The Narrative Gardener

Author: The Narrative Gardener

  • The Questions I Ask Every Manuscript

    “Is this good?” is a verdict. “Is this working?” is a direction. Seven questions that tell the difference.

    Somewhere around page thirty of a cozy mystery, or deep in the second act of a historical romance, or tangled in the magic system of a fantasy novel, questions start surfacing. Different genre, different voice, wildly different worlds, yet there are the same questions, every time. Not because I’m running a checklist. Because the nature of story and the reader–author covenant require they be asked.

    These certain questions reveal patterns that craft advice alone doesn’t catch. They cut through the surface-level stuff—the prose, the pacing, the dialogue—and get at the structure underneath.

    Think of it this way: properly pruning a struggling rose all season long won’t reveal why it won’t bloom. The problem isn’t the flowers. It’s the root system. These questions are how I check the roots.

    Most writers approach revision asking: Is this good? It’s the wrong question, not because quality doesn’t matter, but because “good” has no address. It’s impossible to revise toward. It’s a verdict, not a direction.

    The question that actually opens a manuscript up is: Is this working as a system?

    That shift changes everything. A system can be examined. It has parts that interact, support each other, create pressure, or quietly fail. A story that isn’t working usually isn’t broken everywhere; instead, there’s a weak link somewhere in the chain. Find the link, and the revision becomes visible.

    Here are the seven questions I ask every manuscript—and that every manuscript, in some way, asks of itself.

    What does the protagonist want, and what’s stopping them from getting it?

    This seems obvious. It isn’t.

    “Want” has to be specific enough to create stakes, but broad enough to sustain a novel. “To be happy” is not a want. “To win back the estate before her brother sells it” is a want. The obstacle has to be meaningful resistance—not inconvenience, not bad luck, but something that creates genuine difficulty and demands difficult choices.

    If this question can’t be answered clearly by page 50, readers can’t answer it either. And without a clear want + obstacle, there’s no story engine. Everything else, the gorgeous setting, the witty banter, the carefully plotted twists, is decoration on a house with no foundation.

    Not enough:

    • The protagonist wants “to find themselves” or “to heal” without something specific at stake

    Enough:

    • The protagonist wants something specific that requires choices they’d rather not make

    If this subplot / character / scene were removed, would the story collapse or adapt?

    This is one of my favorite diagnostic questions, because writers are often surprised by the answer.

    If the story adapts easily—if the climax still works, if the character arcs still resolve—that element isn’t load-bearing. It’s decorative. Decorative elements aren’t inherently bad, but they are expendable.

    This isn’t about “kill your darlings.” It’s about understanding what’s actually holding the story up versus what’s just hanging on. Effective revision requires knowing the difference.

    Try it:

    • Mentally remove the element in question

    • Does the climax still work? Do the character arcs still resolve?

    • If yes, it’s probably not essential

    Where is the reader’s attention being directed? Is that intentional?

    Every scene directs reader attention somewhere: to character emotion, to plot mechanics, to worldbuilding, to theme. The question isn’t where it goes; it’s whether that’s intentional.

    Readers will focus on whatever the prose gives them the most of. Three pages of intricate worldbuilding details and two sentences on a character’s emotional breaking point signals a story about the world, not the character. If that’s not the intent, the ratio needs adjusting.

    This is why so many “pacing problems” aren’t actually pacing problems. They’re attention distribution problems. The story is moving at the right speed, it’s just pointing at the wrong things.

    What has to be true for this ending to feel earned?

    Working backward from the climax or resolution is one of the most revealing things an editor can do. What emotional journey does it require? What stakes? What setup? Then the check: is all of that actually present in the manuscript, or is the author assuming readers will infer it?

    Endings fail when the setup isn’t there, not because the ending itself is bad. If the climax requires the protagonist to make a huge sacrifice, the manuscript needs to have spent real time establishing why they value what they’re sacrificing. That groundwork can’t be assumed. It has to be planted.

    Is this scene doing one job or trying to do three?

    Strong scenes have a primary job and maybe one secondary function. Everything else is a bonus, not a requirement. Scenes that try to introduce a character, advance the plot, deliver worldbuilding, and explore theme all at once tend to do none of those things well.

    It’s like trying to grow tomatoes, peppers, squash, and corn in the same small container. Each plant has what it needs to survive, technically. But none of them has what it needs to thrive.

    Quick test:

    • Can the scene’s primary purpose be named in one sentence?

    • If not, it’s probably doing too much

    Does the story’s structure match what the story is actually about?

    A story about internal transformation built on all external plot beats has a mismatch. A thriller whose structure lingers in introspection has a mismatch. Structure should support what the story values, not fight it.

    “Pacing problems” are very often structure/content mismatches in disguise. The fix isn’t to write faster. It’s to align the how with the what.

    What is this story’s biggest vulnerability?

    Every story has a weak point—the thing most likely to break under pressure. Thin worldbuilding. Unclear stakes. A passive protagonist. A meandering middle that can’t figure out what it’s building toward.

    Knowing a story’s vulnerability makes revision strategic rather than random. Everything can’t be fixed at once, and trying that path risks overworking the parts that are already working well while the actual problem goes unaddressed.

    How to find it:

    • It’s usually the thing beta readers mention most

    • Or the thing the writer is most defensive about

    • Or the section that’s been rewritten multiple times without improvement

    The last one is a particularly reliable indicator. Returning to the same section repeatedly without resolution usually means treating a symptom rather than the cause.

