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 story, 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 depends on what you feel you need, and we’ll tailor the form of that approach to suit your working style and what you’re ultimately hoping to accomplish with the manuscript.

In a prior life, I worked on various 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 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 the offerings here.

And if you’d like to talk, just drop me a line on jack@jacklivings.com.