This talk provides a developmental editor and book coach’s practical approach to diagnosing what’s not working in your manuscript and identifying what to fix first.
If you’ve been rewriting the same pages without feeling real progress, this session will show you why. Just like a patient who keeps returning with the same complaint, your draft may be showing symptoms of a deeper problem. Treating the wrong issue first only delays the real cure.
After this training, you’ll stop second-guessing your draft and start making clear, confident revision decisions that move your story forward.
This talk is for writers:
- working on memoir or fiction
- cycling through the same edits without making real progress
- who lack confidence in their revision decisions
LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
After this session, attendees will be able to:
- Approach manuscript problems like a developmental editor — Learn the editorial lens used to read a draft for structural, pacing, and voice issues, distinguishing surface-level symptoms from the root cause underneath.
- Triage revision priorities with confidence — Understand why treating the wrong problem first wastes months, and use a decision framework to sequence revisions from the macro to micro level.
- Identify common structural patterns — Recognize manuscript-level issues like unclear narrative arc, unearned emotional stakes, scene-vs-summary imbalance, POV inconsistency, and thematic drift.
- Stop treating symptoms — Break the loop of line-editing drafts that need structural work first.
- Leave with a treatment plan — Walk away with specific, prioritized revision plans.
You can consider enrolling in Rebecca Pickens’ coaching course, here. A small percentage of the course will be paid to SoMeDocs, to help keep us running, at no additional cost to you.