    The Meta-Question

    Every question above is really a version of a two-part underlying question:

    Does the story understand what it’s trying to be and is the execution aligned with that intent?

    Most revision struggles aren’t craft problems. They’re clarity problems. Once the story’s actual needs come into focus, the path forward becomes visible.

    What to Do with These Questions

    These questions don’t require an editor to be useful. Any writer can ask them:

    • Open the manuscript fresh, in a new document or printed out

    • Go through it scene by scene

    • Answer honestly—not the answers that feel good, but the ones that are true

    A manuscript that can answer them clearly is a manuscript the writer knows. And where they can’t be answered? That’s where the real work begins.

    When these questions surface but the answers don’t point to a clear path forward, that’s when outside perspective helps. A Story Ecosystem Assessment™ asks exactly these questions about a specific manuscript, showing what needs to change and why.

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  • How to Know If Beta Reader Feedback Is Right for Your Story

    Beta feedback is data, not directives. Here’s how to read it that way.

    The beta feedback is back. Some readers loved the protagonist; others found her annoying. Some said the pacing dragged; others wanted more worldbuilding. One person suggested cutting the entire second act.

    The confusion is now worse than before you sent it out.

    This is normal. It’s also not the crisis it feels like. Conflicting feedback doesn’t mean the manuscript is broken; it often means some of it is reader preference dressed up as craft advice. The task now isn’t to implement everything the beta readers said. It’s to figure out which feedback is actually about this story.

    Not All Feedback Is Created Equal

    Beta readers are generous, well-meaning, and almost always wrong about at least one thing. That’s not a flaw in the process—it’s the nature of subjective reading. The problem comes when authors treat all feedback as equally valid, equally urgent, and equally theirs to act on.

    It isn’t. Here’s how to sort it.

    Does it align with your story’s intent?

    This is the first filter, and it eliminates a surprising amount of noise. If the story contains a slow-burn character study and a beta reader says “needs more action,” that’s preference, not a problem. They wanted a different book. If a story is a thriller and multiple readers say “I wasn’t tense,” that is a problem because tension is the whole point.

    Feedback only matters if it’s relevant to what the author and story are actually trying to accomplish.

    Is it pattern-based or preference-based?

    Trust patterns. Question preferences.

    Four out of five readers struggling to connect with your protagonist in Act 2 is a pattern. One reader wishing the protagonist were male instead of female is a preference. These are not the same thing, and they don’t deserve the same weight.

    When processing feedback, look for convergence. Where do multiple readers, independently, flag the same experience? That’s a signal. One person’s strong reaction, especially when no one else shares it, is data about that reader, not necessarily data about the manuscript.

    Does it address a symptom or a root cause?

    “The pacing drags in Chapter 7” is a symptom. “I didn’t understand what your character wanted in this section, so I didn’t feel any urgency” is a root cause, and it’s infinitely more useful.

    Surface symptoms can have deep causes. A reader who says a chapter is slow may actually be saying they’ve lost track of what’s at stake. A reader who says a character feels flat may actually mean the character’s desire isn’t clear. Symptom-level feedback requires ferreting out what’s underneath it.

    Would implementing it make your story more itself, or more like something else?

    Good feedback helps a story become a better version of what it’s trying to be. It clarifies, sharpens, deepens. It pushes the story further in its own direction.

    Feedback that tries to turn a story into a different story is not helpful, nor valuable feedback to take. “I would have written it differently” is not a note. Prescriptive solutions without explanation—“cut this character,” full stop—aren’t notes either. A real note says what isn’t working and why. The solution is the author’s to find.

    Red Flags and Green Flags

    Some feedback patterns are worth flagging immediately.

    Watch out for: vague praise or criticism without specifics (“I didn’t connect” tells nothing useful without a where or why); contradictory taste masquerading as craft (“some readers want more romance, some want less”—that’s audience preference, not a fixable problem); and prescriptive rewrites that reveal what the reader would have written, not what this story needs.

    Look for: multiple readers noticing the same pattern independently; feedback that identifies what isn’t working even when the reader can’t articulate why; confusion that reveals unintentional ambiguity (you meant X, they read Y. That gap is real and worth closing); and questions that show genuine engagement (“Why did she do this? I felt like I missed something”).

    That last one is gold. A reader asking questions is a reader who was invested enough to want answers.

    When Feedback Contradicts Itself

    Don’t implement contradictory suggestions. Instead, diagnose what’s causing readers to split.

    If some readers say “too slow” and others say “too fast,” the real issue is probably uneven pacing: some sections drag while others rush. If some readers love a character and others actively dislike her, the real issue might be inconsistent characterization—she’s compelling in some scenes and opaque in others. Look for the pattern beneath the contradiction. It’s almost always there.

    Beta Reader Mismatch Is a Real Thing

    Sometimes “bad” feedback just means that individual was the wrong audience. Romance readers beta-reading literary fiction will want different things. Adult readers beta-reading YA may not connect with a teen voice on its own terms. Cozy mystery readers beta-reading dark fantasy may find the tone too heavy.

    Before discounting feedback entirely, ask whether the beta readers were actually your target readers. If they weren’t, their responses indicate how the book lands with the wrong audience, which is useful to know, but not useful to fix.

    What to Do When You’re Drowning

    Beta feedback is data, not directives. The author’s job is to look for patterns, identify root causes, and make strategic decisions about what serves the story—not to implement a committee’s vision of what it should be.

