August Tarrier

20 + Years as an Editor
I am a writer myself, so I have an astute understanding and a keen appreciation for how narrative works, and this allows me to support clients in making decisions about structure, pacing, voice, point of view, character, scene, and dialogue.

One of my key strengths is that I am able both to make global suggestions, to intervene in your project in ways that address its breadth and its depth, but also to work at the level of the sentence, focusing on the minutiae in line edits.

I am as comfortable working with memoir or personal essays as I am with novels and short stories. As an academic, I am also able to support clients who are writing monographs, scholarly articles, or dissertations.

The Big Picture
I think of this big-picture work as a process of tuning, homing in on the reigning metaphors and images in the manuscript, paring away repetition and digression, recommending alterations to some scenes or deletion of others, always with an eye to ratcheting up the dramatic tension and to eliminating cliché.

The Line-Edit
While the big-picture work often entails asking the hard questions in order to get at the very heart of the narrative, the line edit is just as vital: if your prose is obtuse or flat or reveals sustained patterns of error, it doesn’t really matter how great your story is. Helping writers to enliven deadwood prose is, in my view, one of the great joys of the work.

The Details of How We Will Work Together
I work in Track Changes, and this allows me to carry on a “conversation” with you on every page of the document. My edit will include margin notes, page by page, line by line. When a potential client gets in touch, I start by providing a complementary overview of the manuscript, in which I focus on the strengths and weaknesses. My review will cover structure, point of view, character development, and dialogue. I also provide a sample line-edit that highlights instances in which the prose is working beautifully and other areas in which it may be flat or unclear.

The review will include information about my fee and a deadline for when I would be able to complete the work, should you decide to engage my services.

The Extras
I am very well prepared to help clients with Query Letters, the Synopsis, or a Proposal.