to bridge thoughts that don’t actually belong together, you…

I once spent three weeks staring at a manuscript for a mid-list thriller, watching a perfectly good plot die a slow, agonizing death simply because the author treated every sentence like a legal deposition. They had all the right ingredients, but they didn’t understand how to use punctuation for pace; instead, they used commas like speed bumps and periods like brick walls. It’s a common mistake that makes even the most gripping scenes feel like reading a technical manual for a toaster. People will tell you that pacing is about “flow” or “vibe,” but that’s just fluff. In reality, pacing…

I was sitting in a windowless office in Bloomsbury back in 2004, staring at a manuscript that was technically “correct” but felt like reading a dry legal deposition. The author had been told by every writing workshop in existence that passive voice was a cardinal sin, so they had scrubbed it so thoroughly that the prose had lost its pulse entirely. Most people think they understand how passive voice actually works, but they usually fall into one of two camps: the terrified amateur who deletes every instance of “was” like it’s a typo, or the academic who uses it to…

I remember sitting in a cramped, windowless office in Bloomsbury back in 2004, staring at a manuscript that was technically “brilliant” but physically exhausting to read. The author was a darling of the literary scene, yet every page was cluttered with justs, reallys, and actuallys that acted like sand in a gearbox. I realized then that most writing advice focuses on the wrong things; people obsess over “voice” while ignoring the fact that how filler words weaken sentences is often the primary reason a reader stops paying attention. You aren’t just being wordy; you are actively devaluing your own authority…

I remember sitting in a cramped, windowless office in Bloomsbury back in ’98, staring at a manuscript that was essentially a graveyard of adjectives. The author had spent three months polishing every sentence, convinced that “more” meant “better,” while I sat there calculating how much of my actual life was being swallowed up by their wordiness. Most writing gurus will tell you that tightening your work is about finding your “voice” or waiting for a moment of divine inspiration, but that’s a lie designed to sell expensive masterclasses. If you want to know how to tighten prose, you don’t need…

I once spent three weeks staring at a manuscript for a client who was convinced her third chapter was the “soul” of the book, only to realize it was actually a glorified roadblock that killed her momentum. She’d spent her entire budget on a developmental edit, but she was treating the structure like a sacred relic rather than a blueprint. Most writing gurus will tell you that your narrative flow is a matter of “intuition” or “artistic instinct,” but let’s be honest: that’s just a polite way of saying they don’t want to talk about the grueling, unglamorous labor of…

I remember sitting in a windowless office in Bloomsbury, staring at a manuscript that was, quite frankly, a masterpiece of sentence-level prose. The metaphors were lush, the vocabulary was sophisticated, and the pacing was steady as a heartbeat. But as I turned to page eighty, I felt that familiar, sinking sensation in my gut—the realization that the story wasn’t actually going anywhere. This is the great deception of the amateur writer: believing that beautiful language can mask a hollow core. Most people think they need a better thesaurus or a more evocative adjective, but they fail to see how structural…

I remember sitting in a windowless office in Bloomsbury back in 2004, staring at a manuscript that the author had described as a “spiritual journey,” while my eyes screamed that it was actually just three hundred pages of aimless wandering. The author was convinced that because they had felt every emotion while writing it, the reader would too. That is the great lie of the creative process: the belief that your emotional connection to a sentence acts as a substitute for clarity. If you want to actually finish a book that people will pay for, you have to learn how…