    Trust your instincts. If a note feels wrong, it might be. But if multiple readers flag the same experience, independently and without prompting, pay attention. That’s the process working.

    If you’re deep in conflicting feedback and can’t find the pattern beneath the noise, that’s exactly what a Story Ecosystem Assessment is designed to help with. An outside eye can filter signal from noise, identify root causes beneath surface symptoms, and help you understand what’s actually not working versus what’s simply reader preference.

    Your manuscript isn’t broken. You just need the right diagnostic lens.

    Story Ecosystem Assessment™

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  • What Is Narrative Ecology?

    A Horticulturist’s Approach to Manuscript Diagnosis

    ripples in a pool from rain

    You’ve rewritten the opening scene five times. Each version feels different, but none of them feels better. You’ve tightened the dialogue, raised the stakes, added sensory details—all the things the craft books say to do. But something still isn’t working, and you can’t figure out what.

    Here’s the thing: you’re treating symptoms instead of diagnosing what’s wrong in the system.

    Stories Aren’t Checklists—They’re Living Systems

    For thirty years, I’ve worked with living systems as a horticulturist. When a plant shows yellowing leaves, I don’t just spray it with fertilizer and hope for the best. I ask: What’s happening in the soil? How’s the light exposure? Is the root system healthy? What about water flow, nutrient exchange, microbial activity?

    A single yellow leaf is never just about that leaf. It’s a signal that something in the greater system is out of balance.

    Your manuscript works the same way.

    When a scene falls flat, when your protagonist feels passive, when the pacing drags—these aren’t isolated craft problems to fix with technique tweaks. They’re symptoms of something happening at the system level, where all your story elements interact and influence each other in dynamic, often invisible ways.

    This is what I call Narrative Ecology™: the study of how story elements function as an interconnected, living system, where change in one area creates ripple effects throughout the whole manuscript.

    The Gardener’s Diagnostic Lens

    In my garden, I don’t diagnose plants by their leaves alone. I observe the entire organism in its environment. I watch how water moves through the landscape, where sunlight is plentiful, which relationships are symbiotic and which are parasitic. I notice what’s thriving and what’s struggling—and I look for the why beneath the visible symptoms.

    When I’m editing a manuscript, I bring that same diagnostic approach.

    I’m not just reading for craft execution. I’m observing how narrative energy flows through your story. I’m tracking where tension builds and where it dissipates. I’m noticing which elements are feeding each other and which are competing for resources. I’m looking at the health of the whole ecosystem.

    Because here’s what I’ve learned in both gardens and manuscripts: everything is connected, and any one element affects everything else.

    A Different Set of Questions

    Traditional craft analysis asks important questions:

    • Is my dialogue realistic?

    • Are my stakes high enough?

    • Is my protagonist likable?

    • Does this scene have enough conflict?

    Narrative Ecology asks different questions:

    • Where is narrative energy actually flowing in this story?

    • Is conflict generating productive pressure or just noise?

    • What’s competing for space and resources?

    • Which relationships are sustaining the system, and which are draining it?

    • Where is growth blocked, and what’s blocking it?

    See the difference?

    One approach looks at individual components. The other looks at how those components interact to create something alive.

    Technically excellent dialogue can still feel wrong for the scene because it’s pulling energy away from where the story needs it. High stakes that don’t create tension aren’t motivating because they’re not connected to the deeper patterns driving your protagonist. A likable character can still feel flat because their stakes and motivations aren’t generating authentic change.

    Craft provides the building blocks. Narrative Ecology maps how they’re supposed to work together.

    Why This Changes Everything About Revision

    When a story is viewed as a living system, the symptoms become clues to investigate.

    Instead of rewriting that opening scene five times with minor variations, step back and ask: What is this scene trying to do within the larger ecosystem? Where does energy need to flow from here? What relationships is it establishing or undermining? Are these the right nutrients at the right time, or am I force-feeding the system something it can’t process yet?

    Systems-level thinking means making targeted interventions that actually shift the manuscript’s health. The whack-a-mole revision process, fixing one problem only to create another somewhere else, vanishes in favor of specific changes with clear reasons why.

    It works with your story’s natural patterns instead of against them.

    The Horticulturist’s Advantage

    I didn’t set out to combine horticulture and editing; the connection just became obvious after years of moving between the garden and the manuscript. Both require you to observe complex systems, understand interdependencies, recognize patterns, and intervene strategically rather than reactively.

    Both demand patience with organic processes that can’t be rushed.

    Both will punish for ignoring root causes while treating surface symptoms.

    Thirty years of diagnosing soil pH imbalances, tracking pest pressure, managing microclimates, and understanding how plants allocate resources has taught me to see what’s actually happening beneath the visible layer of your story. Not just what was meant to happen or what should be happening according to craft rules, but what’s actually alive on the page and what’s struggling to take root.

    What’s Coming

    Over the next year, I’ll be sharing specific concepts from Narrative Ecology™ that will change how you think about revision:

    • What “drought stress” looks like in manuscripts (and why adding more words won’t fix it)

    • How to recognize when your story is root-bound and needs repotting

    • The difference between productive conflict and resource competition

    • Why some manuscripts are overfertilized and undernourished at the same time

    Each post will introduce a new lens for diagnosing your own work—and a different set of questions to ask when you’re stuck.

