The Narrative Gardener

Category: editing life

  • When Stories Blossom: Recognizing Your Manuscript’s Growth Stages

    Your manuscript is growing. It just might not be blooming yet.

    My fringetree, Chionanthus virginicus, about to bloom. I saved it from the compost pile last fall.

    There’s an ornamental bed I’ve been slowly adding to for years that I worked on last October. I know exactly what’s in there—the plants, the shrubs, the colors, the transplants I made. I’ve been watching that bed since February, and until a few weeks ago (given our fickle New England weather), there was nothing to see but wood-chipped ground and my own impatience.

    Then the shoots finally appeared.

    I didn’t make that happen by checking more often. The plants emerged when the conditions were right: enough cold, enough warmth, enough time in the ground. My job was to plant correctly and stay out of the way.

    Stories work in much the same way. They have growth stages, each with its own requirements, and the most common mistake writers make isn’t revising too much or too little. It’s applying the wrong intervention at the wrong stage. Pruning a seedling. Watering a plant that needs sun. Harvesting before the fruit is ripe.

    Knowing where a manuscript is changes what it actually needs from the author.

    The Seedling Draft

    A first draft is fragile in the specific way seedlings are fragile: it has just broken ground, its root system is minimal, and the wrong kind of attention will kill it faster than neglect will.

    What this stage needs is completion. Not polish, not perfection, just reaching the end. The structure is visible but may be weaker than necessary. Some sections thrive; others wilt when the sun comes out. That’s expected. The author is still discovering what this story wants to be, and the only way to find out is to keep writing.

    A potential danger here is editing while drafting—going back over yesterday’s pages, trimming, second-guessing. That’s like leaf pruning a seedling. You’re cutting growth before it has a chance to flourish, and the plant doesn’t have the reserves to recover. Many writers who do this may find themselves at chapter four, forever. The seedling never gets its larger true leaves.

    However, for some writers, this approach is helpful and can re-root them in the story, especially at the start of a writing session. I’m one of those. The trick here, then, is to know when to step out of the sticky clay and move on with the next ideas and let the words flow.

    Both approaches lead to the same place: Write forward. Leave the mess. The mess is where the roots grow from.

    Established Growth

    By the second or third draft, the manuscript has roots. Its shape is there. You know what the story is, even if you can’t fully articulate it yet, and the structure is strong enough to handle bright, sunlit attention.

    This is the stage where strategic revision earns its place. Cut what isn’t serving the plant. Strengthen what is. Deepen the character arcs, clarify the stakes, look honestly at the structure and ask what’s holding weight in scenes and what’s decorative. This is also the right moment to bring in outside perspective—beta readers, a manuscript assessment—because the manuscript is established enough to survive scrutiny without collapsing.

    The signs of this stage are: the story can be explained clearly, the major beats are in place, the characters have arcs even if those arcs need refinement. It feels close but not there yet. That feeling is accurate. It’s not there yet. Let it keep growing.

    Budding

    Late revision is its own distinct stage, and writers often miss the transition. The work now shifts from structural to granular. Sentence-level changes, prose polish, the difference between a scene that does what it needs to and a scene that sings. The story knows what it is. Small refinements make large differences in this stage.

    The danger at this stage is the opposite of the seedling problem: instead of pruning too early, writers may over-revise. They keep restructuring when the structure is sound. They rewrite scenes that were working because they can’t quite believe they’re done. Prolonged stress on a plant that’s ready to flower doesn’t improve the bloom. It depletes the plant.

    If beta readers are saying “this works really well, just needs polish” but scenes are still being moved around, pay attention to that. The reactions signal the stage and the shifting work is likely too much.

    Flowering

    A manuscript that’s ready is ready. Not perfect—what garden is ever perfect?—but complete in the sense that it’s doing what it was always meant to do. The story is vibrant and whole, and it’s time to let it be seen.

