The Editor Life: 5 Days Behind the Scenes with Alice

Ever wondered what an editor actually does all day?

What it looks like to spend all day supporting writers in their stories?

Or what your editor’s doing in all that time when they’re not sharing their feedback with you?

If those questions pique your curiosity, you’re in luck. I’m pulling back the curtain to share a week in my life as a developmental editor and book coach.

You’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at what I do with writers and what I’m working on when I’m not on calls giving feedback.

Plus, I’ll share all the best editing strategies, tips, and tricks that emerge as I dig into stories with writers this week. You’ll hear:

• How I use what we know about a story to solve for what we don’t know
• Whether it’s okay to “tell,” not just “show,” a character’s emotions
• How your character’s emotional intelligence impacts how your reader feels
• A simple way to track the emotional tension in your story
• How I draw out every last drop of meaning and emotion to make scenes unputdownable
• What it means to be “done” editing your book

I love my job and can’t imagine spending my days any other way. I hope you enjoy this peek at what it really looks like to be an editor and book coach!

Links mentioned in the episode:

• Want to work with me in Story Clarity and Story Refinery? Tell me about your story »
• Get a boost of editing joy in your inbox every Tuesday. Join the newsletter »

Further Listening:

• Ep. 32: How Spider-Man (And All Great Stories) Makes Us Laugh, Cry, and Feel the Feels
• Ep. 42: The 6 Essential Elements of Every Novel, Act, and Scene
• A week in the life of another editor and book coach: A Week in the Life: 5 Days Behind the Scenes with Savannah

Transcript

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Have you ever wondered what an editor actually does all day? What does it look like to spend all day supporting writers in their stories? What's your editor doing in all that time when they're not on a call with you sharing their feedback? If those questions peak your curiosity, you are in luck. Today, I'm pulling back the curtain to share a week in my life as a developmental editor and book coach. You'll get a behind the scenes look at what I do with writers and what I'm working on when I'm not on calls with writers. Plus, I'll share all the best editing strategies, tips, and tricks that emerge as I dig into stories with writers this week. Enjoy this week in the life of an editor and book coach. Welcome to your next draft. Today, I'm taking you behind the scenes to shadow me as I edit and coach writers all week. I'm going to check in every morning to share what I have planned for the day, and then I'll check back in at the end of the day to tell you how it went. I'm also going to share the editing tips and strategies that come up in each of my calls with writers this week. So there's going to be a metaphorical charcuterie board of actionable advice here. I've been wanting to do an episode like this for a long time. I'm inspired by Savannah Gil Bo's Week in the Life episodes on the fiction Writing Made Easy podcast. I always love getting to see a peek into someone else's work life. Both what the work actually is and how they structure it throughout their week. And I'm excited now to pull back the curtain on my own life as a developmental editor and book coach, so you can see what I do and how I do it. The other reason I'm excited to share this behind the scenes look is because usually what you hear on your next draft is story theory, outside of the context of an individual. Writer's work in progress. I give examples of that theory at work in published stories, but it's really up to you to put it into practice. I get to see all that theory in practice every single day, though I'm actively using it in all of my editing calls with writers. And of course a lot of what we talk about in those calls is hyper specific to an individual's story. And I won't be sharing the details of any writer's specific work here, but I can still show you what it looks like to put editing theory into action in the context of these anonymized stories. So in a very real way, this episode is a compliment to my usual how to solo episodes. Now that you have context for all those how to episodes, If we get to explore what all that looks like in practice, I won't keep you from the good stuff any longer. Without further ado, come join me for a week in my life. Happy Monday. That might feel like a bit of an absurd greeting, but I genuinely love my job and I am so happy to be here today and every day. I'm, I just love my job. I don't usually record this early in the day, so my voice is a little bit rough, and it might be a little rough in all of the morning recordings this week. Uh. That's how you'll know this is real. That's our verisimilitude. Oh, that's my favorite word, and I didn't know I'd get an opportunity to work it into my podcast. I like starting my week out with a bit of a warmup, as you can tell from my sleep fog voice. So I hold tight to no meeting Mondays. I don't take any calls, and I set aside the whole day to devote uninterrupted focus time to major business development tasks. A lot of the time my Mondays end up being heavily podcast focused, but today I've got a bit of a grab bag. Later this week, I'll be interviewing a couple of guests for future episodes of your next draft. So I have two interviews to prepare for. I'm also going to be presenting a masterclass inside another book, coach's Mastermind Community next week. I have a version of that presentation ready, but I want to make some adjustments to it for this group of writers. So that's on my mind today. I have a suspicion that I probably won't get to this one because I've got a lot of tasks that I'm gonna list out here. But this is one of the things that I want to get to, I wanna be thinking about either today or for later this week. I