Think you’re not wired for fiction editing? Think again

Fiction line editing isn’t a mysterious instinct. Discover how analytical editors can learn the skills and frameworks they need to edit fiction.

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In this post …

• A special kind of brain?
• You don’t want to line edit fiction
• You do want to line edit fiction, but think you can’t
• There isn’t a special fiction-editing brain
• How fiction editing is talked about
• Analytical editors are better equipped than they think
• Structure gives you somewhere to start
• Instinct comes later

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A special kind of brain?

Some editors assume they’re simply not wired for fiction. They’re too analytical, too academic or too comfortable with the logic of non-fiction.

But I don’t believe there’s a special kind of brain required to line edit a novel. Fiction line editing isn’t a mysterious instinct. It’s a skill, and skills can be learned.
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In fact, many of the analytical abilities experienced non-fiction editors already use provide an excellent foundation.

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You don’t want to line edit fiction

Some editors don’t want to line edit fiction, and that’s fine.

You might love the precision of academic editing, the structure of business content or the satisfaction of making complicated non-fiction clearer. You might look at a 90,000-word novel and feel absolutely no desire to get involved whatsoever.
Fair enough. Nobody needs to edit everything.
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However, there’s another group of editors I’m much more interested in …

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You do want to line edit fiction, but think you can’t

Some editors would love to line edit fiction. They love reading novels and are curious about how their colleagues go about working on it. Perhaps they’ve even considered taking on fiction work, but pulled back because they think they can’t.

The doubts I hear most often from editors
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard colleagues say things like, ‘I’d love to work on fiction but …’
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• ‘my brain isn’t wired that way.’
• ‘I’m too analytical, too literal, too academic.’
• ‘I’m in my comfort zone when I’m working with arguments, evidence, facts and information.’
• ‘it’s all a bit of a mystery to me.’

Give them an awkward sentence, a structural inconsistency or a poorly organized chapter in a non-fiction book and they’re perfectly happy. But give them a novel and suddenly everything feels different ... subjective, instinctive. Even a bit mysterious.

​And I don’t buy it. I think they’ve been fed a myth.

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There isn’t a special fiction-editing brain

I honestly don’t believe that fiction editors are born with a mysterious ability to look at a passage of prose and simply know what’s wrong with it or what’s right with it, why it’s working or not working, why it’s engaging or flat.

I’d even go as far as saying that I think that approach is a little arrogant.

That’s not to say that experienced fiction editors never work intuitively. We do. We might sense that a scene is dragging, that a character’s reaction doesn’t quite ring true, that the viewpoint has become unstable or that a piece of dialogue isn’t doing what the writer needs it to do.

But that instinct didn’t appear from nowhere. It was built.

It comes from knowledge, close reading, experience, pattern recognition and practice.

The very same thing happens in other kinds of editing:

• A humanities copyeditor might spot a problem almost before they can articulate why it’s a problem.
• A medical editor might immediately recognize a weak transition or an unsupported claim.
• Someone who works regularly with reports or grant proposals might sense that a section is in the wrong place before they’ve consciously analysed the structure.
• A business specialist might identify a slip in brand voice before they’d nailed the specifics of why the language isn’t sitting quite right.

And yet we wouldn’t usually describe those abilities as mysterious, not at all. Instead, we’d recognize them as expertise. And just like non-fiction editors, the skills fiction editors have learned eventually become a kind of muscle memory.
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So why do we sometimes treat fiction differently?

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How fiction editing is talked about

There’s no shortage of advice about editing fiction: Show, don’t tell. Avoid head-hopping. Make your characters believable. Give every scene a purpose. Raise the stakes. Keep the reader turning the pages. Watch the pacing. Make the dialogue sound natural.

All of these ideas are important. However, there’s a huge difference between knowing a principle and knowing how to analyse a manuscript to check whether those principles are in play.

Suppose you’re reading a scene and something feels flat. What do you do next?

• Advice like ‘improve the pacing’ isn’t much help if you don’t know why the pacing feels slow in the first place.
• ‘Make the character more engaging’ doesn’t tell you what the current version is failing to achieve.
• ‘Show, don’t tell’ can be actively unhelpful if it encourages an editor to start treating every piece of narrative summary as a problem.

For someone who thinks analytically, a collection of fiction-writing and editing principles can feel frustratingly loose.

You know the terminology and you understand the advice in theory, but when an actual manuscript lands in front of you, you still don’t know where to start.

I think that’s where many editors conclude that they simply don’t have the right instincts for fiction. And yet I’m not convinced that it’s because of how they’re wired.

​I think instead that what they’re actually missing is structure.

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Analytical editors are better equipped than they think

If you come from an academic, technical, business or other non-fiction editing background, you already know how to analyse and ask questions such as:

• What is the writer trying to achieve in this section?
• Is the information the reader needs actually here?
• Is it in the right order?
• Does this follow logically from what came before?
• Is the writer assuming knowledge the reader doesn’t have?
• Is this sentence saying what the author thinks it’s saying?
• Has something important been left unexplained?

Those habits are critical for novel editing, and while the questions and the language used to explain the solutions might change because a work of fiction is trying to do different things, the shift is sometimes actually quite subtle. Plus, the underlying analytical process is still in play.

And so the fiction editor might ask:

• What is the writer trying to achieve in this scene?
• What does the reader know at this point?
• What does the viewpoint character know?
• Where’s the reader’s attention being directed and what are they being encouraged to expect?
• Are the events in the scene in an order that demonstrates cause and effect?
• What emotional response is the scene trying to create?
• Is the prose creating that response? If it isn’t, why not?

​Those are analytical questions. And once you start asking them, fiction becomes much less mysterious.

