Category: sample edit

In last week’s post, I began sharing with you the sample edit I did for DF Roberts on the prologue to his novel The Scholars. If you missed it, you can find it here. If you’d like to know what it would be like to have me edit your work, check out my post from April where I offer a free sample edit when time permits.

Since my last post, Mr. Roberts and I have exchanged a couple more emails about the edit, and we talked about whether that prologue should really be chapter 1, which is what I figured it should be. He told me more about the book, and it turns out that my recommendation is to omit the prologue altogether.

As I mentioned last time, prologues are tricky and usually unnecessary. Continue reading

Back in April, I offered to do a free sample edit for anyone who was interested in what it would be like to work with me and/or to see what it would be like to allow their manuscript to go under the knife. This week, DF Roberts contacted me and offered me the prologue to his novel The Scholars. He graciously agreed to let me share the edit here on my blog (which was part of the deal to get it for free), so let’s get started.

First, let’s talk for a minute about prologues in general. If they’re well done, there can be a place for them. Most of the time though, they are basically just “chapter 1” without the proper title, or they’re a backstory dump that the author thinks the reader needs to know right at the beginning of the story. Unfortunately, those backstory dumps can often turn a reader off in the first couple pages as they try to absorb all of this information that could have been more elegantly and smoothly incorporated into the story later on.

What about DF Roberts’ prologue? Because the prologue is all I got to see, I can’t answer definitively, but my gut tells me this is chapter 1.

OK … on to the first bit of actual editing. Continue reading