Can’t quite put a finger on why your story isn’t working? Stuck on your structure? Overwhelmed by your outline? I’d love to help!

In my own journey of becoming a writer, I discovered that I also love helping others with their stories. Locally, that’s come in the form of several writing groups and beta readings. But at the behest of many, I’ve decided to open myself to helping strangers Internet friends I haven’t met yet hone their doughy, misshapen hunks of words into razor-edged tales of intrigue and woe.

What I Can Do:

• Help you with problematic scenes.
• Identify serious structural issues with your story and compare as needed to the Hero’s Journey or Three-Act Structure models.
• Analyze your protagonists’ arcs and subplots for weaknesses
• Tell you where you’re telling, not showing
• Point out when your characters get out of character.
• Raise questions where things aren’t clear.
• Show patterns of inconsistency with point of view and other high-level line editing concerns (overused words/phrases, excessive introductory clauses, etc.).
• Suggest solutions (if requested).

What I Can’t Do:

• Write/rewrite your story for you (unless you want to hire me as a ghost writer).
• Turn your plain prose purple.
• Provide meticulous line editing. I will point out what I can.
• Give you detailed advice on your genre or targeted age group. I’ve read more than a few books and learned plenty of things from conferences, but I am not a publishing industry insider.
• Compare your book to something I haven’t read.
• Fact-check. If something you write intersects with my personal experience and I have insight to share, then I will.
• Tell you if an agent will rep you or that your book will sell. But I will cheer you on!

What Won’t I Work On:

• Anything with a pro-bigoted agenda. Bigoted characters are okay, that’s just life (unfortunately). Teaching others to be bigots with your words is not.
• Anything with grotesque violence.

How About Some Proof Pudding?

Here is my editorial response (posted with her permission, author name and title withheld) for an other-world epic fantasy. It was 106k words, and I turned this around in five days (which was a pretty quick turn around for a manuscript of that size, but it can be done if you’re in a hurry and I have the time in my schedule).

Dear (wonderful writer),

Thanks for trusting me with your manuscript, (title). All the points I make below are with the wholehearted intention to help you improve your book. I will have compliments. I will have criticism (expect much more detail here, as we’re trying to make the story better, not write a glowing Amazon review). These comments are the opinions of just one person — myself — and should be weighted as such. If you find yourself disagreeing with something I point out or suggest, feel free to kick my opinion to the curb. However, if some of my thoughts line up with that of other reviewers you’ve shown your work to, then perhaps those points bear closer inspection.

So right off the bat I’ll start with the positives, because that’s always nice to read first. These are brief and to the point, but I say them with profound weight.

1. I liked the story, as a whole. The protagonist, worldbuilding, magic systems, trial and triumph were all entertaining. That’s a hard enough job to accomplish in writing any story, so well done there.

2. You have a very polished descriptive style. It has an aged, worldly feel to it which fits the setting.

3. The protagonist, Leith, is one I cared about. Also a tough box to check, so again, well done. The narrative in his POV scenes stays very close to him, which forces the reader to attach their emotions (which gets especially impactful there towards the end).

4. The magic system stuff gets really cool once Leith crosses the Way and things start opening in terms of his understanding the world. Would love to see more of the stuff he missed out on and more of his awe as he comes to accept he’s part of that world.

5. The climax was well-paced and tense!

On to the critiques. Beyond the specific comments I make in the document itself (attached), I’ll round my thoughts into two groups, major and minor. The major stuff, again in my solo opinion, would be things that should be addressed before trying for submission. The bar for indie is obviously much lower, and as the story is entertaining already as-is, you would certainly have less revising to do if you took that approach.

In your latest email, you express concern about the pace between the Taleithen and Leith sections of the story. After getting through about half of the Leith stuff, I had the thought that the entirety of the Taleithen segment could be discarded, and simply referred to in flashbacks for particularly crucial pieces of information. When looked at as part of the whole, it is almost entirely backstory. I think to make them jell, now that you have the entire thing written, you might want to go back and completely rewrite the Taleithen portion at the same pacing, so that the “graduation” into maturity isn’t such a jarring change for the reader. I began enjoying the story significantly more once we crossed that line, and the manuscript would undoubtedly be stronger if the first third of it was as strong as the second two thirds. Trimming that section down would also afford you the word count to delve into more setting descriptions (a minor point below), as well as add more of the intriguing magic system stuff.