    Because being stuck doesn’t indicate a lack of craft knowledge.

    Being stuck means trying to solve an ecosystem problem with a checklist.~

    Want more Narrative Ecology™ insights? Subscribe to The Narrative Gardener for fresh perspectives on the living systems behind great stories—plus the occasional metaphor involving compost. Because some things are universal.

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  • Your Theme Is a Noun. That’s the Problem.

    The answer to this question unlocks your entire revision.

    A ginkgo tree sprout in sand
    Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

    There’s a question that comes early in almost every developmental edit, and the answer tells me more about what the revision needs than almost anything else in the manuscript.

    What is this story about?

    Not plot. Not premise. Theme.

    The answers fall into two categories, and they predict very different revision conversations.

    The first kind: “It’s about grief.” Or loneliness. Redemption. Identity. Belonging. A single word, sometimes two. A topic.

    The second kind: “It’s about how grief isolates you before it can connect you to anyone.” A sentence. A claim. A point of view the story is willing to defend.

    Both writers know what their story is about. Only one knows what their story believes.

    Why the sentence changes everything

    A noun theme is a container. It marks the emotional territory the story is exploring, but it doesn’t plant a flag anywhere inside that territory. Two novels can both be “about grief” and arrive at completely opposite conclusions about human nature. The noun doesn’t distinguish them. The sentence does.

    Consider a hypothetical manuscript—a quiet literary novel about a woman returning to her childhood home after her mother’s death to sort through the estate. The theme: “grief and memory.”

    Workable. But revision with that theme is like weeding without knowing what was planted. Something feels off, but there’s no way to articulate why, and no reliable basis for deciding what to cut, what to expand, what the ending needs to earn.

    Now the theme gets rephrased: “The things we inherit from the dead are never what we expected to want.”

    Suddenly the manuscript has a thesis. Revision has questions. Does the protagonist’s arc support that claim? Does she move from expecting one kind of inheritance to recognizing another? Are the objects she sorts through doing thematic work, or are they just set dressing? What does the ending need to deliver in order to feel like the story kept its promise?

    Nothing in the manuscript changed. The lens did.

    The revision test

    A thematic sentence makes a simple scene-level filter possible: is this scene evidence for the claim, a complication of it, or neither? Evidence and complication both belong—they’re the system working. “Neither” is where the hard questions start.

    This doesn’t mean every scene needs a theme stamp on it. Feeder roots don’t announce themselves. But they should be there, quietly pulling the story toward what it believes, even in scenes that look like they’re just advancing plot.

    A thematic noun can’t generate that test. A sentence can.

    The one-sentence exercise

    When theme is currently a noun, try finishing this sentence: “This story believes that ____.”

    Not “this story is about.” Not “this story explores.” Believes. The word forces a claim. It forces a verb. It forces the story to have a position rather than just a subject.

    The claim can be softened later. The nuance, the complication, the place where the story resists its own thesis—that’s where the most interesting thematic work usually lives anyway.

    But a claim that hasn’t been made yet can’t be complicated.

    Start with the sentence.

    If you try the exercise and the sentence won’t come, or keeps shifting, that’s worth paying attention to. It’s usually what a developmental edit unearths early on.

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  • What’s Actually Keeping Your Story Alive

    What readers feel but can’t name is usually theme doing its job.

    Closeup of a root mass

    Every spring, there’s a week in the garden when nothing looks like it’s happening.

    The beds are bare, or close to it. Whatever was planted in autumn is still underground, doing work that won’t be visible for weeks. A gardener who’s new to the season might look at that soil and see nothing—no evidence of effort, no proof anything survived the winter. An experienced one knows better. The quiet surface is usually the sign of a root system earning its keep.

    Theme in a story works the same way.

    The part that gets all the attention

    When writers talk about their stories, they talk about plot. Readers talk about plot. Query letters lead with plot. Editors examine plot. There’s good reason for this; plot is visible. It moves. It creates pressure and release, problem and consequence, scene and sequel. It’s the stem, the leaves, the bloom. It’s the part you can point to and say “here is where the story is.”

    But plot is not what keeps a story alive.

    What keeps a story alive is the hidden network underneath it. The fine, almost invisible strands running just below the surface. Not the taproot of premise, not the thick roots of character arc, but the feeder roots. The small, threadlike filaments that don’t announce themselves. They just quietly pull everything the story needs to stay nourished.

    That’s theme.

    What feeder roots actually do

    In horticulture, feeder roots are the fine, hair-like roots responsible for the actual uptake of water and nutrients. They’re not structural. They don’t anchor the plant. They’re not the part anyone sees when they dig up a shrub or pot a perennial. But remove them, damage them, ignore their health, and the plant shows it—not immediately, not dramatically, but in a slow, creeping way that’s hard to diagnose until you look below the surface.

    A story with weak theme does the same thing. It might have a perfectly competent plot. The characters might be well-drawn. The dialogue might crackle. But something feels thin. A reader closes it and can’t quite say why it didn’t land. There’s no single scene to point to, no obvious structural failure. Just a vague sense that the story didn’t feed them the way they expected it to.

    The feeder roots weren’t doing their work.

    The excavation problem

    Here’s what makes theme genuinely difficult to work with in revision: writers are often taught to add it. To go back through a draft and insert thematic resonance, find the symbols, make sure the character’s journey “means something.”

    That’s not how theme works. You can’t transplant feeder roots. They either grow from the story’s own root system, or they don’t take.

