This month we’re hearing from Kristin Noland. Kristin is an internationally renowned professional editor, specializing in developmental, line, and copy editing of speculative fiction.
She’s edited over seventy manuscripts, including two bestsellers.
What Can You Expect with a Line Edit?
You’ve heard about copyediting and proofreading, but line editing? What’s that?
Line editing is more intense and comes before the copyediting stage. It concentrates on improving your style, enhancing clarity, maintaining consistency, refining language, and possibly polishing dialogue. It involves restructuring sentences, selecting stronger verbs, and decreasing repetition.
Copyediting also does this, but with copyediting, the suggestions are more technical corrections than artistic choices.
Line editors provide an objective, professional perspective. They edit with the reader’s experience in mind but will keep your style and voice. While they make changes within your manuscript, their suggestions aren’t set in stone. You have the final decision on each change. By reviewing and considering our suggestions, you will improve your craft!
At the end of this article, I use a sample to show you what to expect when you get your manuscript back from a line editor. First, I want to explain the line editing process.
The Process
Improving Style
Line editors help refine your writing style by making suggestions to improve the overall tone, voice, and mood of the manuscript.
The goal: to enhance your unique voice without changing it.
Enhancing Clarity
We reduce ambiguities and restructure confusing sentences.
The goal: to ensure your meaning is conveyed clearly to your readers.
Maintaining Consistency
We pay close attention to character’s names, physical descriptions, voices, and personalities throughout the novel, as well as settings and timelines.
The goal: to help readers follow the narrative and increase the believability of your story.
Refining Language
We assess the language you use in your novel, including grammar, punctuation, and word choices. We make technical corrections and stylistic suggestions.
The goal: to enhance the overall flow and readability of your story.
Polishing Dialogue
Line editors focus on making dialogue engaging, realistic, and effective.
The goal: to have your dialogue be authentic, impactful, and serve the story and character development.
We line editors play a crucial role in refining and enhancing your craft and increasing your readers’ enjoyment. By focusing on style, clarity, and consistency, we help you get your messages to your readers with an engaging and immersive story.
A Line Editing Example
This line editing example is from a story I wrote, so I’m not breaking an author’s confidentiality. What’s in brackets would be in a comment on the side of the document.
The bell for the last period of the day chimed, and she Sarah bent down to collectcollected her bag from the floor. Her hands slid, sliding her hands over her cowgirl boots, checking to make sure her kukris were still in their spotsthere. [Or maybe: ensuring her kukris were in place.]
One of her moms had given them gave the knives to her as a gift for protection. Her other mom had sewn sewed holders [Word choice. loops?] on the inside of in her boots so she would could always have them with her. [Maybe, ‘for easy access.’] Sarah never left the house without themher knives. [Could remove the last sentence if the previous sentence is kept as is or the suggestion taken as it implies she doesn’t leave without them.]
She swung her pack over her shoulder and stoodheaded for the door. Almost out the door, her teacher called her back.
“Sarah, is everything alright?” her teacher called.
“Look, I know you just started a couple weeks ago, and maybe no one told you, but my mom died a few months ago. Cut me some slack.” She turned and ducked out of the classroom door.
Keeping her head down, she made her way down the hall andit outside without anyone talking to her. The bright sunshine made her squint. She looked up and immediatelyShe looked at the bright sun and sneezed. “Damn sun,” she said and .”
She turned right on the sidewalk in front of Brenwood Senior High. [Is it important she turns right?] Why anyone would build a six storysix-story school in the middle of town was beyond her. She put her earbuds in and scrolled for one of her favorite songs. “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gee’s blasted in her eardrums as she started the five-block walkwalked five blocks to her home.
Rounding She stopped at the last corner. Three, she saw three black SUVs blocking the blocked her street. One was directly in front of her house. The other two were angled over the curb. [Please clarify their positions. It’s stated they blocked the street, but this sounds more like they are blocking her house.] Her mother was in handcuffs, and two people led Two people were leading her mother to the center vehicle. She looked like she was in handcuffs.
What the . . .?
A black McLaren 720S screeched to a halt next to her. The passenger window opened, and a red-headed woman leaned over. “Get in.”
“What?”
“Get. In.”
Sarah raised her hands and waved them. “No.”“No,” Sarah said, waving her hands in front of her. She made a move to cross the streetstepped off the curb, and the car inched forward.
“Unless you want to be taken with your mom, get in!”
She looked to at her house, and the SUV’s weren’t movingSUVs hadn’t moved. One person dressedA person in a white suit lit a cigarette on her stoop. It didn’t look like he was going to leave anytime soon.
Sarah opened the car door and slid in. “Who are you? What’s going on?” The woman made a U-turn, without saying a word and sped to the next block, and hung a right.
The car sounded amazing. Sarah loved to Sarah, who loves supercars as much as her mother, Clara. [Maybe let the reader know which mother this is. The one who’s in handcuffs or the one who’s passed.], her mother, did as they sped down a side street. She thought theyThe car raced down a side street, and she thought they were headed for the highway, but they went under the old railroad tracks instead, into what the people in town calledinto the bad side of town. Comparatively to big cities ‘bad sides,’ she thought itIt was just a rundown neighborhood, long forgotten. There were more crimesThough more crimes were committed there than any other place in Brenwood, but the crime rate was still low. [Consider cutting the last sentence. Sarah doesn’t return to this neighborhood, so it doesn’t seem important to the storyline.]
Sarah turned in her seat and leaned against the door. “Where are we going?”
The red head placed a finger on Sarah’s forehead and said, “Sleep.”
Getting the Line Edit Back
Getting line edits back can be a little overwhelming with the amount of suggested changes, but I hope you see how the text is clearer and more concise.
An editor puts a lot of effort into line edits, and any editor’s suggestions should be considered, but in the end, it’s your choice whether to accept or reject the changes.
When hiring an editor, it’s important they understand your vision for your work and mesh with your style. I suggest all authors get a sample edited and meet with the editor before hiring them. The author-editor relationship is special. If you’re writing more than one book, the relationship will be long lasting, so you want to make sure you respect each other and communicate well.
More About the Author
Kristin has edited over seventy manuscripts, including two bestsellers. Many of her clients are authors who self-publish or submit to agents and publishers. Kristin is a contracted editor for Brooke Warner Coaching, LLC., She Writes Press, Greenleaf Book Group, as well as the editorial service companies—Book Butchers and The Literary Consultancy. Before transitioning to freelance editing, she was an assistant editor at Literary Wanderlust.
Kristin is taking on new clients! She works with emerging female authors as her goal is to help female voices be heard. You can contact her through her website.
Courses she offers
Author course: Developmental Editing Fiction, Author’s Beginner Course
Editor course: Developmental Editing Fiction, Editor’s Beginner Course