Think You Need a Line Editor? Try This First

Do you need to hire a line editor?

You want to write an excellent novel, and you know that great writing takes shape in revision.

You don’t want to skimp on any of the many layers of editing it takes and end up with a book that’s less than your best.

Nor do you want to overestimate your writing skills and leave your book littered with clunky sentences that a wordsmithing line editor could polish into shining brilliance.

On the other hand, you also don’t want to mess up your editing process or your manuscript by getting the editing phases wrong.

You don’t want to hire the wrong people at the wrong time and reduce the efficiency of your edits by getting them out of order.

You don’t want to waste money you don’t need to spend on professional editing you don’t actually need.

And you definitely don’t want to make your manuscript worse by getting feedback that doesn’t match your vision.

So: do you need to hire a line editor?

Well, maybe. Or maybe not. Let’s talk about what line editing is, what line editors do, and what your book and your editing process truly need.

The Magic of Line Editing

Recently, I was working on a piece of writing—probably a podcast script or a bit of tricky website copy. It was late, and I was tired, but I needed to get this done, even though it felt like pulling teeth to excavate every word from my brain.

So I dumped all my scattered, rough ideas into a Google doc. And I messaged my editor friend Brannan and said, “help.” Maybe I threw in a pitiful emoji. I don’t know. I was tired.

Anyway, Brannan is a book genius. She calls herself a book development partner for nonfiction nonwriters, and one of her many, many book-related skills is line editing.

So I sent Brannan my Google doc. I stood up to find some chocolate so I could eat my feelings. And I let her do whatever it was she could do with my messy pile of disjointed thoughts.

When I came back a few minutes later, the page was covered in green text, all the suggestions Brannan had made to wordsmith my mess into something meaningful.

I read it to see if she’d been able to cobble together anything useful at all.

And every bit of it was brilliant. I loved every word.

I read it and thought, oh my goodness, yes, this is what I wanted to say.

I read it and my mind felt like it could rest.

It felt like a warm bath for my brain, this beautiful peace. I relaxed into the comfort of knowing, I don’t have to fight with these words anymore. I don’t have to struggle with them. Brannan has waved a magic wand, and now they say what I meant them to say all along.

That’s the power of great line editing. It’s actually magical.

And I tell you this story because I want you to know, right up front, that I love and fully support great line editors and the writers who work with them. Great line editing is an incredible skill, and a real gift to the writers who benefit from it.

So let’s start there: I’m pro–line editing and line editors.

Now for the question at the heart of this episode:

Do you need to hire a line editor?

To answer this question, we need to examine what line editing is, what line editors do, and what your book and your editing process truly need.

What Actually Is Line Editing?

Line editing is the level of editing focused on writing style. It deals with word choice, sentence structure, and the clarity and flow from paragraph to paragraph.

Line editing is where you zoom in to the words and make sure you’ve chosen the exact right word in every place. Or where you make stylistic choices like setting one short sentence apart on its own line for emphasis, or rambling on at length without a period to stretch out an idea and slow the pace.

When you hire a line editor to do this type of work for you, they’ll turn on Track Changes or Suggestion Mode, and they’ll literally rewrite your sentences. Not every single sentence, but they’ll really go through the prose with a fine-toothed comb to make sure every line is clear and powerful and every word counts.

Then, your job will be to read through all their changes, accept the ones you like, and query or reject the ones you don’t agree with.

Line editing is different from developmental editing—both in what you’re literally editing for, and in how the editor delivers their feedback.

What Is Developmental Editing?

Developmental editing is the level of editing focused on the content. In fiction, it deals with story structure, character arcs, point of view, genre, and theme.

It’s where you actually zoom out and shift your focus away from the words and lines and sentences and paragraphs. In order to shape the story’s structure into its strongest form, you have to set aside the details for a while and look broadly at the big picture.

In the most zoomed-out version of developmental editing, my Story Clarity package, I don’t even look at the manuscript. I ask the writer to condense it into a ten-page outline, and that’s what we edit. It’s a lot easier to edit the story structure of an entire manuscript when you’re dealing with ten pages rather than a hundred thousand words.

And I deliver my developmental feedback in conversation on Zoom calls, not suggested changes in a document. Other developmental editors might share their feedback in an editorial letter or in comments on a doc.

But developmental feedback typically doesn’t involve using Track Changes to rewrite sentences in the pages of the manuscript.

You Need Developmental and Line Editing

So that’s what line editing and developmental editing are: developmental editing is about the story, and line editing is about the words.