    The work of finding theme in revision isn’t addition. It’s excavation. Tracing back what’s already alive in the story to the hidden system sustaining it. What does this story keep returning to without being told to? What question can’t it stop asking? What does it seem to believe, underneath all the plot, about the way the world works?

    Those answers are almost always already there. The feeder roots exist. The revision work is learning to read them and then making sure the rest of the story is actually drawing from them.

    When the roots are working

    When theme is working well in a manuscript, it rarely announces itself. It shows up instead in the weight a particular scene carries. In why a throwaway moment between minor characters lands harder than expected. In the reason a reader closes the book feeling something they can’t quite name, moved by something they couldn’t track while it was happening.

    The feeder roots did their job. The reader felt fed.

    The parts readers see aren’t always the parts doing the work. That’s not a flaw in how stories function. It’s exactly how they’re supposed to.

    If you’re in revision right now and something feels thin without a clear cause, it might be worth going underground for a bit. Not to add anything, just to see what’s already growing there.

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  • Stakes Are What Characters Believe They Can't Afford to Lose

    Readers don’t feel stakes. They feel what a character can’t imagine living without.

    Cypripedium acaule in the wild. Photo: me!

    A gardener doesn’t save a plant because the garden might look worse without it. She saves it because this clematis belonged to her grandmother, or because that struggling tomato represents the first thing she’s managed to keep alive in years.

    Stakes work the same way.

    When a character’s motivations feel abstract, when readers can’t quite feel the urgency even though the plot consequences are enormous, it’s rarely because the stakes aren’t high enough. It’s because the character hasn’t convinced us what they believe they stand to lose. Not in some theoretical future. Right now, in the reality they’re currently living.

    Plot Machinery vs. Belief at Stake

    A prophecy says the kingdom will fall? That’s plot machinery. It tells us something bad will happen to a lot of people in a future we haven’t lived yet.

    A prophecy says this character will become the very thing they’ve spent their whole life proving they’re not? Now there’s a belief at stake.

    The difference is that the second prophecy threatens something the character has already invested in. It puts at risk a story they’ve been telling themselves, possibly for decades, about who they are. And that kind of threat lands differently, because the reader can feel the weight of everything that’s already been spent defending it.

    This is why stakes that exist only in the future tend to fall flat, even when they’re technically catastrophic. Readers can’t feel a kingdom falling. They can feel a person discovering that the thing they were most certain about themselves might not be true.

    The Real Question Underneath the Stakes

    When I’m working with a manuscript where the tension isn’t landing, I often stop asking “what are the consequences?” and start asking something else entirely: What does this character think failure would mean?

    Not what would happen. What would it mean.

    Would it confirm the thing they’ve been dreading was true about themselves all along? Would it prove that they were right to never trust anyone or devastatingly wrong to start? Would it mean that every sacrifice they made was worthless, that the story they told themselves to survive was a lie?

    That’s the real architecture of stakes. Not the external consequence, but the internal verdict failure would deliver.

    A character fighting to save their village is fighting a plot. A character fighting to save their village because if they fail it will prove that their father was right—that they were never enough, that they’d ruin everything they touched—that character is fighting something that readers feel in their chest.

    The external stakes give the story shape. The internal ones give it weight.

    Why Abstract Stakes Create Abstract Tension

    What tends to happen when stakes stay at the level of plot consequence is readers understand intellectually that something bad will happen, but they don’t feel urgency. They’re watching the story rather than living it.

    Abstract stakes create abstract tension, the kind that produces mild concern rather than breath-holding. You can raise them as high as you want. End of the world. Death of everyone the character loves. Destruction of everything they’ve built. If the character hasn’t shown us what they believe they stand to lose—the specific, personal, identity-level thing—the reader remains at a safe observational distance.

    Specific beliefs are what collapse that distance. When we understand that this character has staked their entire sense of self-worth on a particular outcome, we can’t watch from outside anymore. We’re in it with them, because we know what failure would cost in a way that no amount of plot consequence can manufacture.

    What This Looks Like in Revision

    When I’m doing a developmental edit and the stakes feel flat, I’ll look for a few things.

    First: has the character articulated, to themselves or to us, what failure would say about them? Not what it would do to them. What verdict it would deliver. That distinction matters enormously.

    Second: is there a belief already established in the manuscript that the stakes are threatening? Stakes feel earned when they connect to something the story has already built. If the character has never shown us what they most need to believe about themselves, we won’t feel the threat when that belief is put in danger.

    Third: is the character aware of what’s really at stake, or only aware of the surface consequence? Sometimes the most powerful dramatic tension comes from a character who thinks they’re fighting for one thing while the reader can see they’re actually fighting to preserve a belief they can’t even name yet. That gap between what the character thinks they’re protecting and what they’re actually protecting is one of the richest places a story can live.

    The Clematis and the Tomato

    The gardener saves the clematis because it was her grandmother’s. She saves the tomato because it’s evidence that she can sustain something, that she’s capable of keeping things alive.

    Neither of those plants matters objectively. A garden assessment would tell her they’re both struggling and probably not worth the effort. But stakes aren’t objective. They’re personal, specific, already emotionally loaded before the crisis arrives.

    The best stakes in fiction work the same way. By the time the moment of reckoning comes, the reader should already know, because the story has shown them, exactly what this character believes they cannot afford to lose. Not the kingdom. Not even their life.