Your antagonist/antagonistic force is pretty nebulous. For a good portion (more than half) of the book, I kept wondering what he was really fighting against. Jarred is a fine foil, but isn’t the antagonist, nor are the Puristas or is Parador. They send him through ups and downs, which provides action and moves the pace, but they’re not the true foe. Because the book is the (title), and Leith is the protagonist, it was fairly easy to guess that he would end up being the (title). I think you go to lengths to leave some doubt, but those herrings aren’t red enough to be convincing. But the story also suffers from the ambiguity early on, because it feels like Taleithen (and early Leith) are just wandering around Blue Hills growing up, when our brains are trained to want to take the ring to Mordor. Instead of suffering through all this self-shame of just being tainted with the serpent, I think it would be a much stronger tack to have Taleithen suspect he is the heretic early on (which would help connect the reader to the title earlier, instead of providing vague suspicion). As he enters early Leith, he could begin to pass this off as childhood immaturity, then the incident with Rom brings it back into stark focus, and he runs, not only to save himself, but the Brotherhood he holds so dear as he is once again convinced he is what they are after. That makes the reveal with his family tougher to reconcile into his hurried rush back to Blue Hills to sacrifice himself, but I think with a little rewording you could manage it.

Chiefly, here is my biggest concern. Leith is absent from Act III. In terms of the Hero’s Journey, he sacrifices himself in the Ordeal, then reappears as a background character for the Old Dogs in order for them to carry the climax through. Yes, he makes the sacrifice which is fulfilling his arc as a priest, but his arc as a man and Empath has a massive hole. For Leith, his success at the end comes via Deus Ex Machina (the Old Dogs win the day), and that isn’t satisfying (again, to me) when we just spent 100k words caring about what happens to Leith and how he was going to pull through in the end. Structurally, to earn his stripes, and ultimate reward of visitation from the gods, he needs to make this sacrifice at the critical juncture of the climax, which is the revelation of the hidden key on the scroll, and specifically, the special ink that was used to write it. The sacrifice must be made in immediate (spatial and chronological) support and revelation of the key details. Unfortunately, rewiring this will probably take some surgery, which is never palatable. But in order to make this story the strongest it can be, I think you need to do this. Were this my story, here’s how I would do it:

Leith returns to Blue Hills and is in the hands of the Confessor. But is not prepared for the torture he’s made to endure (might need to give us a scene of this, instead of just the result we skip to), and Jarred shows no intention in letting him die. Jarred passes from zealotus Purista back into playground bully, and means to torture Leith indefinitely. (This is Leith’s failure in the Ordeal – he thought he knew how it would end). He gets a visit from the Old Dogs, but is so drugged he’s listening, but not helpful. (if you wanna get really brutal, Jarred cuts his tongue out before this so he can’t even speak, and his hands are so mangled, he can’t write). Eventually, Jarred lets slip some detail about the heretic scroll that collides with what the Old Dogs were asking about and jogs Leith’s brain (insert your detail here). Leith (suffering greatly at this point) uses his ability to recruit help to escape (or better yet, makes Jarred do it), and slips away to make an appearance at the scroll reading. The audience is stunned when he arrives. He may use his ability to hold them all at bay. Gives a speech, protesting the goodness of the magic users (important here as he’s gotta come full circle on the Empath side still), and the heretics and Heretic are not the enemy of the Brotherhood. He reveals the detail about the gold foil or the ink, and then is stabbed in the back with a poisonous dagger by Jarred. He crumples on the stage, Jarred is restrained by Gadriel, and the priests get to work on the scroll.

In that order of things, Leith is in control of the narrative through the end. The sacrifice is made. His service to the brotherhood and in protection of the magic users is fulfilled. That he is brought back to health by the Old Dogs and psychics is no longer Deus Ex Machina, but the Elixir of the journey. Obviously, there are many ways to skin this cat, if you choose to rewire the climax.

Ultimately, only you can decide if this kind of surgery will be worth the effort. The story as-is is plenty entertaining, and the climax wraps up nicely, even if Leith isn’t a part of it. I think you could indie publish it as-is (after cleaning up the line edit level things), but would probably need to put the climax in Leith’s hands in order to get a literary agent’s offer of representation. Again, only my opinion.

