CREATIVE WRITING SUPPORT

I offer personalized creative writing support in terms of proofreading, editing, individual coaching. For feedback that is less fine-grained, you can also join the meetings I run through The Good Enough Workshop. There, writers can present and discuss their fiction or poetry with other writers.

Please see the FAQ below if you are looking for editing and coaching for creative texts, including poetry, scripts, and prose fiction and nonfiction. I am also available to consult on your text at an hourly rate. Note that editing for poetry is billed by the hour.

All prices are in USD.

Per-word rates assume that the text is written at the level of an English native speaker. This is not to say that it needs to be perfect but, on any given page, there should only be the occasional grammatical issue. If your text needs more help, we may be best to work on a per-hour basis.

What is developmental editing?

Developmental editing for includes everything that touches on story, theme, or other "big picture" elements. In a story (fictional or nonfictional, prose narrative or script), do the character actions seem compelling? Is how characters speak distinct from each other? In a rhetorical essay, is the theme clear? In a personal essay, it may be a question of how the story elements relate to any rhetorical elements.

For simple developmental editing, I charge 1.6 cents a word. (Multiply your word count by $0.016.) For this I give feedback on aspects of the story, from the point of view of a careful reader, noting many of the same elements that the target audience might experience when reading the text. My feedback is made in the form of an email; no notes are made in the body of the text itself.

What is language-level editing?

Language-level editing includes anything that touches directly on the text itself, sentence by sentence, including copy editing, line editing, and proofreading.

Here I will make notes or suggestions in the text using comments or a track changes function (as found in MS Word or Google Docs). I will comment if the narrative voice is consistent, if certain passages are hard to understand, and if there are errors or irregularities in terms of grammar or punctuation. These notes are conditioned by the choices you have made as a writer. For example, if you are writing a story with a first-person narrator, this narrator may have an unconventional style; we will discuss such things before we get going.

For language-level editing of shorter texts, either a short story or an essay, I charge 3.25 cents a word for the first read. (Multiply your word count by $0.0325.)

For language-level editing of texts of 55,000 words or more, I charge 2.5 cents a word for the first read. (Multiply your word count by $0.025.)

What do you charge for revisions?

For all lengths of text, if you want me to take a second look after you have made relatively minor corrections, I charge 0.75 cents a word. (Multiply your word count by $0.0075.) The original rate applies for new sections or if you add substantially to it in a further version. If you ask for me to look at further revisions (i.e., 3rd or 4th), I charge 0.5 cents a word for each reread. (Multiply your word count by $0.005.) The lower rate applies if you have added sentences here and there but the higher rate applies where you have added whole paragraphs or have substantially changed what I've looked at before.