A structural edit is the ‘big picture’ assessment of your manuscript that looks at the creative elements of your story and ensures they’re all pulling their weight in the narrative: plot, pace, voice, story arcs, point-of-view, style, internal logic, consistency, themes, characters, dialogue – all of these come under the microscope during the structural edit.

The Hugo Award-winning writer and critic* James Blish is credited with coining the term ‘idiot plot’: a plot that is kept in motion solely by virtue of the fact that everybody involved is an idiot. While the idiot plot forms the story engine of many a sit-com episode – and, indeed, can be quite entertaining over a thirty-minute television show – it has caused more than one novel to be flung across the room in disgust.

The structural edit is where problems like this are, ideally, caught and corrected. But it’s not just the big problems that require attention. Do the characters’ timelines match? Can the protagonist actually get from point A to point B in the time the story allows? Does the story sag in the middle? Is the solution to your mystery plausible? The purpose of the structural edit is to ask these questions and more in order to make the story as coherent and believable as possible.

A written report outlining what's working and what isn't – plot holes, character inconsistencies, problems with pacing or voice, consistency of POV, etc – and suggestions for improving, expanding or focussing the narrative as required.

The broader themes and/or issues will be dealt with in this report, and your manuscript will be marked up in Microsoft Word Track Changes to highlight individual instances and isolated issues where they arise.

* Blish wrote much of his literary criticism under the pseudonym William Atheling, Jr, from which the ‘Criticism or Review’ category of the Ditmar Awards takes its name. In case you’re interested.