also send out an email newsletter every Tuesday, so I'll need to write that today so it can go out tomorrow. And I had my first call with a new Story Clarity client last Friday. Story Clarity is one of my major editing and coaching packages. I'll tell you more about it on Friday when I have my next story Clarity call. But what's relevant on this Monday morning is that after every story Clarity call, I put together some custom story development exercises, questions and journaling prompts to help each writer develop their story and some really specific areas in between calls. Normally, I like to put those questions together on Friday evenings right after our call, when everything's. Super fresh, but I had to leave a little early last Friday because I went to see John Green's event on his book tour for his new book. Everything is Tuberculosis, which was a ton of fun. I mean, it was also dark and sobering and a very, you know, challenging look at the state of the world at infectious disease. But John Green's events are also super fun. so I haven't written those questions for this writer yet, and I'll do that later today. So I have a few different things to work on and some lofty goals. I don't think that all of these tasks will fit into my day. In fact, when I went to lay them out in Sama, which is my daily task planner, It told me unrealistic workload, bump some tasks to another day. And I thought, yeah, that, that workshop presentation probably isn't getting done today, But I'll get some of these done today and I'll get a solid start on the rest, and I'll keep thinking about things that I'll be developing later this week. So I'm going to get to work and I'll check in again this evening to let you know how it all goes. All right. It is Monday evening and I am back to check in and wrap up my day, and it's occurring to me as I record these that you're just gonna get to hear me at all times of day that I don't normally record podcasts also. Uh, with these impromptu podcasts, I'm not really coordinating with my upstairs neighbors, and I think they're currently hanging pictures above my head. So if you hear any bumps or thumps, that would be why. Hopefully the mic won't catch it and it'll get cleaned up by my audio software. But just a heads up, This is the raw real life that you're hearing. Very is some militude again. It has been a full Monday, just chockfull of deep thinking. I'm always surprised by just how much energy the brain uses the brain alone. not even moving around, not even walking, like just literally the brain and how tired I can feel just from sitting at my desk and thinking, but goodness, I am tired. I kicked off my day with writing those questions for that writer who's in story clarity with me. I did that intentionally. I started there first because I wanted to put my freshest energy towards her story. I love putting together the discovery questions after a writer's first clarity call, They're really a journey into yourself and what you believe and what you as an individual human being with a unique perspective on our world are bringing to this story that you're telling. Here's just a little sample of the questions that I wrote for this writer. What do you want 14-year-old kids to know about friendship? Think about how trust is built in friendships. If on one end of the trust spectrum you've got, I can sit with this person at lunch, and on the other end of the spectrum you've got, I can tell this person my deepest, most vulnerable feelings. What are some other points along the spectrum of trust in friendships? How do you rebuild the ability to trust in other people after someone has broken your trust in a big way? And then I wrote a couple dozen more questions like that, packaged them up and sent them over to the writer for her to explore over the next week and a half. After that was done, I hopped on Zoom with Bran, whom you heard here on this podcast in the episode just before this one, and we talked to the projects that we were working on today. I know I made a big deal about my No Meeting Mondays, but I don't count calls with my editor Bestie, Brandon s and Kim Kessler as meetings. They're really virtual co-working sessions, and we jump into them all the time throughout the week. Occasionally we schedule them, But mostly we just pop in and out of them as needed. today, Brandon and I talked about my vision for this podcast episode, how it fits into the content that I share on your next draft, and what I want this episode to do for you. And then we talked about what Brandon is building, which is just amazing. It's an entirely new framework for thinking about the genres of nonfiction books in a way that makes them way clearer to actually write. And she's building out a super simple quiz to help people identify their genre and a course to help them use their genre to write, and a custom GPT to be like a book coach in their pocket whenever they get stuck. It's just incredible. I work with some really brilliant people. After that coworking session, I wrote my Tuesday newsletter, which began as a reflection on the main editing idea that's been bouncing around in my brain for the last few days, and ended up becoming a super subtle lesson on story structure through the lens of your own life. That's usually how I approach my newsletter. I think back on all the editing work I've done in the last week or two, all the stories I've worked on and the projects I've been building, and beyond that, all the ways that I see story emerging in my own life, even outside of my job. And I pick something that stuck out to me, some aspect of editing that's been rolling around in my mind, like a stone and a rock Tumblr, and I explore it for about 500 to a thousand words. I don't start with a tactical how to strategy, I save those for the podcast, but it's always exciting when something tactical and how to emerges from the broader, more perspective exploring concept as I'm writing. And that's