Developmental Editing: Fiction and Nonfiction
SUMM 520
WEDNESDAY, July 25 – THURSDAY, July 26 2012
9:00am-5:00pm
$450.00 CDN (includes course material)
Learn to develop fiction and non-fiction work to suit the writer’s vision, the publisher’s requirements, and the format and audience for which it is best suited. Start from an outline, annotated table of contents, or an early draft, and ask good questions to bring out the strongest and most distinctive elements. You will learn not only how to evaluate the text, but build and shape it to arrive at a satisfying conclusion.
Whether you are an in-house or freelance editor working in these genres, or a writer with a nascent manuscript ready to be taken to the next level, learn how to assess the work’s readiness and potential, its strengths and weaknesses, its possible structures, and how to leverage the draft to most efficiently get to publication.
This two-day workshop will demonstrate how assessment criteria, a survey of alternative options, market research, and some astute analysis can turn a half- baked idea into a fully cooked work that reaches readers. Using examples taken from students’ own works and before-and- after demos of real books and edits, you will be able to see how to apply judgment and new skills to the work at hand.
By focusing on the developmental process and techniques of substantive editing, this course will allow you to see and manifest the potential in a first draft and work creatively to polish it so that it is suited for success.
Specific topics will include the following:
- understanding the writer-editor relationship
- developing a concept proposal
- completing a market analysis
- creating a checklist for fiction and non-fiction
- writing a reader’s report
- completing a manuscript assessment
- prioritizing editorial to-do lists
- tracking and communicating changes.
This workshop is designed for anyone currently in a junior, entry-level, or new editorial position within a publishing house or working in this capacity as a freelancer, and for writers who want to know how to take a manuscript from concept to finished work for book, magazine, or online audiences.
FACULTY
Joy Gugeler is Publisher of the general interest citizen journalism magazine Orato.com, which she relaunched in 2009, after doing the same for Suite101.com 2005-2008. She currently teaches Publishing and Digital Media at Vancouver Island University, Substantive Editing at Ryerson, and online content management and developmental editing for SFU. She consults and freelances for Canada’s book and magazine industry and has edited adult and YA literary fiction and non-fiction since 1992 in-house at ECW, Raincoast, Beach Holme, and Quarry. She hosts CHLY’s Books & Bytes, as she has for CBC radio and Bravo!, has written reviews for the Globe, Vancouver Sun and Ottawa Citizen, and in 2001 founded Vancouver’s Canadian Book Camp for 120 young readers. She is completing a PhD in Publishing at SFU.
