In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 262.
I had a new, exhilarating experience with the copyeditor of my second novel, Clutch. Anne Horowitz seemed to have memorized Garner’s Modern English Usage style guide and could cite it as easily as a preacher calls out Bible verses; she used that knowledge to unknot and/or retie my many-claused sentences. (The omniscient voice of Clutch likes a parenthetical.) She was looking for typos and grammar mistakes that couldn’t be chalked up to voice, yes. But she also found and interrogated my verbal tics, asked about word choice and preoccupations and tracked imagery with an acuity that made me equal parts enraptured by her attention to detail and embarrassed by my own at times sloppy writing.
We should all be so lucky to work with an editor like this at some point in our careers, but how might we be able to achieve the same effect by working independently? Here are a few ideas:
1. Tackle the big things first. When it comes to editing myself and others, I have a metaphor of the circulation system. You’ve got to make sure the blood is pumping well at the aorta level—leaving the heart and carrying to every part of the body—before you can get into the “artery” work of scene-level solutions or the “capillary” work of line and its components. If the blood’s not carrying down to the leg, how can you worry about oxygen delivery to the tissue in the toe? Part of why the exchange with Anne was so fruitful was that I knew the big-picture stuff was all in good shape. I was also confident in how things were working in that vital in-between step, the artery and vein work. Each chapter and scene were operating in service of the larger purpose of the narrative—my acquiring editor and I had stress tested those over a few rounds of edits—so now I could drill down to the clauses and line-level imagery.
2. Edit like a poet. I learned a lot about editing from my colleague at the Southern Review, poetry editor Jessica Faust. With Jessica, no comma was a given; she’d query stray adjectives, ask about articles, and always checked the punctuation. Of course, covering this territory is perhaps “easier” to do with a fourteen-line sonnet than in a 115,000-word manuscript, but the lesson of patience and interrogation has served me well in prose.
3. Read your work aloud. When I heard R. O. Kwon read from her debut novel, The Incendiaries (Riverhead Books, 2018), several years ago, she admitted she had read the whole book aloud while editing. I thought that sounded insane, but I’ve come to realize the practice’s value. Your tongue will remember repeated words and recurring constructions in a way your eye might miss. It’s not that every paragraph needs to sound bucolic when read aloud, but if you get tongue-twisted getting from the top to the bottom of an idea, there’s often a syntactical situation that can be improved. I read Clutch aloud multiple times and found things to amend with each reading.
When I edit a manuscript for a writer, the best compliment I can get is that it helps them not just on the piece we’re revising together but allows them to see their revision process with more ambition and clarity, and that they carry lessons from our exchange into future writing. Anne did that for me. In the immediate sense, I addressed her five thousand tracked changes but found another five thousand things I wanted to adjust in Clutch. But perhaps even more important, going forward, I know I’ll have more arrows in my quiver when it comes time to revise whatever comes next. I hope you’ll have a few more tools in your toolbox after reading this capsule too.
Emily Nemens is the author of Clutch (Tin House, February 2026). Her debut novel, The Cactus League (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and named one of NPR’s and Literary Hub’s favorite books of 2020. Her stories have appeared in BOMB, the Gettysburg Review, n+1, and elsewhere; her illustrations have appeared in the New Yorker and in collaboration with Harvey Pekar. Nemens spent over a decade editing literary quarterlies, including leading the Paris Review and serving as coeditor and prose editor of the Southern Review. She teaches in the MFA program at Bennington College and lives in central New Jersey with her husband and dog.
image credit: Pawel Czerwinski