Welcome (back) to the Scarlet Quill Society!

This year at YeahWrite our free workshop focuses on everything BUT the writing, with an editorial series that’ll take the words right out of your mouth and put them on the page. Of course, we’re also including some tips on writing so that the eventual edits to your story won’t be the heartbreaking kind where you have to remove an entire character or plot arc and re-evaluate every interaction in your 300,000 word novel.

Check out the bottom of this post (and every post) for a roadmap to the year. We’ll be updating it with links each month as the posts go live, so that you can navigate through easily. And speaking of navigation, don’t worry: our Navigating Prompts workshop from last year hasn’t gone anywhere. You still have a handy tool to refer to when you’re stumped by a prompt or need help on how to approach it or what judges might be thinking as they read your story.

The biggest bonus of the Scarlet Quill Society is that there are actual club meetings. That’s right! Once a month (usually on the Second Sunday) we’ll get together with you and talk about that month’s subject, answer questions, and record the chat for posterity. So if you have an easier time taking in information that way, or if you’re left with lingering questions after a monthly topical post, you’ve got a chance to get the full picture! Check out the full description at the main Scarlet Quill Society page.

It’s a trap!

So you’ve just been handed a story, essay, thesis, or book to edit. It might even be yours, a project that you took Stephen King’s very good advice (as opposed to his advice re: microwaving salmon) about and set aside for just long enough that it feels like someone else wrote it. Now what?

It’s tempting to jump in at the sentence level. There are so many easy errors to find there, from spelling to punctuation to simple word repetition. But wait! Don’t do it! You’ll just have to do it all over again. Save yourself some time (and/or money) and do your developmental edits first. While we’ve been talking for the last couple months in a sort of conceptual way about dev editing (look, I’m willing to make parentheses all day but not to type “developmental” as many times as I’ll need to for this post), this month we’ll get our red pens out and really mark that story up. Up until now we’ve been assuming that the story’s not really done, that the writer can still change things in time. In May, that’s over with. Welcome to the most heartbreaking set of edits to make, the most exhausting… and ultimately the most important.

Developmental editing is the point at which you test the foundations of your writing. If copyedits and proofreading are the finishing touches, the interior decorating, dev edits look at the plans and the structural supports of your work and make sure they’re intact and up to code. Before you can hang a picture on your wall, it’s nice to make sure the house won’t fall down around your ears, right? Let’s see how we do that.

Dev edits really break down into a couple major themes:

• Reality. Is there something in the work that objectively makes no sense or interfere with the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief?
• Clarity. Can you tell what’s happening?
• Consistency. Does the work build on itself and does it comply with its own internal rules?
• Yikes. We’re going to set “yikes” aside for a little bit but just know that we’ll be talking about it again in July when we are excited to be able to bring you an entire panel of experienced sensitivity readers at our monthly meeting. For this month, just know that as a dev editor you should flag anything that makes you uncomfortable or suggests that the author (not just the characters) might be bringing some unconscious (or, heck, conscious) bias to the work. While ultimately it’s the author’s job to decide whether or not to include certain themes or characters or actions, it’s your job to let them know that there could be repercussions for those decisions including failure to find an agent, publisher, or audience (or even just what sorts of markets and audiences they’re likely to end up in, and ask whether they’re comfortable in that company). You may, depending, also need to decide whether you personally would be comfortable having your name associated with a work of that nature.

Reality

OK, yes, we’re in Year Three of a global pandemic and nobody wants any reality right now. I certainly don’t. I’ve had enough reality and I would like to get off this ride and possibly get a refund for my ticket. But that doesn’t let the work you’re editing off the hook, tragically. And before you say “well it’s fantasy, this doesn’t even apply to me” I assure you it does.

The good news about reality is that you can use those questions you learned back in grade school to analyze whether your reality is real enough: Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How? See? We even have frameworks for our frameworks here. It’s great.

Who

Are the characters “real” for the time and place you’ve set the story? Even if the place is a fantasy, you are likely building on real world knowledge. Do you have an appropriate blend of races and/or ethnicities, and is there room for each character to not have to stand in for an entire category of people? “It’s just fantasy” isn’t an excuse for not getting this right. Is that fantasy world built on medieval Europe? That’s not nearly as white as most people have been convinced it was. Speaking of white, did you know one in four cowboys was Black? If you’re working on a Western, you might want to know that.

