Read Your Draft and Help Shape it – What Makes it Work? Or what keeps it from working?
It would be easy to assume that editing is what you read about in Dryer’s English or the CMOS.
But there’s a stage before you red-pencil sentences or challenge punctuation, and that’s Developmental Editing.
That is the first kind of edit for any manuscript. Your editor looks over your whole draft for internal consistency, structure, logical fallacies, story line, and character.
To wrap it up, I write you a longish letter commenting on the sweep of your book, the personalities of your characters, the stakes for them, the slow spots that will lose a reader, and how to make your writing grip and hold your reader spellbound to the end.