exactly what happened today. I'll admit I'm pretty pleased with this issue of the newsletter, and I'm excited for it to go out tomorrow. By the time you hear this episode, that issue will be out in the world already. But if you'd like to catch future issues, you can sign up by going to alice sudler.com/scene worksheet and filling out the form there. You'll be subscribed to my email newsletter, and as an extra bonus, you'll also get my scene revision worksheet, which forms the basis of how I edit unputdownable scenes. And if you really wanna read this specific issue of the newsletter, send me an email at alice@alicesulo.com and I'll forward it to you. After I wrote the newsletter, I could feel that I was starting to fade. Like I said this morning, my list was lofty, but I knew I wanted to get at least a solid draft going of those interview questions for those two interviews I have on Wednesday. So I pulled those out and noodled around on the questions I want to ask. I've got a solid draft now for both interviews and I'm hoping to jump on another co-working call with Brandon or Kim or both of them tomorrow and get their feedback so I can polish those questions up and be totally ready to record the interviews on Wednesday. The day ran a little later into the evening than I would've liked, but this spring I'm working on gathering a ton of podcast content so that I can get ahead and it was worth it to me to spend the extra time tonight so I can get several interviews recorded this week. Batching podcast content is one of the last few things that I'm working on locking down so I can really get my work into my ideal flow. It is hard to get ahead, but I'm going to do it. And that's where I'm wrapping up today. It has been a long day full of content creation from client materials to newsletter content to podcast interview questions, tons of deep thinking here, and my brain is tired, So I'm going to go sit outside, read a book for fun, rest, and head to bed so I can come back energized and ready for more tomorrow. it's Tuesday morning, and I am back at my desk ready for another fun day of editing. I spent the morning getting my life in order, went to the grocery store, tidy up my kitchen, and put some carrots in the oven to roast for lunch. I like to joke that I'm a machine that turns carrots into editing ideas, and I'm going to be creating a lot of editing ideas today, so I'm going to need a lot of carrots. Here's what I've got lined up for the day since it's Tuesday. I have two story refinery client calls this afternoon. Story Refinery is my other major editing and coaching package. It's my ongoing revision support after writers finish story clarity. In story clarity, we get really, really clear on the shape of the story and start revising the outline to match that shape And in Story Refinery, we finish revising the outline and then revise the pages scene by scene to make the manuscript match that outline and make every scene unputdownable. First step today, I have a writer who recently completed Story Clarity and moved into Story Refinery. We'll be taking a really close look at their outline for the middle of their story, act two and three and four ACT structure, and seeing whether it works and whether it's clear enough for them to start writing or if there are any more story problems that we can solve on the outline level before they go to their pages. Then I have a writer who worked her way through an entire draft of her novel in Story Refinery last year. She's now back with a novella, which we've been working on for a few weeks now, and since it's so short and we've worked together before, I brought her straight into Story Refinery to work on it. We spent the first few calls refining the outline, and today I'm going to start reading pages, which I'm really excited about. And of course I've got those podcast interviews coming up tomorrow that I need to prep for. Actually, I saw this morning that one of those guests rescheduled for a different date a few weeks from now. We had talked about that possibility a bit in the last few days, so I'm not surprised, and I love that she is moving things around in her schedule to keep all of her work manageable and life-giving rather than draining. I have been in some environments in the past where my work was exploited, or even when I exploited myself in service of doing the absolute most that I could, and I celebrate every time someone makes the tough choices that protect sustainable work habits rather than exploitation of other people or themselves. Plus as an added bonus, that means I have more time to prep now for the other interview tomorrow. So I'm still hoping to get to that prep today, but I know that if I don't get it totally finished tonight, I can keep working on it tomorrow morning. And that's what I've got on deck. I'm gonna go get to it now and I'll check in this evening and let you know how it goes. It's Tuesday evening now, and I told you I was going to turn carrots into editing thoughts, and boy did I. Today was so much fun and full of so many fantastic story conversations. So I had two client calls today, and I wanna give you a little peek into each of them because there are absolutely principles from each one that can apply to your stories as well. On the first call, the writer and I reviewed their second act and then dug into their third act based on the work we'd done on the global story arc and story clarity. We already knew what the turning point, climax and resolution of this act would be. We just had to put those pieces into place. What we didn't know was the inciting incident, the protagonist's goal, or the crisis. Those three pieces are really tightly connected, and if you can figure one out, you can use it to work out the rest. So we worked forwards and backwards to see which one might become clear first and then triangulate the others. We started with the midpoint. How did the protagonist feel about the giant success