    The thing that would crumble if they failed. The piece of their understanding of themselves they’ve been tending, sometimes without even knowing it, for the entire length of the book.

    That’s what’s really at stake. And when readers feel it, they don’t just follow the plot.

    They hold their breath.

    Stakes are one of the most nuanced elements to diagnose in a manuscript and one of the most rewarding to untangle. If your story’s tension isn’t landing the way you want it to, a Story Ecosystem Assessment™ looks at exactly this kind of systemic question. Learn more here.

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  • A Story’s Point of View Sets the Rules for Curiosity

    What your narrator can’t—or won’t—see shapes everything your reader feels.

    a hornet's nest up in a tree in a forest
    Not everything that catches the eye is meant to be understood. Credit: me!

    What the narrator is allowed to wonder about shapes everything a reader experiences.

    A limited third-person narrator can’t casually speculate about what’s happening in the next town over. An omniscient voice can, but if it chooses not to, that silence becomes its own kind of information. A first-person narrator might fixate on a detail that seems irrelevant, and that fixation tells us as much about the narrator as the detail itself.

    Point of view isn’t just a technical choice. It’s the boundary around what gets to be interesting on the page.

    The Microclimate of POV

    Think of it like a garden’s microclimate. A shaded bed under oak trees can’t grow sun-loving tomatoes, no matter how much the gardener wishes otherwise. But it can grow hostas, ferns, hellebores (if they aren’t buried in snow!)—things that thrive in exactly those conditions. The limitation isn’t a flaw. It’s the environment that determines what flourishes.

    A close third-person POV creates a microclimate of immediacy and interiority. The narrator wonders what that look meant, whether the silence is angry or sad, why the room suddenly feels smaller. The reader is pressed up close against the character’s perception, living inside the gap between what’s observed and what’s understood.

    An omniscient narrator operates in full sun. It can see everything, move anywhere, tell us outright what a character feels or choose to withhold that information for effect. That withholding, when an omniscient narrator goes quiet, carries a different kind of weight than a limited narrator’s uncertainty because the reader knows the narrator could tell them. The silence is chosen.

    First person is its own microclimate entirely: the most intimate and the most unreliable. What the narrator notices, what they obsess over, what they skip past without comment, all of it is characterization. The reader is always reading two texts simultaneously: what the narrator says and what the narrator reveals without meaning to.

    Each POV creates conditions. The writer’s job is to know what grows there.

    When the Microclimate Gets Confused

    Here’s what tends to go wrong, and it’s more common than you’d think: the narrative voice starts wondering about things its POV can’t actually sustain.

    A close third-person narrator who suddenly speculates about another character’s childhood. A first-person narrator who describes their own facial expressions as though watching from outside. An omniscient narrator who dips into one character’s interiority so deeply and so consistently that readers forget it’s supposed to have a wider view, and then they feel jarred when it suddenly pulls back to tell them what’s happening across the kingdom.

    These aren’t always catastrophic errors. Sometimes they’re barely noticeable. But they erode something important: the reader’s trust in the container.

    When the rules of curiosity feel inconsistent, readers lose their footing. They’re not sure anymore what the narrator knows, what it’s allowed to know, or whether the boundaries will hold. That uncertainty doesn’t create productive tension; it creates a low-level unease, a sense that the story isn’t quite in control of itself.

    The fix usually isn’t to change the POV. It’s to understand what the chosen POV permits, and then be rigorous about staying inside those conditions.

    What This Looks Like in Editorial Practice

    When I’m working through a manuscript and scenes feel flat or slightly off, technically competent but missing something, POV confusion is often what I find underneath.

    Not the wrong POV choice. The right POV choice being inconsistently applied.

    I’ll ask: what is this narrator allowed to wonder about? Then I’ll look at what they’re actually wondering about. When those two things diverge, that’s usually where the flatness lives.

    Sometimes the narrator is failing to use the full range of curiosity their POV permits. A close third-person voice that reports events without ever speculating, questioning, misreading—that’s a narrator not taking advantage of the microclimate. The conditions are there for interiority and immediacy, and the story is growing lettuce in the shade instead of intricate, mysterious hellebores.

    Sometimes the narrator is reaching past what the POV can sustain, grabbing for information or certainty it hasn’t earned, or shouldn’t have. That’s the sun-loving tomato problem. The gardener keeps trying to force it, and the plant keeps struggling, and the problem isn’t the tomato. It’s that this bed doesn’t get enough light.

    Curiosity Has a Container

    The magic isn’t in choosing the “right” POV. Every POV is right for something. The question is always: what kind of curiosity does this container permit, and is the story growing things that thrive in those conditions?

    When a scene feels flat, it’s worth asking not just who the narrator is, but what this narrator is allowed to wonder about and whether the story is actually using that permission, or ignoring it, or accidentally exceeding it.

    Curiosity has a container. The story grows best when the writer knows its shape.

    And the editor’s job, sometimes, is simply to help the writer see the microclimate they’ve already created and understand what it was always capable of growing.

    POV is one of those elements that tends to reveal itself slowly across a full manuscript, which is exactly why it shows up in Story Ecosystem Assessments™. If something feels consistently off in your narrative voice and you can’t quite name what it is, that might be worth exploring. Learn more here.

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  • The Scene Wants Something Small

    Microwants give a scene shape.

    a tiny pink flower against a blurry background.

    I’ve noticed that scenes feel strongest when the character wants something very small.