And both are important! Regardless of whether you hire an editor for either of these stages, you need to refine your manuscript through a developmental edit and then a line edit.

Your manuscript needs both types of editing.

But do you need to hire someone to line edit your manuscript?

Why Do Writers Hire Line Editors?

After all, lots of writers do.

In fact, I suspect that a lot of the writers listening to this podcast would like to hire a line editor, or have maybe even already worked with one before.

Because if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re serious about your writing. You’ve spent a lot of time studying the process that books go through from idea to publication. You know the editing pathway: developmental editing, then line editing, then copyediting, then proofreading.

More than that, you want your book, when you finally publish it, to be great. Excellent, even. Totally professional, holding its own on the shelf next to the authors you admire. You want to be proud of it, to know that you’ve put your absolute best work out into the world.

And maybe you’re worried your writing isn’t good enough to sit on that shelf.

Maybe you’re new to the craft of writing, and you know that you have so much to learn.

Maybe you’re still finding your voice and style as a novelist after coming to fiction writing from academia, or screenwriting, or copywriting, or a profession that doesn’t have anything to do with writing at all.

Maybe you even got feedback from an authority you respect—like an editor, a critique partner, or a professor—telling you that you need a line editor.

Maybe you’re a perfectionist or a completionist, and you just don’t want to skip steps or cut corners.

All those reasons boil down to: you know the words on the page need to be the right words. You’re not sure you can make those words the right words on your own. And hiring a line editor comes with the promise that when you get the manuscript back, the words on the page will be the right words.

Be Careful Whom You Hire

I would encourage you to be cautious about embracing that promise unquestioningly.

The best line editing does do that. And I know how it feels—like I said, I’ve been edited by Brannan, and I’ve seen her work magic. She made her words feel more like my words than my words did.

But a great line editor is hard to find, just because there are so many people who put up their shingle as an editor, and there’s no standardized training or certification or regulation for editors of any kind, and you’ll find as many bad edits out there as good ones.

If you listened to my episode on manuscript evaluations, this is my same warning, but for line editors. You’ve got to vet the professionals you hire to make sure they understand your vision and are truly able to help you reach it.

I think there’s a particular danger when it comes to line editors, too. If you’re searching for line editors because you believe your writing isn’t good enough, then you’re likely to approach the editors you find with the assumption that they know more than you do and you should trust their judgment more than you trust their own.

And if you send your manuscript to an editor whom you believe knows more than you (but who actually doesn’t), and whom you’re afraid to question, and who doesn’t understand your vision and doesn’t have the ability to help you reach it . . .

. . . then what happens is you hand over your voice.

I’ve heard how writers feel after they’ve gotten bad line edits, line edits that didn’t feel right, that they disagreed with, but felt weird or bad or unqualified to argue with. One writer told me, “I just gave my voice away.”

So keep this in mind when you think about hiring a line editor.

A good line edit is magical. It makes your story more you than you even knew was possible.

A bad line edit erases you.

And that’s a steep price to pay.

So that’s my word of caution around imagining a line editor as a panacea. The right one might be, but the wrong one is not just unhelpful, but actually harmful.

The Magic Behind All Great Line Editing

But there’s something more fundamental that I want you to know about line editing. Something I don’t hear anyone talking about, but which I’ve found to be so important that I’ve built my entire approach to editing around it.

Here’s the missing piece, the essential thing you need to know before you start googling line editors:

I find that the best line edits are derived directly from the developmental edits.

I’ll say that again:

Effective line edits are inextricably tied to effective developmental edits.

See, developmental editing is about knowing what you want to say.

Line editing is about how to say it.

And how can you decide how to say something if you don’t know what you want to say in the first place?

Line Editing Without Development

If you try to line edit your manuscript without first doing the deep developmental work, you’re polishing up a lot of beautiful words and sentences and paragraphs that might have little to do with the story you’re trying to tell.

If you hand your manuscript over to a line editor and they can’t see what you truly want to say, they’ll polish up a lot of beautiful words and sentences and paragraphs that look very nice, but don’t look anything like the story you’re trying to tell, or even change the heart of the story entirely.

Your line editing can only ever be as clear as the developmental work you’ve put into the manuscript.

And on the flip side, all your developmental work will never have any impact on your readers unless it’s expressed through effective line editing.

Developmental Editing Leads to Line Editing

When I guide a writer through a developmental edit in Story Clarity, I have us start with that ten-page outline. We set the manuscript aside and focus only on the bigger picture, not the pages themselves.