that he'd experienced in the midpoint? What would he do immediately after? There we found the set piece, the scene that we thought would probably hold the inciting incident, although we still didn't know what the inciting incident would be. Then we jumped forward to the turning point after this giant catastrophe, the turning point? What were the protagonist options? What choices could he possibly make after everything fell apart in a horrible way? and there we found the crisis, the tension, the protagonist was fighting throughout the entire act. That tension was an emotional truth, a sense of belief in himself that the protagonist was at risk of losing, and if he failed. Of course that led really neatly to his goal for the act to keep on trying things without experiencing that catastrophic emotional failure. And because we knew the crisis and the goal, now we knew what the inciting incident needs to set up, and that led to a lot of options for the writer. Now that they know what specific tension their protagonist is facing throughout Act three. What the turning points and crisis are that will bring that tension to a head. They can dig deep into the emotional truths they know about what it is like to be faced with this kind of tension. Will their protagonist rush forward boldly? Will he hesitate and step back? Will he try to ignore signs that something he's tried isn't working, or will he collapse at the first hint of failure? I don't know. That's the writer's job to explore based on what they know of what these kinds of emotional experiences are like, that's what it means to write what you know. It means to tap into the emotional truths, you know, likely from your own experience, and show us what it feels like to navigate those inner emotional challenges regardless of whether the story is set in your hometown or on the backs of dragons on a planet in another galaxy. So. That was the first call. It was a lot, right? Well, I had a quick break, ate a snack, and jumped into my second story refinery, call the second writer, and I had already vetted the writer's outline, and so today I got to dig into her pages for the first time. Remember, I know this writer, and I've worked with her for a long time. She writes beautiful emotionally compelling stories, so I was surprised when I read the first act of her novella to discover that it. Didn't make me feel anything at all. I told her that, that all the actions were exciting and all the events were in the right place, and yet I wasn't feeling any emotional connection with the characters, especially the protagonist. And then we dug into why, First off, the writer explains that she'd been experimenting with all showing and as little telling as possible. In this draft, the writing was cinematic full of exciting action packed scenes that we could watch like a movie and like a movie we had no access to. The feelings characters were feeling only the expressions on their faces and the movement of their bodies. I've seen more than one writer get chipped up recently by the advice to show, not tell. So let me just give you permission right here to tell in your stories. telling isn't bad. Every story needs a balance of both showing and telling. Sometimes the reader does, in fact need you to tell us what emotion the character is feeling. So that was one challenge. But the greater question here wasn't just should we use emotion words on the page, it went much deeper than that. what I asked is this character's relationship with his own emotions. What is his level of emotional intelligence? How well does he know and understand himself and his emotional experience? How well does he think he knows and understands himself? The answer it turned out is he does not have much of a connection with his emotions. There are a lot of factors why he's been socialized into a certain type of masculinity. He's a bit of a selfish jerk. He wants to think of himself as a tough guy. He tends to stuff his emotions down rather than acknowledge them. All of this means that he's not going to go around expressing nuanced explorations of multifaceted emotional experiences in his interiority. He won't be thinking things like I expected to be disappointed, but instead I felt a strange mix of pity and perverse satisfaction. He doesn't articulate his emotions that clearly, even to himself. He barely even registers his emotions, but that doesn't mean he doesn't feel emotions. With the exception of sociopaths, all humans feel emotions. We are all feeling things all the time that are influencing the ways we think and behave, whether we recognize and understand those feelings or not. For us storytellers, the trick then becomes how do you. The writer, figure out what your character is feeling, even when they might not know it themselves. How does that emotion present to them? What do they recognize? For example, does this writer's emotionally repressed protagonist, interpret all of his big feelings as anger? And how does that emotion impact what your character thinks and does, whether they realize it or not? The extra fun piece of all of this is this writer is writing in first person, which means the reader's access to the protagonist's emotions is filtered through what the protagonist understands about them, which again, is a pretty rudimentary level of emotional intelligence and mainly just repression. So that's an extra challenge here to convey emotional nuance to the reader through the filter of a character with very limited emotional awareness. This is what separates good stories from great ones. This is what makes stories resonate in our minds long after we've closed the book. this level of psychological acuity, of deep understanding of human emotion, even beyond what the characters might understand about it themselves. And so I ask you, as I ask this writer today, what's your protagonist's relationship to their emotions? What do they understand about themselves and what do they