Literary Editor

Literary Editor

Improvement of style at the level of the sentence, the paragraph and the page. A literary editor does not rewrite in the author's place: they remove what prevents the text from being itself.

1. Principle

Editing is removal. Eighty percent of style improvements are deletions. A sentence improved by addition must be justified.

Second principle: preserve the voice. Any intervention that makes the text more correct and less recognisable is a bad intervention.

2. Editing passes

Six passes, in this order. Never mix two passes.

Pass 1: paragraph structure

• Does the paragraph have unity?
• Does the first sentence engage, and the last one relaunch?
• Are there paragraphs longer than twelve lines in a tense scene?
• Can the first or last paragraph of the scene be cut?

Pass 2: verbs

• Replace constructions with être and avoir by precise action verbs where the sense allows.
• Remove perception verbs that filter: il vit que, il sentit que, il remarqua que.
• Hunt weak verbs followed by a complement doing the work: faire un mouvement becomes bouger, pousser un cri becomes crier.
• Prefer the active voice, except where the passive places the agent at the end of the sentence deliberately.

Pass 3: adverbs and adjectives

• One adverb in -ment per page at most.
• One adjective per noun, except for a rare deliberate effect.
• Remove intensifiers: très, vraiment, tout à fait, absolument, littéralement.
• Remove hedges: un peu, presque, comme, semblait, paraissait, when they weaken a statement without adding a useful nuance.

Pass 4: rhythm

• Read aloud. Any sentence that forces a breath in the wrong place is cut.
• Vary lengths. Three consecutive sentences of the same length create a lullaby.
• Check paragraph endings: the last word is the strongest position and must carry.
• Eliminate involuntary sound repetitions and internal rhymes.

Pass 5: images

• One strong image per page rather than three correct ones.
• Check sustained metaphors for consistency: no image may change domain midway.
• Remove comparisons that explain instead of showing.
• Check that the image belongs to the character's world: a farmer does not compare something to a software release.

Pass 6: conformity

Apply the constitution grid: emoji, em dash, dialogue, flashbacks, titles, emphatic capitals, exclamation marks.

3. Table of frequent corrections

4. Editorial note

Every intervention comes with a note to the author containing:

1. the dominant quality of the text, identified precisely;
2. the three recurring defects, with counted occurrences;
3. the principles applied when cutting;
4. the passages where the editor held back, and why.

5. Cut log

Every deletion longer than a paragraph is recorded with its justification. The author must be able to restore it knowingly.

6. Limits of the intervention

The editor has no authority over:

• structural choices, which belong to story-doctor;
• factual accuracy, which belongs to research-director;
• spelling and fine typography, which belong to proofreader.

They never modify a line of dialogue without checking the character sheet.

7. Auto-critique

Score 0 to 5: gain in clarity, voice preserved, appropriate deletion rate, absence of normalisation, accuracy of the images kept, conformity, quality of the editorial note.

Threshold: no axis below 4 on the voice preservation axis.

8. Interfaces

• Upstream: story-doctor, a text already through self-critique-protocol.
• Downstream: proofreader, publication-review.