But eventually, once we get that outline watertight, we move into my Story Refinery package, where we have to make the manuscript match the outline we built. That means cutting scenes, adding scenes, and moving scenes around so that all the events in the story happen in order.

And it means refining every scene so that every page conveys that story effectively to the reader.

Because the reader won’t experience the story via a ten-page outline. They’ll experience it as a hundred thousand carefully chosen, unputdownable, page-turning words.

Those words communicate all the decisions we made in the developmental editing process. If they don’t effectively convey the story we developed to the reader, well, then we’re not done revising.

And so yes, developmental and line editing are two discrete layers of editing. They are two different lenses, two different areas of focus.

And yet, I consider them inextricable.

I don’t believe effective line editing is possible without a deep, developmental-level understanding of what the story is meant to be.

And I don’t believe that the developmental-style work of digging into the heart of the story is complete until we have effectively expressed that story in the words on the page that will carry it to the reader.

Great Developmental Editing Makes Great Line Editing Possible

Here’s the best news: I have found that the developmental-level work of clarifying the heart of the story will give you every clue you need to make every line-level stylistic choice in your manuscript.

In other words, I firmly believe that there’s a way to approach the developmental editing process that will empower you to line edit your manuscript yourself and hone your own voice and style along the way.

And when you hone your own style, you actually preclude the need to hire a line editor.

You no longer need to outsource. You become your own best line editor.

My Approach to Line Editing

I get asked semi-regularly whether I offer line editing. And I get why writers ask that, because I specifically choose to work with writers who are in the late-stage refinement space, when you’re a hop, skip, and a jump from being line-edit ready.

In fact, if you go to the front page of my website, some of the first words you’ll see are:

“This is the space for late-stage refinement that walks the line between developmental and line editing. We’ll unearth hidden layers of meaning in your story and make every scene sing.”

And when I answer that question, “do I offer line editing,” I always feel a bit like that “well yes, but actually no” pirate meme:

Although I feel like I’m the reverse: “Well, no, but actually yes.”

No, I don’t offer line editing. But yes, we’re going to line edit your scenes together.

How in the world does that work? How does a developmental editor and book coach help you become your own best line editor without herself line editing your novel?

It works because of that fundamental, essential principle that’s become the backbone of my scene-level editing and coaching:

Effective line edits are inextricably tied to effective developmental edits.

Examples: Developmental Feedback to Line-Level Edits

Let me give you some examples of what this can look like inside Story Refinery, where I workshop scenes and pages and sentences and words with the writer. These are the feedback examples I teased up front—if you’d like to see them written out and broken down, grab the download below:

Keep in mind that all my feedback is derived from developmental editing. But I offer my feedback with broad open-endedness or line-level specificity depending on what the writer needs.

When all the writer needs is to know what a scene is meant to do and then they’re off to the races, my feedback will be:

“Here’s a concept of what should happen in this scene. Explore what comes out when you take those ideas to the page.”

When the writer isn’t sure how to take those ideas to the page, or they already gave it a go and we can tell it’s still not working, I’ll get much more granular.

Here are examples of real feedback I’ve given to real writers in the last few weeks:

We know that at the beginning of the scene, the character feels this, and at the end of the scene, she feels that. If you put an emotion word in this sentence at this key moment, it’ll anchor the emotional arc in this scene.

Do you hear the developmental core of that feedback and the line-level application?

Developmental: We know that at the beginning of the scene, the character feels this, and at the end of the scene, she feels that.

Line-level: If you put an emotion word in this sentence at this key moment, it’ll anchor the emotional arc in this scene.

I’ll give you a few more examples. See if you can spot the developmental core and the line-level application. And at the end, I’ll tell you how you can check your work.

We’ve figured out that what we want to emphasize in this scene is the tension between these two characters. The dialogue you’ve written is really powerful and full of tension and can definitely stand on its own. These dialogue tags are actually distracting from that tension, and you can cut them.

Could you have this character say something like this, or this, or this here? We know that this scene is about the protagonist trying to convince this guy to do something, so we want to make it really clear at the end that he’s agreed to do it.

We’ve determined that the point of this scene is to be intense and thrilling and action-packed. In this section, if we break each sentence into its own paragraph and shorten the sentences to quick, punchy lines focusing on the action, you’ll speed up the pacing and make this beat feel really intense.

We know that when all this stuff happens in this scene, the character feels this about it, which is a big deal for all sorts of reasons we’ve discussed, so we want the reader to feel it, too.

