Deej Explains Structural Editing

...and might just do a little dancing about architecture...

What does a Structural Editor do?

Most people don’t know what an editor does. They think they do, but largely, they don’t.

To begin with, editing is not a single task, it’s a process composed of three distinct phases. The process is sometimes called “the editing funnel”, partly because the jobs go from abstract to specific, and partly because it really can only go in one direction.

Each phase also has multiple terms it can go by, just to keep things fun.

The part that I do, and am best at, is structural editing, sometimes called developmental or content editing. In essence, this stage is about making sure the story works as a story. We’ll get into more detail about that in a moment.

Once the structural edit is done, the copy edit happens, also called the line edit. This pass is about making sure the language of the book works. Consistency in names and phrasing, eliminating unintentional ambiguities, making sure the author used the correct word and not its second cousin, and keeping punctuation consistent, are what the copy edit is all about.

The final pass is the proofread, looking for typos, misspellings, and other close-in errors in the text.

(RacPress works on a compressed publishing schedule compared to TradPub, so the copy edit is basically also a proofread, or has been so far.)

A structural editor reads the manuscript and looks for story problems, plot holes, and thirty-thousand-foot-view problems. If the editor is a descriptive editor, he describes the problems to the author, and it is up to the author to work out solutions. A prescriptive editor — which is what I am — offers a range of possible solutions for the author to choose from, unless the problem really only has one good solution.

The structural editor then writes an editorial letter for the author, detailing everything as much as possible. This may or may not include a copy of the manuscript marked up with notes, depending on circumstances.

After the author addresses the issues and has an amended or rewritten draft, he turns it in for copy editing.

If there is a difference between structural and developmental editing, it’s this: traditional publishing houses used to (and may still) solicit novels from established authors by asking for a book proposal, made up of the first three chapters or so and an outline of the rest. In that case, the developmental editor will offer advice based on the outline, and provide the author with guidance through the writing process, if the author wants that (or the publisher demands it). The main reason I don’t operate that way is that I work best when I can get the whole story into my head. Outlines aren’t enough; I need the actual story so I can see all the moving parts.

(As to “content editing”, I object, but I object to the word “content” in general, because it’s a lazy word used by midwits because it has been trendy the past decade or so. You are not a “content maker”, you are a singer, or a songwriter, or a musician, or an author, or a commentator, or a filmmaker, or a screenwriter, or an actor, or… or… or…. Its usage for structural editing is less offensive than almost any other usage, because we do edit the content of a story. But I still won’t use it.)

What does structural editing look like in practice?

It’s different for every book, of course. But the example I use most often is Sarah Hoyt’s fourth book in her Shifters series, Bowl of Red, because it is the clearest example I’ve had so far. You don’t need to know the series or anything about it except this: It is an ensemble series. There is a large cast, and each book features the core duo of protagonists of the series as a whole, while one of the rest of the cast steps forward to be the protagonist for that particular book.

Being close friends with Sarah, and her primary structural editor, I knew the book was coming, but she was very confident that it wouldn’t need any editing. Given that she’s been publishing for over twenty years, I assumed she was correct.

Then she direct messaged me in a panic. She had run the book past her beta readers, all fans of the series, and none of them understood who the protagonist of the book was. In her panic, she worried that she would have to scrap the draft and write the entire thing over again, but she asked me to read it and tell her what I thought.

I assured her before I even looked at it that the solution was likely far simpler than rewriting the entire book.

So I read it. In doing so, I spotted a few small technical storytelling issues that were unrelated to the main problem — a character popped up in the back half of the story who needed to be introduced earlier in the book (and there was an obvious place to do that, it could be done in a sentence, or at most a paragraph); and a location that had been used before in the second book needed more explanation for any reader who did not remember book two, or hadn’t read it; if there was anything else, I don’t remember it.¹

For the main problem, I gave her two things to change, and said she should do only those, and see how readers reacted. If they still didn’t get it, I had more extensive fixes that could be done, but didn’t think they were necessary.

