There’s no one way to write a manuscript, and there’s no one way to edit one, either. Before you work with an editor, you should know how they approach their work–and how they see their contributions in the context of your project.
These are just my thoughts on the major types of editing, and every editor alive will disagree with one or two things below. As it should be.
The Manuscript Editor’s Role
Every piece of creative, informative, or persuasive writing has at least a whiff of audacity about it. This thing you’re writing never existed before, and the world will keep on spinning if you never finish it. But your work will exist, and we’ll all be that much gladder that the sun comes up each morning.
Editors serve authors by allowing them to be as audacious as their work demands. By giving writers the freedom to create on their creation’s own emerging terms. A good first draft isn’t perfect by a long shot; it pays for its own distinct genius in little misconstructions and big inconsistencies. Editors preserve the genius while helping authors resolve the inconsistencies and correct the misconstructions.
In case we never work together, know that I’m cheering you on as you finish your gloriously imperfect draft. And that I wish you happiness with an editor who’s just right for you.
Types of Editing
For most manuscripts, I find that the most helpful sequence of editing–the one that satisfies the demands of most projects in the fewest steps–runs developmental editing, copyediting, and proofreading. This preference isn’t chiseled in granite. Each type of editing goes by different names, copyediting can be of various depths and is sometimes split into multiple stages, and so on. To keep the conversation coherent, we’ll stick with the big three I just listed.
These are relatively new categories. Toni Morrison was an editor at Random House, and that along with her electrifying genius told you what you needed to know. What we now call developmental editing once consisted largely of relationship-building and author-cajoling, as when James C. Fields persuaded Nathaniel Hawthorne to revisit the discarded rough draft of his novel about a Puritan love triangle. Copyediting was confined for years to the newspaper trade; final edits to manuscripts were typically made by typesetters. This arrangement worked except when it didn’t: The only English-speaking typesetter at Darantière introduced thousands of typos to the original galleys of Ulysses, which gave James Joyce a chance to make thousands of changes himself when, serving as proofreader, he reviewed the results.
Things are more heavily subdivided these days, but the same editorial functions help each manuscript get to print. That’s caused a bit of confusion. Editors can’t agree with any finality on definitions of different types of editing because authors insist on writing different things every time out, and editing is above all responsive to the material at hand. The closest we’ll come to real consensus on these things is a general agreement on the pith and marrow of each editing stage. Which leaves the fringes. A line editor might look ahead a bit by pulling quirks of punctuation into helpful consistency; a copyeditor might call attention to a plot hole just by spotting an ambiguous turn of phrase.
Each manuscript needs its own particular cascade of editing stages, with each stage focusing on certain issues and each interacting with the others in ways unique to the project at hand. That’s an invitation to discuss your manuscript and what you’d like to do with it. If you don’t discuss it with me, please do so with an editor who seems to be on your frequency. To help get the conversation started, here’s my idea of each type of editing.
Developmental Editing
Before you shellac a piece of wood, you shape and sand it. Before you hunt for grammatical ambiguities in a manuscript, you get its scope and proportions right. That’s the essence of developmental editing.
Back a century or so ago, a publisher might return an author’s manuscript with an offer to read a revised version. Guidance toward that revision wasn’t always offered. On or about December 1910 human character changed, and so did publishing. Editors like John Hall Wheelock and Maxwell Perkins saw enough to work with in manuscripts submitted by writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe to invest months with them, even years, toward shaping, honing, and polishing sloppy-but-promising drafts.
Developmental editing takes a bird’s-eye view of your manuscript and stays there. If you’re still working on your first draft, a developmental editor listens to your ideas, worries, and complaints, and responds more constructively than the ceiling ever could. When you’ve finished your first draft, the conversation continues. This can be a tougher stretch than the one that got you a completed draft, since it involves viewing your favorite, most expansive passages with a healthy skepticism and asking whether the bits that came the hardest don’t deserve a good deal more work.
A good development editor will critique your manuscript’s premise, pace, flow, and balance. The promises your book makes to its readers, and extent to which it delivers. Your response to an insightful development editor might well run something like “Yeah, I see it now. Let me work something up and get back to you in ten days or so.” Or “No, I need to keep that. But I’ve got some ideas that might answer your questions. Will check in when I’ve written them up.”
Developmental work undertaken after the completion of your first draft is sometimes called substantive editing. Then again, substantive editing sometimes refers to wholesale rewriting undertaken by an editor, often at the author’s request and always subject to the author’s approval. For a profession devoted to clarifying things, we seem to enjoy muddying the waters at times.
Whatever you call it, I promise you that it’s worth the trouble. The right developmental editor will tell you things you don’t necessarily want to hear about your manuscript, but that you need to know.
Copyediting and its Cousins
Developmental editing is a distinct phase because copyediting allows it to be. While developmental editing focused on your manuscript’s premise and story, its scope and contours, copyediting concerns itself with how you’ve fulfilled the promises you’ve made to your readers.