    Not “justice” or “redemption” or “to find themselves.” Those matter, but they’re the novel’s work, not the scene’s work.

    A strong scene needs a character who wants to avoid eye contact at the dinner table. Who needs to get out of this conversation without lying. Who’s trying to steal thirty seconds alone in the bathroom before someone notices they’re gone.

    Microwants give a scene shape. Abstract desires tend to dissolve into atmosphere.

    The Tomato Stakes Problem

    It’s like the difference between “create a beautiful garden” and “get these tomato stakes in before the storm hits.”

    One is a lovely idea that could meander anywhere. The other has urgency, specificity, a clear finish line, and probably some mud and splinters along the way.

    When a character wants something concrete and immediate, the scene has traction. Readers can track whether they get it or don’t. The tension stays taut because the stakes are right there, graspable, now.

    The larger wants—the thematic ones, the soul-level yearnings—those build across the manuscript through the accumulation of these small, specific moments. They emerge from the pattern, not from a character standing in the rain thinking about meaning.

    What It Looks Like on the Page

    Here’s a before and after that shows up in manuscripts more often than you’d think.

    Before:

    Libby sat across from her mother, feeling the familiar weight of everything unsaid between them. She wanted, more than anything, for things to be different. For her mother to really see her. For all of it to finally make sense.

    There’s real feeling in that passage. But the scene has nowhere to go. “For things to be different” isn’t a want—it’s a weather system. It can’t be achieved or failed within the next three pages. The reader has nothing to track.

    After:

    Libby kept her eyes on her water glass. If she could just get through the next ten minutes without her mother asking about the job, she could excuse herself, drive home, and fall apart in private. Ten minutes. She just needed her mother to keep talking about the neighbor’s new deck.

    Now we have a scene. Libby wants one specific thing—to deflect one specific question for one specific window of time. The reader is immediately enrolled in whether she’ll get it. Every line of dialogue her mother speaks either threatens that goal or delays the threat, and we feel the difference.

    The emotional content is the same in both versions. Libby is overwhelmed, unseen, holding herself together by a thread. But in the second version, that emotional weight is being carried by a concrete, immediate want. The abstraction has been given a body.

    What This Means in Revision

    When I’m line editing and a scene feels like it’s floating—technically competent, emotionally present, but somehow inert—the first thing I look for is the micro-want.

    I’ll ask: what does this character need to accomplish, obtain, avoid, or survive in the next few pages? Not in their life. Not in the arc of the novel. Here. Now. In this room, at this table, in this conversation.

    Sometimes the writer knows the answer and just hasn’t put it on the page yet. The microwant is there in their notes, clear as anything, but they assumed readers would feel it without being shown the specific shape of it. A light revision brings it forward.

    Sometimes the microwant genuinely isn’t there; the scene exists to convey information or emotion, but no one in it actually wants anything particular to happen. Those scenes usually need more significant rethinking, not because they’re badly written, but because they’re doing the wrong job. They’re atmosphere when they should be architecture.

    Turning atmosphere into architecture is some of the most satisfying editorial work there is. Finding the physical action that carries the emotional weight. Locating the small, urgent want buried underneath the abstraction and helping it rise to the surface, the way you’d stake a climbing rose that’s been growing along the ground. It was always going to bloom, it just needed something to climb.

    The Larger Wants Are Still There

    None of this is to say that theme and soul-level yearning don’t belong in your manuscript. They absolutely do. They’re the whole point.

    But they belong to the pattern, not the scene. They accumulate. They emerge. A character who spends a hundred and twenty thousand words desperately engineering small, specific escapes—from conversations, from eye contact, from the one question they can’t answer—will arrive at their moment of reckoning carrying the full weight of every one of those microfailures and microvictories. The reader feels the theme because they lived through the accumulation of scenes that built it.

    A character who spends a hundred and twenty thousand words wanting “to finally be free” will arrive at that same moment and find that the reader has been waiting for something to happen.

    Because a scene without a small want is just two people talking in a room.

    A scene with one? That’s where the story lives.

    If this resonates with something you’re working through in revision, a Story Ecosystem Assessment™ might be exactly what you need. I look at manuscripts through this kind of lens—finding the places where the architecture has gone soft and helping you figure out why. You can learn more here.

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  • The Thing I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know

    On expertise, humility, and the ellipsis that stopped me cold.

    hands around a cup of tea
    Photo by Yaopey Yhong on Unsplash

    I’ve edited dozens of manuscripts. Thousands of pages of dialogue. I’ve flagged misplaced em dashes, untangled punctuation disasters, and gently redirected authors who were using ellipses like confetti at a parade.

    I thought I knew ellipses.

    Then I encountered a specific situation—a character’s thought trailing off mid-sentence, hesitating, and then continuing—and something made me stop. Not because it was wrong, exactly. Because I suddenly wasn’t sure I knew why it was right. Or what the rule actually was. Or whether I’d been handling it correctly all along by feel, the way you sometimes drive a familiar route and arrive without remembering any of the turns.

    I sat with that for a moment.

    It wasn’t comfortable.

    There’s a particular kind of vulnerability that comes from discovering a gap in knowledge you assumed was solid. It’s different from not knowing something you never claimed to know. This was something I should have known. Something I’d been working around for years without ever fully articulating. And the moment I tried to articulate it, I couldn’t.

    I felt exposed. Inadequate. Like someone was going to find out.