Right now, I can see how the character feels about the event, but I’m not feeling how the character feels. That’s because in this sentence, you’re putting the character’s processing of the thing that happens before the thing actually happens. That means we hear about a feeling (and don’t feel it ourselves) before we see the cause that creates that feeling.

Flip that, so the action comes first and then the character processes it, and your reader will experience it like your character does.

We know that we need to move through time quickly in this part of the scene and summarize this set of major events while still helping the reader feel connected to them.

You’ve written this summary sequence in past perfect (so, “we had walked”), which makes it feel as though the character is far in the future, looking back and telling us about what happened. That’s pulling us out of the flow of this sequence. It also creates an awkward transition when we drop back down into the moment with the character at the start of the next scene.

If you switch these two paragraphs to simple past tense (so, “we walked”), it will feel much more immediate to the reader, as though we’re walking through the events with the character.

There you go—that’s six examples of how I translate developmental concepts into line-level edits.

And every single one of those line-level suggestions stems directly from the developmental analysis that the writer and I do together. Because in order to figure out how the words will be best configured on the page, first we need to figure out what those words should even be doing.

Spot the Differences

Did you catch the developmental part of each piece of feedback and the line-level part?

If you’d like to check your work (or you’d just like me to give you the answers), go grab the free download I put together, where you can see all those examples on paper and see my breakdown of the developmental and line portions of each one.

You can get that download here:

Meet Your Own Best Line Editor (hint: it’s you)

To be clear, absolutely none of this is a line edit in the traditional sense.

Every now and then, I’ll ask a writer if I may make some suggestions directly on the doc to illustrate what I’m talking about, and I’ll turn on Suggestion Mode and write some words or change some tenses or add some paragraph breaks or draft some sentences.

But all of those are merely suggestions to illustrate the concept I want the writer to see, so that they can then go experiment with them and make line edits of their own. I don’t go through the entire scene in Suggestion Mode making edits on every sentence, as a true line editor would.

Because ultimately, I believe you are your own best line editor. And my goal is to equip you with the ability to spot developmental-level challenges in your writing and address them on every level, even down to the lines and the words.

I have seen time and time again that when we workshop scenes together on the developmental level, we can boost your line-level writing and skills enormously. And by the time we’re finished, you’ll love your prose so much that you don’t need to hire a line editor.

It’s not a quick process, for sure. It can take weeks or many months for you to refine your style and find your voice like this.

But the result is you writing in your voice. And no one can take that away from you.

Need Help? Get Support!

Having said all that, I do believe there is a place for every kind of editing and every kind of editor! Wherever you have weaknesses, there’s an editor or coach who specializes in that who would love to support you and lend their strengths.

So there’s nothing at all wrong with getting a line editor! And for many writers that’s part of their process.

Like I said right at the beginning, I respect great line editors so, so much. They are able to take the messy ideas I give them and turn it into the beautiful words I meant to say all along.

Your Lines Are Your Arena to Express Your Voice

But if you are a writer aiming for a career as an author where you write and publish many many books over the course of many years, it is strongly to your benefit to shore up your line-by-line writing skills such that you don’t really need a line editor.

On just a practical level, you bring down the amount you have to spend refining the manuscript. Hire fewer people, save a bit of money.

But beyond that, when you become your own best line editor, you have more ownership over discovering and expressing the things you truly want to say.

And whether you work with me or not, you need to know how to translate broad, conceptual, developmental-level feedback into specific line-level changes.

Because that’s the kind of feedback you’re going to get throughout your career—from acquisitions editors, developmental editors, and beta readers.

They will give you expansive ideas without concrete steps to apply it. The application and execution of that feedback is going to be up to you—they’re not going to tell you how to do it.

But when you are your own best line editor, and when you know how to translate developmental feedback into line-level changes, that’s not scary or overwhelming.

It’s the space of possibility and opportunity. The space where you can play and experiment and make every idea your own.

It’s your arena to have full agency over how your story is told.

You’ve Got This

It is a big deal to offer that agency to someone else by hiring a line editor. If you choose to do so, make sure that you vet your line editor carefully. Choose someone you can trust, the kind of editor who can work magic and make your story more fully yours.

And even so, know that you have the capacity and the power to do this. You’ve got what it takes to be your own best line editor. You can make your story excellent.

The key is to dig deep into your story’s core. Do the deep developmental work to understand why your story matters, on every level, from the biggest big picture to the smallest beat in a scene.

And then use that as your guide for every line-level change.

To see what that developmental-to-line translation looks like, grab my sample feedback here:

I wholeheartedly believe that you can do this, and that you will be so freaking proud of the result.

Happy editing!