Manuscript Development, Consultations, and Editing
I specialize in helping each writer and poet express themselves with clarity, delve into memory and emotion, open and articulate their unique imagination, and organize their writing to express themselves with power and precision.
Your prose and poetry manuscripts and artist projects may be submitted at any stage of the creative process. I am happy to work with nearly all genres, including fiction, memoir, nonfiction, plays, and poetry. Works-in-progress, full-length manuscripts, chapbook manuscripts, and new and selected projects.
How I Approach Your Work
During a careful review of your manuscript, I focus on the literal and emotional narratives, as well as the manuscript’s organization, language, texture, shape, tension, and flow. I highlight the most powerfully expressed prose passages or poems and indicate areas that will benefit from revision. Editorial recommendations are offered in a Word Document and via Track Changes.
Conceptual and developmental advice and feedback, line editing, and text editing are available. After thoughtfully and thoroughly reading and evaluating your body of work, I will discuss my observations and suggestions with you during a complementary 1 hour Zoom meeting. If additional Zoom time is useful, it can be scheduled on a case-by-case basis.
Coaching & Mentoring
Together, we will discuss your goals, explore ways to strengthen your creative expression, and work on organizing your time. We will tackle the concerns and restraints that hold you back and strategize ways to move beyond them. I will provide tools to help you strengthen your prose or poetry, identify and clarify your subjects and themes, and better express your unique style. We will go through your creative process, focusing on your needs, skills, areas of interest, and ultimate goals.
Tips
It is helpful if you clarify the kind of feedback that is most useful to you before I begin the editorial work, manuscript evaluation, and/or coaching.
Though I cannot guarantee the publication of a manuscript or individual prose pieces and poems, my goal is to provide suggestions and edits that help you to express your emotional truth, and will lead to a stronger and more vibrant and coherent body of work in the form of a new revision or a completed manuscript that is ready for submission.
Rates
Manuscript consultations, development, and editing: Rates are determined on an hourly basis, and an estimate will be offered following a preliminary telephone/Zoom conversation. A 50 percent deposit is required when you submit your writing for review, and the balance is due upon my completion of the review.
Coaching and mentoring: 4, 6, or 10 session Zoom meetings or phone conversations are recommended. Fewer or additional sessions can be discussed. Each Zoom meeting is usually 1 to 2 hours, but can be longer if needed.
For a complimentary 15-minute conversation to discuss your writing and your editorial needs and goals, please email janfreemaneditorial@gmail.com.
Presently scheduling manuscript reviews and coaching for February, March, April.
Congratulations to Rose Styron on the rave national attention she is receiving for her memoir, Beyond This Harbor (Alfred A. Knopf, June 2023). For a taste, click on CBS, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Progressive.
Testimonials From Writers and Poets
“Jan’s ear and her perceptive questions and suggestions were right on the mark as I worked towards the completion of my memoir Beyond This Harbor via Zoom... Jan is terrific. I highly recommend her.”
“Jan Freeman is a brilliant editor who brings her poet’s attention to the nuances, power, and impact of words to everything she touches. I can’t say enough about how skillfully she transformed my novel and, equally important, inspired and energized me to aspire to my very best self. Brava!”
“My decision to work with Jan Freeman was one of the best decisions that I have ever made in preparing a poetry manuscript. Her constructive feedback exceeded my expectations. Together we outlined a doable plan to tighten and elevate my work. Jan is a consummate professional and I consider myself fortunate to have found an editor who made me feel both seen and heard. I highly recommend Jan’s services.”
“I write poems in conversation with my artwork, so the intertwining of visual and verbal language in my manuscript required especially sensitive reading, which Jan did with extraordinary care. She gave generous, thoughtful attention to every word, line, and space, to the poems’ resonances with the art, and to the manuscript as a whole. Her comments were succinct and penetrating, our discussions inspiring. She gave me not only a thorough edit but also an education that took me well beyond what I knew. The poems, the manuscript and my prose writing have been masterfully transformed by her brilliant editing. I have no doubt she can respond to anyone’s work with the same skill and deep capacity for empathy.”
“Jan’s in-depth, rigorous reading of my poetry manuscript allowed me to understand where its emotional heart lies, and she provided me with a practical way to revise in order to bring out that heart. Jan gave me the outside motivation and clarity I needed to finish this project and submit it for publication. I am thrilled that the manuscript was selected for the Cowles Poetry Prize at Southeast Missouri State University Press. Working with Jan got me through that final “push” involved in putting together a successful manuscript. I’m incredibly grateful.”