Michelle Richmond – Editor

I offer editorial assessment and content editing for novels, short story collections, memoirs, and individual short stories and essays. I also offer query letter review and developmental editing for nonfiction books to help individuals and brands tell their stories.

Whether you’re writing your first novel or story collection or you have a few unpublished manuscripts tucked away in a drawer, I can help you polish your book to send out to agents and publishers. If your goal is to publish independently, I can help make sure that your book stands out from the thousands of independent titles released each week.
I will look at the big picture of your manuscript–story structure, style, plot, characterization, point of view–and pinpoint where the narrative is lagging. I’ll suggest new scenes that need to be written, structural rearrangement, and specific ways to deepen character. I’ll also provide guidance to help you streamline the prose, tighten dialogue, banish cliches, and improve narrative pace.

We all have narrative ticks--things that we do repeatedly that we don't even notice. Do you use too many dialogue tags that draw attention to themselves? Are there certain gestures that you rely on too heavily? Do your scenes get bogged down in unnecessary description? On the other hand, is the description so sparse that readers have a difficult time feeling grounded in the narrative? How natural does your dialogue sound? Focusing on these and other issues of narrative craft can mean the difference between a decent manuscript and a great one.

I have taught numerous fiction writing workshops and craft seminars at the graduate level, in addition to leading private novel writing master classes. I have taught in the MFA programs in creative writing at the University of San Francisco, California College of the Arts, St. Mary's College of Moraga, and Bowling Green State University, and will soon be teaching a course on plot for Stanford Continuing Studies. As the founder and publisher of Fiction Attic Press, I curate short fiction and creative nonfiction for publication online and in print. I also am the author of four novels and two award-winning story collections.