GEOFF EDITS

I’ll help you edit your novels, memoirs, book proposals, short stories, essays, sample chapters, and more. As an editor, I play many roles: funhouse mirror, ketamine shaman, intelligence agent, Sunday School teacher, and deep-clean custodian all at once. If you are trying to publish in places like The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Guardian, Artforum, or Frieze, I know what they are looking for because I have contributed regularly to these publications.

For early drafts, I start by finding ways to draw out semi-conscious throughlines and resonances that resonate like heat spots, or centers of gravity, that direct me where the text needs to go. For later drafts, I straighten out the structure and deep-clean your prose and make it immaculate. Here’s what I offer:

HOW THIS WORKS

  1. Tell me the word count of your project

  2. We determine what kind of editorial feedback you want. Is this project at the gestation stage, is it getting ready for agents or editors, or is it somewhere in between? I’ll read one or a few sample pages of your project and determine whether developmental or line edits will be most helpful. Both developmental and line-edits are the same rate.

  3. Once you’ve had a chance to digest my edits, we’ll have a phone call to discuss.

DEVELOPMENTAL
EDITS

In the actual document, I will have sparse comments addressing macro concerns. In a separate document, I’ll add an exhaustive analysis of your project. These include:

  • Structure: Structure is the most important thing in getting published. I will look at how you structure an argument. We’ll look at a character’s change over time, and straighten out the causality of your story for a clearer backbone. I provide this for short texts, individual chapters, and the entire book as a whole.

  • Organizing Logic: Publishable writing will have a unity of concept within its various components, and once the noise is deleted, the piece harmonizes. Often a writer can’t see this for themself. Like an analyst, I will apprehend the symphonic structure of your writing, tell you what notes you still need to hit, suggests deleting what’s unnecessary, and reorder things so that it flows like an unclogged drain.

  • Character Analysis: For narrative works, I’ll look at your characters and do a deep dive into their motivations, their inhibitions, what drives them to action, and how does that action change them. Like tying shoelaces, I’ll draw out their strands of desire and see how they can be braided for a satisfying story.

  • Argumentation: As a writer and editor of art criticism for over 13 years, I have academic training in how to make an argument. I’ll point out holes in logic, fallacies, or places where you conflated things that were in fact different. As a surveyor of contemporary theory and philosophy, I might bring new thinking or research from any relevant discourse that would add to your writing.

  • Style Development: Everyone has a style, even if they don’t know what it is yet. As an editor, my particular gift was noticing stylistic quirks in emerging writers, and encouraging them to take risks to develop them and write a piece that sounds undeniably their own.

line EDITS

I’ll write in-line edits into the document itself, looking out for things like:

  • Structure: Sometimes, I think of this like moving around the furniture in a room to fix the feng-shui. I might move paragraphs or entire sections around, to make sure the sequence and order of information is as productive, efficient, suspenseful, and organic as you want it to be. 

  • Readability: I think of this as paragraph surgery. How does one sentence lead to the next? What makes you want to read the next sentence? How do you build momentum throughout a paragraph? How do you get the reader to turn the page? This, in my view, is the most important thing in any text, especially for legacy publications.

  • Order of Information: How do you convey huge amounts of information naturally without bombarding the reader? I make sure there aren’t lapses of information that make a reader put something down, and that the reader has all of the information necessary, and not too much, to keep wanting to read the rest of the piece.

  • Clarity and Economy: The shorter it is, the easier to publish. I’ll cut out the noise, or streamline sentences to convey complex things with grace and economy.

coaching (hourly)

book PSYCHOANALYSIS

Struggling with writer’s block? Want to uncover the deeper meaning of your story? Have a book idea but can’t envision a book proposal? Want to write a memoir, but don’t know what your story is? I offer hourly phone calls, talking you through any issues you might have with your project. We might analyze, psychologically, why you're writing this book and what set of problems you are trying to solve, what you're trying to discover. If you’re working in first-person autobiography, we can do a literal analysis session where I ask you targeted questions to reveal yourself as a character—your desires, your issues with authority, what you’re speaking out against—and how to represent that on the page. Globally, we can discuss questions about what your book is, why you're writing it, who your reader is, what market you might be angling for.

BEAT SHEET OUTLINING (NARRATIVE)

The most important thing in publishing any narrative work is establishing causality. I have seen so many people get rejected by editors, saying their work was “too anecdotal,” meaning it reads like a string of unrelated events that are only loosely connected. In these conversations, I help you narrow down your story to one central storyline, going beat by beat, in chronological order (even if your writing itself isn’t told chronologically). Not only does this clarify your story, or point out plot holes you never knew were there—it sometimes reveals connections you never noticed that will present your project in a new way.

publishing CONSULTATION

What does it take to land a mainstream book deal? What goes into writing a book proposal? How to get an agent? What was it like cold-pitching The New Yorker? I make myself available to answer any question you might have: about writing, my own journey, the publishing industry, anything. 

PITCHES AND QUERY LETTERS

For a flat fee, I will write your pitches and query letters, with a strong track record for editor and agent responses. We either start with a draft you have, or I’ll have you fill out a questionnaire, and together, we go through as many drafts that it takes until it’s ready to send out.

  • Pitches: Depending on the publication, you want a strong story and angle with a description of your story that shows you know how to convey information as efficiently as possible. How to establish your argument or angle from anything else on the market? 

  • Query Letters: I’ve written so many of these for so many people, you have no idea. Bring your book description to me, and I’ll make the magic happen. For novels and memoirs only.

  • Agent and Editor Emails (if I have it): Depending on who you’re trying to reach, I can share you contacts from the many emails I have culled in the past 13 years across many publications and agencies.

Interesting in working together? Send me a short or long description of your project, how many words it is, what your publication goals are, and what kind of edits you would like at this stage.

inquire