not understand about themselves? Whew. Again, that was a lot, right? This is why I love my job so much. These are the kinds of conversations I get to have every single day, and the result is amazing stories that I love and that writers are so proud of, and I know readers are going to absolutely devour when they get their hands on them. I usually call it a day after two refinery calls. Today, though I still wanted to take another pass at those interview questions for the podcast interview that I'm recording tomorrow. So I hopped on Zoom with Brandon and Kim and we talked through their work and mine, and I spent some time workshopping my questions with them. I feel really good now about the questions I've put together, and I'm excited for this interview and I hope that you enjoy it too when it comes to the podcast in a few weeks. This was such an energizing day all day today, fueled of course by carrots. can't forget the carrots. Credit to the carrots. That said, it was still a long day. Don't be fooled. This was more than eight hours of work, so I think I'm gonna try to take it a little slower tomorrow. There's always so much that I can be doing, but I'm going to aim to work a shorter day and take longer breaks, maybe go on a walk. We'll see what happens. Right now I'm gonna sign off for the night and I'll meet you right back here tomorrow morning. I am back on Wednesday morning, although morning isn't really accurate. It's early afternoon now. I did take that slow morning that I mentioned yesterday, and I started my day off with a walk through the woods behind my house. It's a gorgeous 70 degree day. It was a delightful walk though. I was listening to a Regency Romance audio book on the walk, so really I'm not coming in from the woods, but from a cliffside in Cornwall, sea breezes blowing through my hair as I lamented that as a woman, I was not allowed to own property. Anyway, now I'm back at my desk and ready for the day. I have just the one interview coming up soon, and then I'll check in with Kim and Brandon and probably support them on some of the projects they're working on. And if another task comes up that needs my attention or that I just really wanna tackle, I'll work on that. But I'm not planning anything more into my day today than this one interview. So that's what's coming up for me today. I'll check back in this evening to let you know how it goes. It is Wednesday evening and I am wrapping up my day. I recorded the interview and it was so great. we talked about genre and how it impacts your story in the revision phase, and it's a fantastic conversation. I won't spoil any more of it than that, but I think you're going to get a lot out of it when I share it on the podcast in a few weeks. And you know, I just had a ton of fun nerding out about story with a friend. After the interview, I took a break for a little while, sat in the sun, got a snack, listened to more of my audiobook. I could have ended the day right there, but I forget that every time I record podcast interviews, I'm really fired up to go edit them immediately.'cause the conversation's super fresh in my mind and I really love everything we talked about. So I came back to my computer an hour later and I did the first rough cut of the interview. And now I am wrapping up my day. I can feel the edges of a headache coming on, which is probably a sign that I've been pushing really hard this week, and I should make an early night of it tonight. So I'm heading back to the Cornish Cliffs to enjoy the sea breezes and wander rugged mores and tolerate archaic laws about property ownership. I'll see you back here tomorrow morning. Good morning and happy Thursday. I am back at my desk and so energized and ready for another day of editing. Today looks a lot like Tuesday. The main event is my two story refinery calls this afternoon. The first is another recent story Clarity client who is now refining her outline with me in Story Refinery. We've mapped out most of the ACT by Act outline, which means we know all the major events that happen in each act, and today we're zooming in on act one to expand it into a scene by scene outline. So that's the first story Refinery call. The second call is with one of my longest standing clients. She came to me a little over four years ago with the first draft of her novel, and we're now nearing the end of draft five. We've worked this story through several big picture and micro passes. In this draft, we're really focusing on drawing out all the layers of emotional nuance that are happening underneath the surface in every scene, as well as making sure each scene aligns really tightly with some structural adjustments we made to the beginning of the story. So I'll be reading a couple of scenes for this writer and we'll discuss them together and if we have extra time, we might touch on her query letter since she's gearing up to query agents this summer. I have a few hours before those calls though, so I can knock out a few other tasks this morning. I have some admin things I need to do, things like sending emails, so I'll set aside some time for those and then I have an open block where I can dig into any project I like. Maybe I'll start preparing the assets that go with this podcast episode, the blog post show notes, and email. Or maybe I'll start toying around with a survey I want to send out to get your feedback on the your next draft podcast. Actually, what I'll probably do is go play around in chat GPT. I've noticed lately that I'm getting more frequent inquiries from writers who found me through a recommendation from chat GPT. So I wanna go experiment with chat GPT and see what it's telling people about me. It's like googling yourself, but with more steps. So that's my plan for the day. You can bet I've got carrots on deck to fuel me. I promise I eat more than just carrots, but I do eat a lot of carrots. I'm going to get to it and I'll see you back here at the end of the day. I'm back