    This stage has its own particular difficulty. After months or years of growth, the habit of tending can be hard to break. There’s always one more thing on the list to examine. One more pass. One more scene to reconsider. But a flower held in a vase too long fades there.

    When you’ve done multiple revision passes, incorporated substantive feedback, and can’t identify what to fix without breaking something that works, that’s the signal. It’s done. Let it bloom and be admired.

    When the Manuscript Won’t Move

    Some manuscripts stall. They stay in vegetative growth for a long time, not quite budding, and no amount of additional revision seems to move them forward.

    This usually indicates a root problem rather than a surface one. The foundation isn’t strong enough to support flowering—something in the core conflict, the stakes, or the character’s central need isn’t fully developed yet. Or there’s a condition mismatch: the story is being forced to grow in the wrong environment, and it’s not as robust as it could be. A quiet character study being pushed toward thriller pacing. A cozy mystery being revised for tension it was never designed to hold.

    None of this means the manuscript is lost. It means the conditions need to change before growth can continue. Sometimes that means setting it aside and coming back when the creative well is refilled or the writer’s craft has grown. Sometimes it means a more honest look at the foundation. The plant isn’t the problem. The soil is.

    Right now, in my garden, things are at different stages all at once. The lilacs are just finishing flowering. The peonies are budding out. The Asiatic ginger groundcover in the back is already spreading, ahead of everything else. None of them are in the wrong. They’re just on their own timelines, doing the work appropriate to the environmental conditions.

    A manuscript has a timeline too. The best thing to do is figure out which stage it’s actually in—not the stage you wish it were in—and give it what that stage requires.

    The bloom will come. It just needs the right conditions and enough time.~

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  • The Gate

    On finally showing up as the thing I’ve been building.

    Photo of me as The Narrative Gardener

    I came to editorial work as a horticulturist.

    That was the plan, anyway. Twenty-three years of professional horticulture, a plant science degree, hands that knew soil before they knew manuscript markup, surely the niche was obvious. Gardening books. Horticulture titles. Stay in your lane.

    It didn’t work out that way, at least not immediately. I fell into fiction editing instead, which was also somewhere I wanted to be, so I didn’t resist it. But I carried the horticulturist’s brain with me anyway—the way I thought about ecosystems, about what was thriving and what was starved, about intervention versus patience. I just didn’t recognize I was doing it. It was simply how I read.

    From the beginning, I knew I needed something to distinguish me. The editorial field is not small and not quiet, and “experienced fiction editor” is not a differentiator. I looked for the niche. I tried angles. Nothing quite fit, or nothing felt fully true, which amounts to the same problem.

    What I didn’t see—for five years, I didn’t see it—was that I’d been doing the thing the whole time. The horticulture wasn’t separate from the editing. It was the lens I’d been using on every manuscript without naming it. The framework existed. I just hadn’t looked directly at it yet.

    I looked this winter. Named it: Narrative Ecology. Started this Substack. Watched the two halves of my professional life finally stand in the same space and recognize each other.

    And then I understood why I’d always needed a face for the brand that wasn’t quite my own.

    The Narrative Gardener arrived three years ago as an avatar. An illustrated version of me in my garden, purple plaid shirt, pruners in hand. She could be on the website, front and center. She could anchor the brand, be someone distinct from just “Aime Sund, editor.” The idea of me, accurate in every meaningful way, but at a slight remove.

    Which is so Gen X of me to say.

    We grew up with a specific inheritance around self-promotion: don’t. Competence was supposed to speak for itself. And then the internet arrived and said, “Actually, you need a personal brand,” and an entire generation quietly had a small crisis and found workarounds. Mine was a drawing. She could take up space I wasn’t ready to claim yet. She went first.

    The Narrative Gardener was always me. I knew that when I named her. She wasn’t a persona; she was a way of stepping onto the stage without fully stepping onto it. The anxiety of visibility dressed up as a brand decision. It worked well, when I remembered to use it.