Those two changes were relatively simple.

First, either rewrite the opening scene from the protagonist’s point of view, or insert a new opening scene that was his point of view, then let the book proceed as it was.²

The second involved a bit more rewriting, but was simple to explain. Having an ensemble cast, the book had a… complicated climax. (Which is the usual situation in that series.) Lots of moving parts, multiple battles going on involving different characters. I told her to make the protagonist’s story resolve last, after everything else, or at least narrated after everything else in the climax resolved. It would involve some rewriting to shuffle actions around and make the larger whole hold together, but far easier than rewriting the entire novel from scratch.

That was all. Open the book from his point of view. End the book with his story resolving instead of having his resolution stuck in the middle of all the action.

A week or so later, she informed me that her beta readers thought that she had rewritten the entire novel because it all read “much more smoothly” than before.

That is what a structural editor does.

How did I know my solution would work?

First of all, I didn’t know for certain that it would, which is why I held additional changes in reserve, in case the ones I thought would work didn’t.

That said, there are two things that make for a good structural editor.

The first part is training. There is no formal training to be a structural editor that’s worth a damn. (And don’t get me started on supposed “systems” and “certifications” that some editors brag about. A credential is not skill.) But immersing yourself in story, and in storytelling and dramatic theory, can be of great benefit. I spent too many years trying to become a screenwriter, and screenwriting is all about structure. But wherever you learn theory, you then need to immerse yourself in lots of story, and try to gain a feel for what works and what doesn’t.³

Finding out how things that didn’t work got fixed can also help. The example that was in my mind after Bowl of Red was a story about Oliver Stone’s script for Platoon, which I no longer recall the source for. Supposedly, Stone had a draft he couldn’t get producers to buy, because they all thought it was too confusing. So Stone rewrote the first ten pages, putting the focus on the protagonist, Chris Taylor, and leaving the introduction of the rest of the central characters to later in the first act. That rewrite is the draft that sold, because producers suddenly got the focus of the story.

The other part is, as far as I can tell, something you’re born with.

You see, while I credit my long study of screenwriting with giving me knowledge of structure, when I was a film student — before I did all that deep diving and study (and practice) — I would often help out other film students by giving notes on their screenplays. I didn’t think much of it, it was the sort of help I just figured you did in a pay it forward sort of way. If I ever got stuck on something, I could ask someone I’d helped with a script and maybe get the same sort of help.

Well, it turned out, I was told several years later, that there were fights over who got to ask me for notes next. So I had some kind of insight even before I was old enough to drink legally.

Alfred Bester (who was a magazine editor, in addition to writing comics and science fiction) referred to his ability as “story omnivision”. In a collection of his short stories, he told a tale about submitting a story to John W. Campbell. Campbell objected to the Freudian elements of the story, since Campbell was devoted to Dianetics at that time, and asked Bester to remove those references. Bester thought for a moment, saw that the removals would not hurt the actual story, and agreed to do it.⁴

This is not something just anybody can do. And even if you have the capacity to see things that way, you still need to have had enough immersion in story, and experience with changing stories, to be able to use that capacity.

1. There was another character who popped up without introduction, but since it was screamingly funny in the way she handled it, I demanded that she not touch that.

2. And I honestly don’t know which one she chose. I try to be as hands-off an editor as possible; I give my analysis and suggestions, am available to help or clarify as the fixes are being made, but I make a point of not trying to micromanage the book. The main reason for this is that I’m also an author, and editors who are also authors are notorious for trying to make any book they’re given into their book. I do my level best to avoid being that kind of jerk.

3. There is also the matter of genre. You cannot know the reader expectations of every genre in the kind of depth you should have to do good editing. So immerse in the genres you want to edit. Which you ought to have been doing from the time you started reading, already.

4. The fact that Bester could do this with his own story, which he had presumably just written recently, and with almost no time to consider it, is (forgive the pun) astounding.