Line Editing: Learn How To Edit Your Manuscript
BKEdits
for authors of prose and poetry,
fiction and nonfiction
Does your writing bring your ideas to your reader as easily as a clear stream flows downhill?
Or is it more like a silted-up river, or a creek full of old appliances and wire fencing? Does your writing actually impede your ideas, so that your reader has to struggle to receive them?
If you want to write difficult prose that makes your readers work hard, leave me out of it. But if you want your readers to understand the meanings, and feel the feelings, that you have put into your manuscript, I can help you.
What is line editing, and how can it help my manuscript?
Line editing is not plot critiquing; nor is it a salability assessment. I won't suggest places to send your work. And I won't tell you whether it will sell or not, because my crystal ball's in the shop.
What I will do is help you and educate you in these areas:
1. Clarity. I can help you in the tricky task of transferring what's in your head, into the reader's head, through the medium of your writing. Your own complete knowledge can actually be a block to clear expression, because you unconsciously assume that the reader knows some of what you know.
2. Smooth Writing for Easy Reading. I can help you overcome clumsy narrative and clunky dialogue, so your writing sounds as if it fell accidentally into the most felicitous arrangement of words. Ideally, the reader will be almost unconscious of the page, and your ideas will pass into the reader's mind, carried by words that stand out of the way and let meaning through.
3. What about grammar and spelling, you ask? Yes, of course I can help with those. You'll probably already have used a spell checker, but a spell checker won't tell you that you've used "discrete" and "discreet" in the wrong places. (Judging from some published books, no one has told the publishers, either.) Using the wrong word can be a kind of mental typo; a person moving along at a good clip can insert "their" for "they're," without even realizing it. I can spot those for you.
Why should I pay for line editing?
Ideally, you won't pay for it for long. Line editing is a one-on-one educational tool. It's all very well to be told by a book, for instance, to eliminate useless adverbs and substitute active verbs, but it's very hard to see how that advice applies to your own writing. When you see the changes I make, and my reasons for them, and re-read your work with the changes in place, you are training your mental ear.
Rates and Payment
$6.00 per page, flat. A page is about 250 words, the standard double-spaced 8"x11" paper, or about 20 lines of poetry. I take checks, money orders, and PayPal.
Method
You may e-mail or snail-mail your piece. It can be a whole story or essay, or part of one, one page or thirty, or three hundred, just as you like. It can be fiction or nonfiction.
Try a page or two and see what all those writing books have been talking about!
Questions?
Or a manuscript you're thinking of sending? Contact me.
Tips on Line Editing
Line Editor Search & Destroy: Dialogue
A Brief Look at Describing Characters
Bonita Kale