    Over time, my working framework became real and specific enough that I started thinking about it outside of edits, building services around it. The Narrative Gardener became more persistent; she wanted to be everywhere. I, however, stayed slightly behind her.

    What shifted wasn’t sudden. It was a slow kind of shift, the kind where I looked up one day and realized the distance had closed without me quite deciding to close it. Once the framework had a name and a place to exist outside my website (here), once the two halves of my work were finally visible as one thing, hiding behind a drawing started to feel like a mismatch. Not dishonest. Just incomplete.

    I needed updated and brand-centric photos. And now photographs of the actual person seemed less like exposure and more like accuracy.

    I was still nervous about it. Privacy, imposter syndrome, the introvert’s particular discomfort with being looked at, all of it was present, none of it gone. But underneath the nervousness was something steadier. I’d been building toward this without knowing I was building toward it. New photos weren’t a vanity project. They were the next true thing.

    During the shoot, the photographer suggested I go barefoot for a couple shots.

    I hesitated for approximately one second. The reflex formed—is that professional enough—and then dissolved. I work for myself. I spend summers with my feet in grass, mulch, and soil. More than thirty years of horticulture is not incidental to how I think about story structure; it’s the whole point. Bare feet weren’t a quirky choice. They were accurate.

    I said yes.

    What I noticed as the camera clicked away, was that the millisecond of hesitation was the interesting part. Not the decision; the decision was easy once I actually made it, but the reflex to check myself against some external standard of what a professional is supposed to look like. I’ve now been editing long enough to recognize that reflex in manuscripts and stories. It’s the same impulse that makes writers sand down their most distinctive sentences or ideas because they don’t sound like what a novel is supposed to sound like. The voice that’s most distinctly theirs is the one they second-guess first.

    One of the barefoot photographs is me, actually me, sitting among my tools and potting soil bags and empty pots against a whitewashed brick wall in bright sun, looking directly at the camera. It matches the avatar. That coherence was intentional—I wanted the brand to feel like a single continuous thing—but I didn’t anticipate what it would feel like to see it in digital existence. To look at a photograph and think: yes, that’s the person who does this work.

    She went first. Now, I’m here.

    Authors will recognize this moment too. There’s a point in revision where you stop seeing your manuscript as a collection of problems and see it as a thing that exists—finished, imperfect, yours. The work was always real. Being seen in it is the part that costs something. It’s also the part that matters.

    I’ve been building toward this visibility for a while. It feels right to arrive at it with bare feet.

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  • Three Signs You’re Ready for a Developmental Edit

    Reading the Signs Before You Bring in Outside Eyes

    There’s a particular kind of stuck that happens after the draft is done.

    The manuscript exists. It has a beginning, a middle, an end. Characters who breathe, scenes that move, a story that, mostly, holds together. And yet… Something isn’t sitting right, and the revision passes that were supposed to fix it have produced a document that looks different but feels the same. The writer knows something is off. They just can’t locate it.

    This is not a failure of craft. It’s a failure of proximity. And it’s one of the more useful things a developmental editor is actually for.

    The harder question is whether that’s where a manuscript is. Developmental editing is a specific intervention for a specific condition. Bringing a developmental editor in before the draft has been through the writer’s own revision process is like training laterals on a vine that hasn’t set its trunk yet—you’re redirecting energy the structure still needs, and the intervention doesn’t just fail to hold. It sets things back.

    So how do you know when the right time is?

    emerging hellebore in frozen soil

    Sign one: Your beta readers contradicted each other

    Beta feedback that converges is useful. Beta feedback that diverges is even more useful… and harder to sit with.

    When some readers find the pacing tight and others find it slow, when some connect with the main character and others don’t, when the ending lands for half the room and falls flat for the other half—these are not signs that the manuscript is broken. They are signs that something structural is creating inconsistent experiences. A pacing problem that only some readers notice is often a scene-function problem: certain scenes are doing more than one job, or the wrong job, and different readers weight those jobs differently.