Who is the main character? Who are the supporting cast? Who is the POV character, and how does that affect reader knowledge? Should any of this be adjusted? Are character descriptions appropriate? Are personality traits being racialized (don’t, in case this isn’t clear)? Is your main character the appropriate character for this story, or do you have a Boy in the Striped Pyjamas problem, where the main character and the thing the story is ostensibly about are incompatible?

What

Are the trappings of the story appropriate? Are technologies and ecosystems appropriate for the time and place? Are the kinds of trees and stones right? Is the clothing appropriate? Do at least what an editor friend calls “thirty seconds of research” (TSOR) on these things. Don’t be the published author I read once who missed out on the chance to describe clothes made with hummingbird feathers (which is extremely cool, I think we can all agree?) and instead put an Aztec leader in silk, which wouldn’t have existed in that place and at that time. Double fail. The level of research appropriate will vary by book type: a novel set on another planet may not need as much in-depth research as a historical piece where readers will have actual knowledge of the time and place. But don’t think you can skip this just because you’re editing a fantasy book. Even on Azeroth the forests aren’t composed of a single type of tree.

Where

Are settings built appropriately for the plot? If the story is set in a city, is the city researched or worldbuilt appropriately? Again, you can use real-world examples to check how well a fantasy story is managing. Remember to check your own assumptions about what real-world examples look like, though. For example, despite media using “the South Side of Chicago” for decades as a shortcut for “urbanized Blackness” there’s a huge Irish population on the South Side of Chicago, as well as a significant portion of the city’s parks system. Real (or realistic) places aren’t likely to be homogenous, whether you’re talking about geography or population.

When

“When” is a twofold inquiry for dev edits. First, it’s an external question. When is the story set and do the details line up with that setting? Is the technology appropriate to the time? The internal question we’ll hold off on for the “clarity” and “consistency” sections of this post, but just know that’s out there, hanging over your head. No pressure.

Why

Do things in the story happen for realistic reasons, and do characters have realistic motivations? If you can’t figure out why something would happen other than “the story wouldn’t take place unless” then it’s time to go to the author and suggest they plug in some backstory that would motivate the event. Some whys you should be asking: Why are these people in this place? Why do they want the thing? Why does the antagonist oppose them? Why does the country have this system of government? Why did the colonists come to this world?

How

This question is another one that applies at the micro and macro levels. How do people travel in this world? How much time does it take? How do they live their daily lives? As a dev editor you should be looking both at character-level actions (how did Sumayya find the haunted doll, how did the haunted doll get into the well) and book-level problems (How does magic work? How do ghosts behave?).

Clarity

We could make this a long drawn-out explanation, but let’s get to the heart of the matter: is there enough information in the story for the reader to tell what’s going on, but not so much that the story itself is obfuscated? What’s been left in the author’s head, versus what’s on the page? Has every piece of blocking been left in, describing every character movement? At the dev edits stage it’s not your responsibility to fix all these things line by line (unless you’re  also the author, in which case I’m sorry good luck have fun). It is, however, your job to flag at least a couple instances (use the comments function of your word processing program!) and note that it’s a global problem and that the author needs to take another sweep through the manuscript and see if they can clear it up.

Usually they’ll struggle in particular with one type of scene. For example, many people have trouble writing fight scenes that clearly describe where the characters are and what they’re doing. As the editor, it’s your job to make the call whether they should do more description or simply elide chunks of the scene like “Kiran made his way down the hall under cover of the borrowed shield.”

This is also a great time to think about pacing. Information-heavy datadumps can lead to missed information. Is information in the story before the reader needs to know it? Does uneven pacing lead to some sections of the manuscript getting skimmed so that information is more likely to be missed?

While you’re not fixing sentences at the dev edit stage, take a look at grammar and sentence structure now, and give the author a chance to clean up things that are consistently wrong (fragments, dangling participles, descriptions) before the next editing pass. Also consider the vocabulary that’s being used and whether it’s appropriate for the target audience. For example, I’m saying things like “elide” and “obfuscate” in this post because I’m talking to an audience of writers and editors. Those wouldn’t be appropriate vocabulary for a middle grade or early reader book. They might be fine for a YA book, depending on the remainder of the vocabulary.

Consistency

It’s ironic cause I love Batman so much. And the Zelda games. But continuity is actually important to me, and it will be to readers. Otherwise you might launch a thousand TikToks trying to reconcile whether something happened (cw: comic-normalized violence).

