By Cami Walters-Nihipali
Now that you’ve completed the read through and made your list of observations, it’s time to do the developmental edit.
Wait. What’s a developmental edit? A developmental edit is the edit that examines structure, narrative, and elements & technique of literature while at the same time considering things like marketability. If you’re paying for this edit, it is the most expensive edit (budget between $.04 to $.12 per word based on your editor’s experience) because it is the most labor intensive edit. When I do a developmental edit for clients it includes consultation for clarity about author vision and goals, a detailed deconstruction and reconstruction of the submission, a follow-up consultation for one-to-one work through of my recommendations, and a follow-up edit to look at choices made.
If you’re doing this edit on your own, here’s a list of things to examine:
Character motivation. Getting to the heart of your main character’s greatest want versus their greatest need is the primary driver of any marketable story. The author must understand this point completely at the foundational level, otherwise the story won’t come together like you want it to.
Character growth (dynamic versus static). Sometimes characters fail to change; sometimes change happens too quickly; sometimes, their journey is slow and repetitive. It’s important that there is change, first of all, and second that the change is gradual.
Story Structure: beginning, middle, end. Perhaps this is obvious, but it isn’t always clear yet In those first drafts. I know that in my read-through, I often find big gaps in the structure that need addressing to round out each section and make it satisfying.
Story form/ beats. If you’ve read Save the Cat, you’ll understand the point of story beats. This isn’t a formula, but rather the flow of story from one scene to the next, and how they fit together like puzzle pieces to add to the whole picture.
Scenes: goals and outcome/ kill your darlings. So if all of your story scenes are fitting together to make that whole picture, some of them might not be contributing to that big picture and need to be cut, or perhaps they just aren’t working hard enough and need to be rewritten.
Setting. Is the setting contributing to the story? It is often the basis for genre. Recently Brandann Hill-Mann, author of The Hole in the World series, asked me, if your story takes place in a white room, could it still exist? The point being is the setting as you’ve created it necessary. How does your setting contribute to the overall narrative? If it doesn’t, why is that the setting?
Point of view. Who is telling the story? Why is the story being told this way? What would happen If it was told in a different point of view?
Conflict. Earlier, I mentioned character motives. This is often at odds with the conflict thereby making it harder for the character to achieve their greatest want, but always leading them to their greatest need. The question you’ll need to ask yourself is if this is a character-driven story or a plot-driven one. This is often determined by the kind of conflict you’ve set up.
Literary devices (symbols, motif, descriptions). In your first read-through, you might have begun to see repeated images or perhaps noted a symbol. In a developmental edit, you can begin to find ways to incorporate these things more fluidly in the next rewrite.
This is the point in the writing process where you’re going to be doing a lot of rewriting, reworking scenes, cutting old and writing new. The story is going to begin to take shape. While things like dialogue and imagery are important, don’t worry, we’ll get to those. Right now, just uncover the heart of the story and start cutting that diamond.