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Analysis isn’t the same thing as imposing a formula

This is where I think people sometimes become wary. When those of us who love an analytical approach to fiction editing start talking about ‘frameworks’, ‘systems’ and ‘analysis’, it can sound as though we’re trying to turn fiction into mathematics.

Put Character A here. Add some conflict on page 12. Insert an emotional response. Increase tension by 17 per cent. Novel edit complete.

If only! But that isn’t what I mean. Good fiction is far too varied for that.

For example, a literary novel and a fast-paced thriller are not trying to create the same reading experience. A comic novel can succeed by doing something that would be disastrous in a psychological thriller. And a technique that works beautifully for one writer could feel completely wrong in the hands of another.

And so a framework isn’t there to tell us what a book must do. Instead, it helps us work out what this particular book is trying to do – and whether the choices on the page are helping it succeed.

That distinction really matters. Analysis isn’t about forcing a manuscript to conform to a template, but rather about understanding cause and effect.
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• If the writer includes X or withholds Y, what does the reader experience as a result?
• If the viewpoint shifts there, what changes?
• If this paragraph explains the character’s emotion directly, what effect does that have compared with allowing the reader to infer it?
• If that line of dialogue was removed, what’s lost or gained?
• If the backstory in this scene is moved somewhere else, how would that affect reader engagement?

Once you can see those relationships, you can make editorial decisions for reasons you can explain.
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That’s much more useful than ‘It just feels wrong’. In fact, it’s essential because fiction editors need to be able to explain and justify their recommendations to an author, not just suggest changes that appear random and based on gut feeling.

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Structure gives you somewhere to start

This is the part I care about most when I teach fiction editing (and when I report to my clients).

I want editors to have a way into the manuscript.

I’m not talking about a giant checklist they have to apply mechanically or a set of commandments, but rather a route – a way of getting under the skin of a novel at scene level.

If something feels like it’s not working, I want them to be able to slow down, break the problem apart and ask useful questions:

• What’s happening here?
• What’s the writer trying to make the reader notice?
• What information is available?
• What’s being implied?
• Whose perspective are we experiencing?
• What changes during the scene?
• Where does the pressure, energy or tension rise or fall?
• What does the reader want to know next?
• Does the prose support the intended effect?

From there, you can start identifying why a passage works or doesn’t work. And once you know why, your editorial suggestions become much more precise and genuinely useful for your author.

Instead of saying ‘This scene is a bit slow’, you can explain what’s making it feel slow and offer options that would solve the problem.

Or rather than saying, ‘I’m not connecting with this character’, you can examine what information the reader’s been given, the degree of psychic distance, what the character wants and how their emotional responses are being presented.

Or rather than ‘This dialogue doesn’t sound natural,’ you can look at what the speech is actually doing: whether both characters sound the same, whether they’re saying things they already know for the reader’s benefit, whether the exchange has an underlying purpose, whether the characters are responding to one another or simply taking turns delivering information.
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The judgement is still yours, but now you have something to base it on.

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Instinct comes later

There’s nothing wrong with editorial instinct; it’s incredibly useful. But I think we sometimes get the order backwards.

We tell people to trust their instincts before they’ve had the opportunity to develop them.

An experienced editor might read three lines and immediately sense a point-of-view problem, whereas a newer fiction editor might need to stop and work through it deliberately, asking questions such as:

• Who’s perceiving this?
• Could this character know that?
• Whose language is being used?
• Have we moved from one consciousness into another?

That slower process isn’t evidence that they’re bad at fiction editing, but rather that they’re practising their art and honing their skills.
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And when you do something consciously often enough, eventually you start doing parts of it automatically. In other words, the framework doesn’t replace instinct but instead helps you build it.

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The language is different, but the skills are familiar

The terminology can make fiction line editing feel more alien than it really is. Words and phrases like psychic distance, viewpoint, backstory, scene momentum and character voice might feel unfamiliar, but many of the underlying editorial skills aren’t.

• If you already edit non-fiction, you’re used to asking what a section is trying to achieve and whether every part of it is contributing to that purpose. In fiction, you can apply the same thinking to a scene.

• If you work with author or brand voice, you already know how to assess consistency in diction, tone and register. Those skills are useful when you’re looking at narrative and character voice.

• If you analyse the order in which an argument or explanation unfolds, you already understand the importance of progression and cause and effect. Fiction asks you to apply that thinking to narrative momentum.

• And if you regularly decide how much background information a reader needs, and when they need it, you’re already dealing with a question that fiction editors encounter constantly when working with backstory and exposition.​

​The terminology and material change, but the analytical habits are often much more familiar than they first appear.

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Wrapping up: You might not have the ‘wrong kind of brain’

If you don’t want to edit fiction, don’t. There are plenty of other kinds of editing, and nobody gets bonus points for taking on work they don’t enjoy.

But if you do want to line edit fiction and the thing stopping you is the belief that you’re too analytical, too academic or simply not wired for it, I’d ask you to challenge that assumption.

Your analytical brain may not be the obstacle. In fact, it might be one of your biggest assets. Why? Because you already know how to examine language closely; identify patterns, inconsistencies and gaps; and ask what a piece of writing is trying to achieve and whether it succeeds.

Working on fiction doesn’t mean throwing those skills away, but instead learning how to apply them to a different kind of text.

Fiction editing isn’t some mysterious instinct, I promise you. It’s a skill. And skills can be learned.

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Related resources

• Fiction editing courses
• Fiction editing books

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​About Louise Harnby

Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.

• Get in touch: Louise Harnby | Crime Fiction & Thriller Editor
• Connect: X @LouiseHarnby, Facebook and LinkedIn
• Learn: Books and courses
• Discover: Resources for authors and editors

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