On Reading Someone Else’s Life: Notes from a Developmental Edit

A few weeks ago I finished a developmental edit on a partial draft of a memoir. The author had approached me for input, partly because they felt the subject matter - grief - might be too raw.

It’s a strange and particular privilege to read 26,000 words written from someone else’s heart. An offering in the form of a sustained and intimate account of someone else’s life.

I am so used to approaching work with a critical eye, in part because I have taught undergraduate and postgraduate students for years and I have learned to sustain the same kind of close attention to other forms of draft writing. The privilege of being invited into someone’s thought process, their else’s half-formed ideas. And then helping them see what it’s already trying to become.

Supporting someone with the shape of their memoir scratches a similar itch, but with the added intimacy of it being their actual life as the material.

I suppose most of us read memoir the way we read anything: distraction, pleasure, for recognition, for the pull of someone else’s experience against our own. But developmental editing is a different kind of reading.

On the one hand, I move through the draft, scene by scene as it offers itself to me. But I am also attentive to the shape underneath, the themes and motifs, the connections being made. I am reading, simultaneously, the smallest sentence and with a view to the whole architecture of the thing.

That’s the bird’s-eye view that developmental editing provides.

It’s not the stage of proofreading and it isn’t even at sentence level except where a sentence is doing structural work. For example, establishing time, signalling a shift in tone, or letting the reader know how much they’re allowed to trust the narrator in this particular moment.

With this memoir, the questions I kept returning to were:

where does this story actually begin? What does the reader need to know, and when? How much time should pass on the page versus in the telling? Which scenes do we need to linger in? Where might we end up?

A lot of the work is about finding the shape that the material is already gesturing toward.

Tone matters enormously here too. In this case, the writer had a clearly established voice and a tone which moved between profoundly raw, honest and intimate to sections where and difficult material was held back at a particular emotional distance. What stuck me was how I could offer my insight into getting that calibration right.

And then there’s character. The people in a memoir are real, but on the page they have to function as characters: legible, dimensional and allowed their own contradictions. I suppose part of my job was helping the writer see their own family, their own past selves, with that same attention they’d bring to inventing someone from scratch.

And what struck me was how much of developmental editing is really just sustained, structured attention. Which is odd given I officially have a diagnosis of attention deficit!

But I love getting absorbed into someone else’s project. It’s exciting to be invited in early. And so, I make sure I read closely, once, twice, three times. Making notes in the comments, setting it aside, making more notes. Until I write a lenghty editorial report and targeted comments in the margins.

And I suppose, I’m sharing this because I’d like to do more of this kind of work.

If you’re a writer working on memoir, narrative nonfiction, or academic prose moving into more public-facing writing, and you’re looking for someone to read with that bird’s-eye attention then please get in touch.

You can find out more here.