So here’s the things you’re looking for as a dev editor:

• Do characters have an opportunity to know information before they act on it? That is, is the author not doing the ridiculous thing that Agatha Christie always does and plugging information into characters after the fact that explains later why they did a ridiculous thing? “Oh,” Poirot said Belgianly, “That ees because I knew that eggs do not come from the cheeckens in zis state! Zees can only be…. a dinosaur!” “Life finds a way,” Jeff Goldblum replied. And then you, as the dev editor, squirted them both with a squirt bottle and yelled NO! because at no point in the story did anyone before that have any opportunity to know about the dinosaurs and that egg was referred to as a chicken egg more than once by the omniscient narrative voice.
•  Are character and narration voices consistent throughout?
• Look, we’re going to get more into characters in a couple months but are the characters acting consistent with what the reader is allowed to know about their history and motivations?
• Are characters responding to other characters consistently? That is, is the reader told that a character is called “ugly” and “useless” more than once despite descriptions which show them as conventionally attractive and actions which are objectively useful?
• If the story’s world has internal rules (for example, how magic works) are they followed, or are rational reasons apparent for a deviation from the rule? If vampires can only come out at night, is there a reasonable explanation why Blade can come out when the sun is up? Do magic spells always need to be spoken aloud? Is Gandalf actually powerful or is he just really good at fireworks (don’t @ me about the Balrog, the only textual evidence that we have for it being powerful is that Gandalf defeats it, which still begs the question of is Gandalf actually powerful or do balrogs just kinda suck)?
• Are readers aware of rules or stakes before they become important to the story?
• If the POV for the narration isn’t omniscient, does the narration only contain information the narrator could know?

There are, of course, more ways a story can be inconsistent than these, but this should get you started thinking in the right direction.

In conclusion…

Don’t fall into the trap of trying to edit sentences that will need to be changed or deleted. Developmental editing is about making sure the joists and foundation of the story are strong, not about painting the walls or choosing rugs. Do the pretty parts later. Many dev editors won’t even make notes in the actual manuscript at that stage, they’ll just write up a couple pages describing issues with the story and holes that need to be filled or topics to work on before the next pass. Only when you’ve done all this (and another dev edit and another until there’s no more big issues to find) are you ready to move on to the line edit stage.

Your turn!

Got questions? Let’s continue this conversation in the Coffeehouse on Facebook or Discord. And keep an eye out for the next face-to-face (face-to-Zoom?) meeting of the Scarlet Quill Society on Sunday, May 15 at 2:00 pm US Eastern Time. NOTE: This is the THIRD Sunday of the month, not our usual second Sunday. 

Join the Scarlet Quill Society!

Live Scarlet Quill Society meetings take place on the (usually; we’ll warn you!) second Sunday of every month at 2:00 pm U.S. Eastern Time. Each month, paid Society members will receive an email with a link to the Zoom meeting. If not every topic interests you, you can also purchase one-time access passes to each month’s meeting via Ko-Fi. If you can’t make it to the meeting, or you don’t like to speak on camera, you are welcome to submit questions before the meeting that our editors will answer in the meeting.

• $5 one-time access to this month’s Zoom session
• $5 monthly subscription: Access to all the live meetings and recordings as soon as they’re uploaded, as well as a private Discord channel where your topical questions will be answered by YeahWrite editors!
• $3 monthly subscription: Access to the meeting recordings as soon as they’re uploaded, as well as a private Discord channel where your topical questions will be answered by YeahWrite editors!

A week after the meeting, recordings will become available to all at no cost, but if you find them useful we encourage you to leave a tip in our tip jar—it helps keep the lights on over here and allows us to keep bringing you the high-quality workshop content you’ve come to expect from us, as well as acquire some exciting guest panelists.

Rules of Order. Order of Rules. Something like that.

Wondering what the next meeting of the Scarlet Quill Society will be about? Here's our club agenda for the year.

September:

• Read: Editing nonfiction: how much is enough?
• Watch: September meeting

October:

• Read: Line- and copyediting: getting picky
• Watch: October meeting

November:

• Read: Finishing touches and final checklists: more than just spellcheck!
• Watch: November meeting

December:

• Read: DIWhy? what you can (and can't) do yourself
• Watch: December meeting

About the author:

Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.

rowan@yeahwrite.me

About the author:

About the author:

Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.

rowan@yeahwrite.me

About the author: