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Editing
How to edit a manuscript, the Editor's Six Core Questions, and the Foolscap.
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- How to Edit a Manuscript: Part 5 - Story Grid ExtensiveWe have made it to the fifth and final part of the How to Edit a Manuscript series! (Here's Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 , and Part 4 .)
- How to Edit a Manuscript: Part 4 - Story Grid Intensive
- How to Edit a Manuscript: Part 3 - Story Grid Diagnostic
- How to Edit a Manuscript: Part 2 - Grading the Competency LevelIn Part 1 of the How to Edit a Manuscript series , we introduced you to the way Story Grid approaches editing a manuscript and gave you the first thre
- How to Edit a Manuscript: Objective Tools - Part 1When you were in college, did your friends constantly want you to read over their papers to give feedback? Maybe your friends ask for your input on th
- Story Editing: Definition and Story Grid’s ApproachStory Grid is a methodology for creating and editing stories that consumers love so much they tell everyone they meet.
- Units of Story: Beats, Tropes, Scenes, Sequences, and QuadrantsUnits of story are a way of dividing our work into manageable pieces that can be examined and edited to create a story that works. Every story is made
- Editor's Six Core Questions: Macro Analyzing Your ManuscriptThe Editor's Six Core Questions are a series of inquiries we use to diagnose a manuscript. By testing our stories this way, we can assess where we've
- How to Run a Writing Group: A Proven System to Keep Feedback Positive and HelpfulAre you tired of going it alone as a writer? Joining or starting a writing group is a wonderful way to build community and improve your writing skills
- How to Give Helpful Writing FeedbackAs a writer, it’s nearly impossible to get helpful, specific, actionable feedback on your writing. Even if you join a WRITING GROUP, most of the feedb
- The 5-Minute Nonfiction Chapter Outline“We need another chapter, don’t we?” We were on the last leg of revisions, with a deadline at play, and the gap had just become clear. Painfully so. A
- Overcoming Your All-is-Lost Moment as a WriterJoin Story Grid Editor Allison Fairhurst this week as she goes through some solutions to combat creative lulls, blocks, and your all-is-lost moment as
- How to Write a NovelOne of the most common questions we get as Story Grid Certified Editors is, "Can the Story Grid method be used as a drafting tool?" The answer to that
- How to Start a Publishing Company: Our Checklists and WalkthroughIn January 2020, Shawn Coyne and I launched Story Grid Publishing . The division of labor between the two of us has been this: Shawn gets the manuscri
- Ethan Frome (Edith Wharton)One Central Character with offshoot characters that embody a multitude of the main character’s personality traits: Ethan Frome is a poor farmer in rur
- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (J.K. Rowling)How does the second of the Harry Potter series look through the Story Grid lens? Let's break it down by the Editor's 6 Core Questions .
- Battle Your Way to an Explosive Core EventIf you’re struggling with your draft, Editors Courtney Harrell and Parul Bavishi will show you how to battle your way to create an explosive Core Even
- Editor's View vs Writer's View
- How to Craft Brand, Business, and Big Idea NarrativesOne of the things I have found useful about being a certified Story Grid editor is how well the framework applies to business communications. After al
- One Sentence Can Fix Your Biggest Story ProblemsHow long have you been working on your current story? Weeks? Months? Years? Are your revisions even getting you closer to the story you want to tell?
- From Initial Idea to Publishable DraftHow to develop your Personal Writing Process “What is the rhythm of a writer's day? First, you enter your imagined world. As characters speak and act,
- Using the Foolscap to Draft Your Next NovelI’m a writer, and of all the methods and approaches I’ve studied about the craft, Story Grid is the one that makes the most sense to me because of its
- What to Expect from a Story Grid Developmental Edit
- Turning the Amateur First Draft into the Professional First Draft
- Our Writer's vs Editor's BrainsWe’ve all heard the adage: left- and right-brained people think differently. That we are more or less creative depending on which side dominates. Thou
- Beyond NaNoWriMo: What Do You Do Next?Did you just stay up until midnight every day in November to wring out 50,000 (or 20,000 or 80,000) words for your NaNoWriMo project? Or are you almos
- Sales Hook Memetics“Kid, sounds great. But don’t forget to feed the editors sales hooks.” “When you pitch an editor or publisher these days… it's not like the old days w
- Targeting Editors6-10 books a year. St. Martin’s Press Bennett : Then I use the list of editors on the agency info sheet, find the ones who do big idea nonfiction and
- How Editors ThinkHey, I thought it was terrific, but I have to listen to my staff or I’ll have to do all of this crap myself…hey hey…you understand…how about Petrossia
- What Good Agents KnowSo a longform piece like Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point in the June 3, 1996 edition of The New Yorker is a slam dunk easy sell as a book project
- Staring Down the First DraftLet’s pretend you’re Malcolm Gladwell. It’s midish-1998. Google won't start up until September. Facebook is more than five years away. The Kindle laun
- How Many Scenes In A Novel: The Math of Story TellingSo you have the top quarter of your Foolscap Global Story Grid filled in. How do you begin to actually map out the rest of your Story? How long will i
- Where I Turned to Learn How to EditJust about everywhere I could. I asked seasoned book editors who told me that editing depended on what kind of Story was being told. You didn’t edit a
- Where Did The Story Grid Come From?When I began my editorial career at one of the major New York publishing houses, there was no systematic process to learn how to edit a Story. That is
- What an Editor DoesWhen a person meets me for the first time and learns that I make my living as a literary editor, the first question he invariably asks is: “What exact
- 1-Page Book Plan: The Story Grid FoolscapWhile drafting or revising their novels, story writers often need a 30,000-foot, 1-page book plan for their stories to avoid going off track. To gain
- The Story Grid Spreadsheet: Analyzing Your Manuscript Scene-by-SceneThe Story Grid Spreadsheet is a tool writers and editors use to analyze scenes across an entire story. The spreadsheet helps us to improve our scenes
- Works, Doesn't WorkHow many times have you read this snippet of a book review, either on Amazon.com or in a major newspaper or blog? This book is badly in need of an edi