on Thursday evening. It's been another day full of fun conversations about stories with writers, and once again, I wanna give you a little peek into what we talked about in each call. So in the first call, the writer is working on an enemies to lovers slow burn romance in a regency like setting. We've built out the act by act outline, which means we know all the major events in the four act of the story I had planned to take a closer look at Act one today, but we both realized quickly that Act One is already really solid. So we moved forward into Act two. The fun part about Act two is it's where feelings are going to start to develop, but this is enemies to lovers. So neither character really wants feelings, and when feelings first start to grow, they won't even be aware that it's happening. But those feelings, the ones they don't want and aren't even consciously aware of. Are going to be driving their actions. So the way to make all those plot points we've built in act two feel exciting and feel like they flow naturally from the characters budding interest in each other is to figure out exactly what's going on within each character in each scene. What does he feel about her? Why? What does she feel about him? Why If she dislikes him in one scene and then she dislikes him in the next scene, what's the subtle difference between that dislike? Does she hate him more? Does she hate more specific things about him? Does she hate him? Despite some positive quality he shows, which annoys her because it challenges her blanket hatred. This nuanced tracking of their feelings for each other will create irresistible romantic tension between them. The task I gave this writer is one you can do too, especially if you have a romantic arc you want to track though. Really it works for any emotional arc. If you just tweak the bullets, if's the task, go through your scene list for each scene, create two bullet points, what she feels about him and what he feels about her. And then dig into each of their psyches and write down all the layered, nuanced, complicated, contradictory feelings you find there. That's the emotional tension at the heart of your story. So that was my first call. the second call was with my longstanding client, who's writing a YA fantasy novel Full of Dragons and magic. Like I mentioned this morning. We've done several passes on it, and mostly now we're digging into layers of nuanced meaning within each scene. What that looks like is basically we talk our way through the scene, pausing after every beat to examine. What's the protagonist feeling here? how does that tie back to or build upon what she was feeling in the previous beat or even the previous scene? How does this other character's line of dialogue hit her? Why does she pause here? Why does she hesitate? Why does she hide? Why does she observe? Why does she decide? Why does she move forward? One of the scenes we were combing through was the climax of act three and the global turning point. That means it's a really huge deal. In the climax of the scene, the character has an enormous success. She achieves the thing that she's been pursuing for the entire book. So I encouraged the writer to make that high higher, to bring it up to the heights of rapture, an emotional high, more intense than anything in the book so far. Then a couple pages later, the rug is ripped out from under the protagonist. The success it turns out was false, and she's actually failed with catastrophic consequences. So I encouraged the writer to bring that low down, lower to take it down to the depths of despair, the deepest emotional devastation of the entire book so far. The whole time I was talking, I was holding my pencil, not writing anything, just waving it around. At this level of editing, I feel like a conductor of an orchestra. Louder here, bring it down, softer there. Now really dark here. Honestly, this is my favorite level of editing, drawing out every last powerful drop of meaning and emotion. This is where the work of transforming good into great and amazing, and unputdownable happens. Everything else I do is to get us to here where we can soak every page with such great empathy for your characters that they come alive in your reader's minds and linger with them long after they read the final page. So that was my second call of the day. Those calls were the bulk of my day, as they should be. I did get my admin tasks done and emails sent this morning. Although I once again underestimated just how terribly long it takes me to send even a single email. And I used up all that time when I was going to play with Chat chi pt, which made me sad. So I still don't know what the AI is saying about me. Maybe I can find out tomorrow. I'm so curious. Actually, I would love to hear from you about this. Have you ever used AI like chat GPT to search for editors or book coaches for your book? What prompts did you give it and what were the results? If you'd like to let me know. Send me an email at alice@alicesuler.com. I would love to hear, and that's where I'm wrapping up today. Tomorrow evening, I'm traveling to spend the weekend dancing to a big band at a swing dance event, and I'm really excited for it, which means I need to go pack tonight. So I'm ready to go tomorrow. So I'm going to go do that and I'll meet you back here tomorrow morning. it's Friday now, and I'm getting ready to finish out the week strong. I will admit it has been a really full week. This week. I've been pushing hard, a little harder than I normally like, but some weeks are like that, and hopefully I'll be able to slow down a little bit next week. I'm also really looking forward to swing dancing this weekend. My suitcase is packed and sitting by the door, so I'm ready to hit the road as soon as I wrap up the day. But that's all hours away. First, I have my Friday work ahead. The main event today is one client call this afternoon. It's the fourth and final call with a writer who's