Editorial Consulting

I’m occasionally asked if I do freelance editorial work. The answer is yes! There are few things I love more, possibly because when working on someone else’s stories or novel, I can achieve a clarity of vision that I often can’t with my own. My aim is always to get the writer what he or she needs to proceed to the next phase of revision, and I’m happy to work on fiction and nonfiction, short and long. How I approach your work ultimately depends on where you are in your drafting process, and we can tailor the form of that approach to suit your working style and what you’re hoping to accomplish with the manuscript.

Over the years I’ve edited fiction that has gone on to be published by Simon & Schuster, Harper Collins, Viking, Ecco, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Handsel Press, among others, as well as a wide range of literary magazines. I’ve also edited a number of writers who’ve self-published their fiction, as well as some who’ve simply wanted to get their story to be as good as it could be.

In a prior life, I held editorial posts at magazines you might have heard of or even read in your dentist’s waiting room. One was The Paris Review, and the rest were more mainstream endeavors like Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Travel + Leisure, and Food & Wine (guess which one had the best conference room lunches). I focused on international editions, and was lucky to work with journalists from all over the world, almost always editing their work in hasty translation, a process that gave me a new appreciation for the contours of stories and the ways narrative could manifest and resonate even when the prose read like it had been run through a wood chipper.

These days I teach creative writing at Princeton and through Stanford’s Continuing Studies program. If you’re looking for a smart, dedicated cohort with whom to learn and workshop and commiserate, you should check out some of Stanford’s offerings here.

And if you’d like to talk about editorial work, please drop me a line on jack@jacklivings.com. I’d be happy to hear about what you’re working on and to discuss how I might be able to help.