    Find out what, exactly? That I’m human? That expertise isn’t a destination you arrive at and then maintain by standing very still? That six years of editing and forty-five years of obsessive reading doesn’t actually confer omniscience?

    Rationally, I know all of this. Emotionally, in that moment, it felt like a crack in the foundation.

    Here’s what I found when I dug in: there are different ways an ellipsis functions in fiction dialogue and internal thought. A trailing off at the end of a sentence, the thought dissolving into silence, behaves one way. An ellipsis that bridges a hesitation, where the thought stutters and then continues—“I just…I can’t explain it”—behaves slightly differently. The mechanics are subtle. The feel of it is something most authors and editors handle by instinct without ever naming the distinction.

    Which is exactly the problem. And exactly the point.

    Instinct is built from accumulated experience, and it usually serves us well. But instinct without articulation is fragile. You can’t teach what you can’t name. You can’t explain a correction if you don’t know why it’s a correction. And you definitely can’t catch the places where your instinct has quietly been wrong, because you’ve never held it up to the light long enough to look.

    The uncomfortable truth about editorial expertise, and maybe all expertise, is that it’s not a fixed thing you possess. It’s a practice. A continuous, occasionally humbling process of refinement. I learn something on almost every project. Sometimes from the manuscript itself, sometimes from the research I do when a manuscript makes me uncertain, sometimes from the quiet, unsettling moment when I realize I’ve been assuming something I’ve never actually verified. Some lessons are small and technical, like the one about ellipses. Some are larger, about how stories work, about what humans need from narrative, about the endless complexity of trying to put experience into words.

    That moment doesn’t feel good. But I’ve started to think it’s the most important one.

    If you’re an author who has ever gotten editorial feedback and felt that same exposure

    —how did I not know this, I should have known this—I want you to hear this: your editor probably has a version of that feeling too. Maybe not about the same things. But the gap between what we know and what we think we know is something we all navigate.

    It doesn’t mean the foundation is cracked.

    It means we’re still building.

    Have you had a moment like this—where something you thought you knew turned out to be shakier than you realized? I’d love to hear it. Drop it in the comments.

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  • ISWG March Writing Question

    Hello again! I realize it’s been a loooong while, but that’s because I’ve been busy growing a business. I couldn’t let this question go unanswered, though. Have a look! 😉

    March 1 question – Have you ever read a line in novel or a clever plot twist that caused you to have author envy?

    How about an entire book or series?

    Absolutely! In fact, I’m reading one now.

    I’m reading Darkdawn by Jay Kristoff, the third book in the Nevernight series. I can say that the entire series has screwed up my insides and given me the greenies with envy.

    But more importantly, it has inspired me and fed the individual fire within.

    The story of Mia and her exploits is EPIC; there’s no other way to say it. But it’s the physical structural elements the author has employed that make my heart race.

    Why? Because he breaks every ‘rule’ out there. All those little things within text that many say detract from the reading experience, well, they are there.

    Such as:

    • Footnotes – yes! In a fiction text, there are footnotes, and they are brilliant. I love this as a technique to impart other stuff that information junkies like myself just have to know. And those that don’t want to know about the three kinds of sea drakes in the Sea of Sorrows don’t have to read them. Simple as that! But I warn you, you might miss the best joke on the page if you skip them…
    • Italics – I say “Use ’em, anytime you want to. Just be consistent.” And do use them for the things they should be used for as well, such as book titles and other works the style guides recommend them for. Consistency is the key here.
    • Other typefaces – YES!!! Why else do we have all these gorgeous fonts and letter forms if not to use them in printed works? Kristoff uses all small capitals for one of the characters. 😱 Imagine that? I did only find this out when I switched from the audiobook to the hardcover, however. But up until that point, the narrator was stellar at character voices. Seeing the text only made me love it more.
    • Creative word placement on the page – such as stringing words across a page to mimic stepping into a shadow in long strides. Love it! When I read that construction, I feel the shadows stretching to accommodate Mia as she steps; I see her jump and land soundlessly on the next word. It adds another level to the reading experience. What’s not to appreciate?
    • Taking the piss on himself and critics in the text – In the banter between two characters, the author raises the absurdity of footnotes in a fiction book, like “Who does that?” and the brutality of the ending of the second book. It is brutal; I was wrung out for an entire day after listening to it. First-class book hangover. But I love that he addresses the things he knew he would get slag for in a laugh-out-loud way. Why not? Rules, even implied ones, exist to be broken; that’s one of my mottos, but I’m also an Aquarius, and we live for such things.
    Image by Peter Lomas from Pixabay

    Expressing creativity takes many forms. I always encourage the authors I edit for to make the story and text work for itself and for them.

    If you want to s p a c e out a word to illustrate how a character speaks or thinks, do it! I’m with you.

    Italics for a character’s inner thoughts? Love it, I do this myself. The form of italics has a softer, inner thought feel to it, more secretive, more private.

    Footnotes1 for extra info and cheek? Bring them on.

    I hope to see more of this type of rebellion in writing. We are already creating pictures with words in the reader’s mind, why not create them on the page with the physical form of the words?

    The only character I’m not as yet comfortable using in printed books is the interrobang (!?) because it is used in the texting universe. But I think it will become mainstream shortly; it is perfect for expressing that exclamation-question tone. And as we all know, language and writing constantly evolve with communication preferences and societal norms.

    For now, I’m off to write inspired, however the words want to come out. How about you? Will you?