been working with me in story clarity for the last couple of months. Like I mentioned on Monday, story Clarity is one of my major editing and coaching packages. It's my starting point for deep revision support for second drafts and beyond. At the beginning of story clarity, writers send me several materials, including their manuscript and a detailed 10 page outline of the story. Then for two months, we dig in together to find out what their story is really about and sharpen their vision for the story. To crystal clarity, we map out the essential arc of the story in a teeny tiny outline, and then prepare the writer to expand that into an act by act outline, and then seen by scene outline that can support their entire revision process. By the end of story clarity, writers know what their story is about both in the external plot and the internal character arc, And they know how those two threads are inextricably connected and drive each other and they have a holistic revision process to guide them in adding detail to the outline and then revising the manuscript to match that outline. Sometimes writers choose to take everything we learned in story clarity and keep building on it on their own. More often they like to add on a series of story refinery calls for continued support as they flesh out the outline and then start revising the pages. Today's call is the final story clarity call for this writer, but we already know that she'll be continuing with a few story refinery calls, so it's not the last time we'll work on this story together. And that's where I'll leave you this morning. I'm going to go read all the ideas that this writer has been developing in response to the homework I gave her a couple weeks ago. I sent her some pretty intense journaling prompts, and I wanna spend a good bit of time exploring everything that came up for her before we talk. I'll see you back here this evening to let you know how it goes. It is Friday evening and I'm back for a final check-in. My focus today was fully on that story clarity client and her story. She brought such beautiful and rich reflections from her story exploration in between our calls, and we had a really fun conversation putting together all the puzzle pieces of her story that we've gathered together throughout the last eight weeks. If today had been the first or second or third call of a writer's story clarity, you'd be hearing a very different reflection. Right now, I'd be telling you about how we, once again, triangulated the inciting incidents, turning point and climax to use what we knew to solve for what we didn't yet know because we did. Or I'd be talking about how I love to use the framework of the love genre for all kinds of stories about human relationships, for friendships and family relationships, as well as romance. At the end of the day, the beats of the love genre are really the arc of humans coming closer together or breaking farther apart. The writer and I talked about that too, and we applied the love genre beats to her story of friendship. But this was the writer's fourth call, her final call and story clarity, and every time I wrap up story clarity with a writer, I find myself reflecting. On what it means to Mark progress in the process of revising a novel. If you've listened to my recent episode on manuscript evaluations, you know that I spent years experimenting with a wide variety of ways to structure the editing package. That eventually became story clarity. I kept expanding and contracting the package, trying to find just the right balance of progress that felt useful to the writer, outcomes that were satisfying and possible to reach, and a scope that fit within writer's budgets and timelines. What makes the process of revising a novel difficult to package is that it's never done right. Art is never finished, only abandoned after all. It's done when it's shipped, when it's off to the publisher or self-published in all the places I put done in quotation marks, because when books really nag at writers, they come back for second editions or the revised and updated version, or they pull the self-published book down and they put up a new draft. Done is an elusive target at the best of times when you're in the production phase. And at this stage of story development, we are so frigging far from the production phase. we are working with a completed draft, a first draft or a second draft, or a 10th draft. And yet for weeks at a time, the work that we're doing bears more resemblance to brainstorming a new story idea than to polishing up words on the page. That is to say even this many drafts in the work can feel like it's closer to the beginning than the end. Plus it's cyclical, it's recursive, it's iterative, it's continually cycling back to base principles, telling ourselves the same story over and over and over again, and each time seeing it a little bit clearer, getting a little bit sharper, understanding, a little bit better. There's a reason why I have my Story Clarity. Clients send me a 10 page outline of their current draft, and then within story clarity, we rebuild a teeny tiny six point outline that takes up half a page, and then we expand that to an act by act outline and then to scene by scene. Again. Actually, there are many reasons why. This is the process I use, and one of them is that as Dr. Paula Rasinski of the Elon University Writing Center would tell me all the time, writing is recursive, revision is recursive. Storytelling is recursive. Every time we go back to the beginning and tell ourselves and each other the story again, it gets a couple degrees clearer, sharper, cleaner, more solid, more focused, more tight. So how do I package that? How do I box up one discreet section of that cyclical fluid, ongoing recursive flow and promise. By X date, we'll solve it all. The answer is I can't. I cannot promise that any story will be completely solved within the four calls of story clarity, partly because