A major editing point: There is a lot of POV confusion between characters in paragraphs. I pointed it out as much as I could, but there is undoubtedly more. You operate with a 3rd person omniscient camera, which is fine, but each paragraph should only be inside one character’s head. Otherwise the pronouns get all jumbled up and things get messy. At least twenty times I got pulled out of the story because I had to reread a paragraph multiple times to figure out who was doing what and who was saying what because it wasn’t clear. Adjacent to this, there are a number of places missing dialogue tags. The general rule is that any time you have more than two characters in a scene, every bit of dialogue needs a tag to identify who is speaking. There are also a handful of missing or extra spaces, a few stray underscores, etc. It would be worth the time to find a freelance editor that can give you line edits focused on fixing these structural issues. I was lucky enough to find a local writing group with a freelance editor in it that works on our stuff for free (and practice).

So that’s all the big stuff. Here are some other minor unorganized thoughts I put down as I read. Plenty more like these contained in the Word doc.

Getting through chapter three, and by this point, we see that recitation is a big part of Taleithen’s routine. Yet we don’t see any of the words or other languages. I think to immerse the reader in this fully, you’re going to need to add some of that here and there. Not like fully fleshing out the languages, but enough to convince the reader that the words actually exist in this storyworld, and aren’t merely referred to in passing by an author that couldn’t be bothered to take the time to invent them. You get into it with the Cata Craeum dudes later on, but drill it into the readers’ heads early, as it is drilled into Taleithen’s, so that we believe.

Four chapters in, I have no sense of what the primary antagonistic force is. Should have some semblance of it by now. What’s the problem Leith is going to have to solve?

Your style is very narrative-heavy, light on dialogue. I find myself wishing for a little more balance as it helps me as a reader get to know the characters (especially the minor ones we don’t get POV scenes from) better.

Taleithen’s relationship with Coram is well-explained. Not so for Leith and Math (at least so far). Might give us a little more of their history earlier so we appreciate why they’re so close.

Not a lot of time spent describing interior or exterior settings. A few glimpses here and there, but not enough to put the reader in the spot most of the time.

I want a scene with Leith and Rose before he ultimately turns her down, showing their friendship, and his naive temptation. He should experience some of the things he learns from his family later that are clues to the bond and the Three. The attentive reader would pick up on these things later as foreshadowing, culminating in the satisfying conclusion for them in the end.

Do we actually ever read Rose’s note to Leith? I can’t remember if we did or if the contents were important.

You don’t end too many chapters with cliffhangers or page-turning developments. Generally, that is advised.

A number of scenes are pretty flat (especially in the beginning), in terms of where Leith begins and ends emotionally. In order to maximize the reader’s experience, there should be some slope to every scene, either positive to negative, negative to positive, or negative to double-negative. Scenes that crest or dip in the middle then return to the same emotional state they began at are less gripping, and may lead the reader to set the book down after a chapter, instead of blowing past bedtime to keep reading. You want the latter!

So that’s about it. Happy to entertain questions or discussion regarding anything here or in the comments inside the doc.

Congrats on a great story. Please keep me posted on the progress!
M

Along with that email, I returned her Word doc chock full of comments and compliments, observations and questions. Here’s what the writer sent back in response:

You are a legend. I think you’ve missed your calling as a developmental editor! You have given me so much to consider, opened my eyes to issues I couldn’t quite put my finger on, and spent a lot of time formulating thoughts and fixes. I am humbled by the attention you have given my story, and so so grateful for your time. As you imply, there is a lot of re-writing to be done, with some major surgery to strengthen the plot arc, intensify part one, and include Leith in the final denouement. Frankly I’m quailing at the thought of all that work, but I think you are so right on so many counts. Damn your eyes, Matt Rollins. 

All the goosebumps! I want you to write me an email like that too!

Questions You’re Asking:

• Will you edit a single scene or chapter? Sure, though if you intend for me to edit your entire novel, I suggest waiting until you have an entire draft completed as that will ensure my continuity of thought throughout the process.
• Do you edit non-fiction or memoir? I can, but those are not my forte. If you really want me to take a crack at it, let’s talk.
• How long will it take? Entirely depends on the quality of your writing, complexity of your work, and the shape that it is in. During a typically busy time, turnaround of a 100k manuscript would be about a month.
• How much will it cost? $0.005 per word ($5/1000 words), payable via Venmo or Zelle. If you’re rich in budget and short on time, I will drop everything I can to work on your story to the tune of $0.015 per word ($15/1000 words). Expect a turnaround rate of roughly 1 day per 20k words for a rush job.
• Do you do consultations? Sure. Email me and let’s talk about talking shop.

Ready to Get Started?

Email me here: mrr.theauthor (at) gmail.com

Let’s Whip Your Words into Shape!