    Beta readers tell you where they felt something. They are rarely positioned to tell you why. That diagnostic step of identifying the pattern beneath the contradictory responses is what a developmental edit is built to do. Contradictory feedback isn’t chaos. It’s signal waiting to be read.

    Sign two: You’ve revised the same scenes multiple times and they still aren’t working

    There is a particular revision loop that writers recognize immediately when it’s pointed out: the scene gets rewritten, and the new version is different, but the problem is still there. So it gets rewritten again. The prose gets tighter, or looser, or the dialogue sharpens, but the scene still doesn’t land. More passes. Same result.

    This loop is almost never a prose problem. It’s a structural problem wearing a prose costume.

    When a scene isn’t working no matter how many times it gets revised, it usually means the scene is being asked to do something the surrounding architecture isn’t supporting. The setup isn’t there. The payoff is in the wrong place. The character motivation that would make this moment land hasn’t been established, or was established too early and has since been buried. The writer cannot see this from inside the manuscript because they know what the scene is supposed to do. The scene knows too. It just can’t do it from where it’s standing.

    This is the forest-for-the-trees problem, and it’s almost definitionally invisible from inside.

    Sign three: You know something’s wrong but can’t say what

    This one gets dismissed more than it should.

    Writers are often told to trust their instincts, and then, when their instincts fire—when they read through a draft and feel a persistent unease they can’t articulate—they talk themselves out of it. The manuscript is finished. The beta readers liked it. Maybe the feeling is just anxiety.

    Sometimes it is. But more often, the feeling is accurate. Authors spend months or years inside a manuscript, and that proximity creates a kind of peripheral vision for the story’s problems. The conscious mind can’t isolate the issue, but something in the writer’s reading brain is registering it. That registration shows up as unease.

    It is worth trusting. Not because instinct is infallible, but because an experienced editor can often identify in a single read what the writer has been circling for months. The instinct points at the neighborhood. The edit locates the address.

    When you don’t need a developmental edit

    This is worth saying plainly, because not every stuck manuscript needs the same intervention.

    If the draft isn’t finished, a developmental edit isn’t the next step. Self-revision is. A developmental editor works with a complete manuscript—one that has been through at least one round of the writer’s own critical eye. Bringing in outside perspective before that work is done means paying for feedback on problems the writer could have found and solved independently.

    If the draft is complete and has been revised, but what feels off is at the sentence level—rhythm, word choice, consistency of voice—that’s line editing territory, not developmental. The two are distinct services addressing distinct layers of the manuscript. A developmental edit will not fix comma splices, and line editing will not fix a second act that loses momentum.

    And if the manuscript genuinely feels finished—if the beta feedback was largely consistent, if the revisions landed, if the unease is absent—then it may simply be finished. Not every completed draft needs a developmental edit. Some manuscripts find their shape through the writer’s own revision process, and the right next step is querying or copyediting, not another layer of deep editorial intervention.

    What developmental editing actually does

    It’s not rescue work. It’s diagnostic work.

    A developmental editor reads the manuscript as a complete system, tracking how the structural elements interact, where the load-bearing moments are, what the reader is being set up to expect and whether those expectations are being met. The questions are systemic: what is this scene doing relative to what the story needs it to do? Where is the reader’s attention being directed, and is that the right place? What is the emotional logic of this character’s arc, and is it landing?

    The edit doesn’t fix the book. It gives the writer a map of what’s actually happening versus what they intended to happen, precise enough to revise strategically rather than in circles.

    That map is most useful to a writer who is ready to use it—which means a draft that is complete, a revision process that has already run its course, and a writer who has arrived at the limits of what they can see on their own.

    If those three signs are present, a writer’s limits have probably been reached.

    Aime Sund is The Narrative Gardener—a fiction editor and horticulturist at Red Leaf Word Services, where she helps genre fiction authors grow stronger stories through her Narrative Ecology™ framework.

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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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  • 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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