every story comes in at a different stage of development with different hyper-specific needs, but mostly because every layer of solved opens up the next layer of newly visible unsolved. There is no fully solved until the book is published, and even then, that's just because the writer decided to plant their flag right there and call it done. after I wrapped with this afternoon's writer, both of us fired up with newfound clarity and a sense that we had finally gotten our grasp around the story. I reached out to Kim and Brandon. I shared that teeny tiny six point outline we'd built. They asked a couple of really good questions about it, and for a little while I went into a tailspin. I worried that I'd actually vastly missed the mark an hour earlier when the writer and I had built it together. But to frame this work as success or failure in that way as solved or unsolved, fixed or broken, is just not true. not only is it unhelpfully discouraging, but it simply does not reflect the reality of how story development happens. The entire nature of revision is to look at the shape of a story, ask really good questions, tighten the shape, ask really good questions, tighten the shape, ask really good questions, tighten the shape again. That's what I do in every call of story clarity, and when the questions we're asking of the outline hit diminishing returns, we start revising the manuscript itself and more questions open up. And eventually when we're ready to let it go, we stop asking questions and we send the story out to readers. Until that point, though, every single question is simply pointing us to the next layer of story development. Today the writer and I did finally crack that teeny tiny sixpoint outline, and when Kim and Brandon asked really good questions. Those questions were an invitation to the next layer of story development to come, which the writer and I will keep exploring in story Refinery endurance over the long road of revision, requires that you recognize and celebrate the milestones of progress along the way. The final done of handing the published book to readers. Months or more likely years away? I say months, partly because for some writers that's true, but mostly because it's less frightening to hear than the reality, which is usually years. If the only success you celebrate is the end of the production phase, you are going to have a really, really long slog with little refreshments. But when you can see and mark each milestone of progress throughout revision, the process itself becomes its own reward. We're already celebrating your story. Yes. Years before a single reader can see it. And so the part of today's call that I want to share with you is this win at minute 55 of 90. I paused our conversation to say. I wanna plant a flag here. We just hit a milestone. Do you see it? Does that feel true? How does this story, the one that we just described together, feel to you now, and we took a few moments not to keep building, but to look back and reflect, to see how far we've come from the version of her story that she brought me eight weeks ago, and admire and celebrate the clarity she has now, is her story done? Art never is. But we reached a milestone today and we took the time to see it. So my invitation for you is that you might do the same, that you pause from asking the questions that lead you to the next layer of story development. so you can look around and see the milestones that you've reached too. I promise you. You have passed some monumental ones and when you can celebrate each one, the journey of revision becomes such a joy. and if you need help spotting the milestones you've reached or would like a guide to run alongside you as you strive towards the next one. I'd love to support you in story clarity in eight weeks, your story won't be done, but we will reach levels of clarity that are difficult to achieve on your own, and we will build you a trustworthy revision strategy that you can follow throughout your next draft. I think this is a nice place to wrap up our week together. I didn't plan to finish the week with a meditation on what it means to finish any stage of editing. I'm glad this is where we landed. If you wanna dig deeper, I have so many things for you. Links to everything are in the show notes Of course. But here's what you'll find there. If you loved what you heard about Story Clarity and Story Refinery, and you'd like me to support you in your story, I'd love to chat. Go to Alice sudler.com/contact and fill out the form you find on that page to tell me about your story. If you'd like to get a boost of editing joy to fuel your revision in your inbox every Tuesday, sign up for my email newsletter. You can do that by going to alice sudler.com/scene worksheet and filling out the form there. As an extra bonus, you'll also get my scene revision worksheet, and for further listening, I recommend these podcast episodes. If you'd like to dig deeper into your character's emotions and how to capture them for your readers, check out episode 32 of your next draft. that's how Spider-Man and all great stories makes us laugh, cry, and feel the feel. If you're curious about all that talk of triangulating story elements, like the inciting incidents, turning points, and climax, check out my series of episodes on the six Elements of Story, beginning with episode 42, the six Essential Elements of Every Novel Act and scene. And if you'd like to follow a week in the life of another book, coach and editor, check out a Week in the Life, five Days behind the scenes with Savannah on the Fiction Writing Made Easy podcast. That's a lot of things, so head to the show notes and grab the ones that pique your interest. Thanks for joining me this week. I always love seeing behind the scenes in other people's work, and I hope you enjoyed this peek at what I do and pulled some useful tidbits out of it for your own editing. And now it's time for me to go dance. Happy editing.