Remember the last time a friend or cousin or coworker mentioned a book they just knew you’d love, by an author you’ve never read? Or, even more awkwardly, handed you a copy? Put on the spot by someone who knows you decently well, you commit to reading the thing. You’re skeptical enough that the book has to be really special to capture your imagination, but you’ll give it a fighting chance. That’s my idea of the reader a copyeditor is trying to reach.
This stage brings us from a rough but fully developed draft to a proof of the book as it’s laid out and typeset. That’s a lot of territory involving a lot of detailed work. Naturally, work of that scope is broken into specialties: line editing, heavy copy editing, medium copyediting, light copyediting, bantamweight copyediting, light sweet crude copyediting, and so on.
Each editor sees these categories a bit differently, and publishers have their own definitions just to keep everyone on the same page. Every manuscript makes its own unique demands on its author and editors, but a productive conversation has to start somewhere. Here’s how I break things down when I’m left to my own devices.
Line editing has the same objectives as developmental editing, but pursues them paragraph by paragraph and sentence by sentence. A good line editor will ask whether each sentence in your manuscript is pulling its weight. If a word, phrase, or passage threatens to disrupt your manuscript’s rhythm, pace, or voice, a line editor might write a query in the margins. Or they might just go ahead and make the correction and ask what you think. Please don’t take that directness for haughtiness; it can be more efficient to give the author an alternative to consider than to describe the issue and propose options in a long note.
Line editing typically involves a lot of fact-checking. Again, anything that might cause readers to stop in their tracks and wonder what you’re saying is a threat at this stage, and a good line editor will be all over it.
Good line editors will also clean up typos and misspellings along the way, but that’s not their primary focus. And for good reason: Enough can change after a round of line editing that the manuscript will need to be copyedited in any case. It’s best to copyedit the manuscript’s final Final FINAL version, since any substantial changes might introduce new errors.
Heavy copyediting is much in the spirit of line editing, but without the structural changes. Copyeditors at this stage and below typically presume that the manuscript will be ready for typesetting when their edits have been incorporated. They’ll leave the structural questions behind, but will still highlight constructions that don’t seem to work as well as they should. A copyeditor’s queries, when addressed with care, should require little new writing.
Not that heavy copyediting, and even lighter forms of editing, doesn’t occasionally reach back to line-editing questions or even developmental ones. If each word and punctuation mark needs to draw the reader in, copyeditors naturally follow up when something looks a bit off.
If a citation gets the page number wrong, a copyeditor naturally finds the source and corrects the citation…which means reading a bit of the source and sometimes discovering that the author has mischaracterized a thing or two. If a manuscript randomly spells a character’s hair color grey and gray in the first few chapters but switches to auburn later on, is that change a typo, maybe a vestige of a previous draft? Or is it connected to an underdeveloped plot point? It happens, even to the smartest authors working in the best of faith. Copyeditors might go so far as to suggest changes, but they rarely presume to actually make them except to correct spelling, punctuation, and simple grammar.
Light copyediting presumes that everything is as it should be aside from questions of grammar, spelling, and punctuation. This is a valuable step following a round of line editing, but might not be worth the trouble after heavy or medium copyediting.
This is distinct from proofreading. Completely different animal.
Medium copyediting is last in this list because asking for a medium copyedit tends to be another way of asking for a conversation about what you’d like to accomplish at this stage. Broadly speaking, a medium copyedit limits the editor’s mandate to make every phrase sing, while imposing a more significant imperative to get the manuscript into printable shape.
I love heavy copyediting and line editing. If you threw a manuscript at me and said “Here, edit this,” you’d get a heavy copyedit in a few weeks. If you said “Here, edit this and feel free to tweak it a bit,” you’d get a line edit.
The only thing I like better than the heavier forms of copyediting is doing the right kind of editing at the right time.
Proofreading
After a manuscript is reworked to everyone’s satisfaction, it’s made ready for publication. First, it’s typeset: The manuscript is taken from Word or Google Docs or a stack of cocktail napkins and laid out in every detail the way it’s meant to be printed or digitized. That means pagination, word breaks, front and back material including a table of contents, a careful selection of fonts instead of just the one–you get the idea.
A surprising number of issues can crop up at this stage. Stacks of hyphens can crop up at the end of a series of lines; the left margin might see four instances of the all in a file. The tail end of a sentence might be all that appears on the last page of a chapter. Headers and page references might get thrown for a loop. Even these days, printer’s errors can crop up.
That’s why we make a galley proof–a copy of exactly what the printer will see–and have it meticulously checked by a proofreader. Good proofreading has saved most of the books you’ve ever loved. Speaking from experience, proofreading requires a different lens from the one copyeditors use, and a different kind of endurance.
AI’s Role
AI has no place in any of this.
