Welcome back to the Drawing Room.
For five weeks you've been drafting — place, sleuth, the ordinary world, the first crack, the widening. This week the series does the thing it's been promising since Lesson 1. There's no new lesson to write, and nothing new to draft. Instead, something rarer: you get to watch a working author read my rough pages and tell me the truth, and then I'll show you how to read your own pages the same way. If you're just joining us, this is the sixth of seven free Sunday lessons writing the opening of a mystery together with the goal of shaking some story ideas loose. You can read this one cold, but it'll land harder if you've got pages of your own to look at while you do, so I recommend a quick pass through the previous lessons if you haven’t gone through them yet.
Before the lesson, one honest question.
Back in Lesson 1 I promised I'd ask a thing here and there. I asked a simple question earlier in the series, but now I have a more direct one. We're near the end of this run, so I need to know how it's actually landed for you. And be honest, because a shrug is more useful to me than a kindness. Your answer tells me two things: whether the structure of these lessons is working, and whether there's something here worth building into a real next step.
It's one tap. Answer now, or sit with this week's lesson first and come back up to it. The poll will stay open.
If these Sunday lessons went away after next week, how would you feel?
Okay, with that out of the way, let's move on to the (hopefully) good stuff.
LESSON 6: THE EDITOR'S NOTES
For five weeks we've been writing. But this week is about stepping back and reconsidering our work. Our progress. The goal is to use what we've learned to become better readers of our own work. To help showcase this, I hand my weeks of rough pages to a working author, and you see what she says back.
First, a confession, because it makes the rest of this honest. Some part of me wants to believe I've been handed a gift at birth, that every word out of my fingertips is gold, that Korina will read my pages and simply weep with gratitude. That part of me is an idiot. The truth is quieter and more useful: every word is progress, not treasure. A draft isn't a verdict on your talent. It's raw material, and notes are how it gets better. Hold that, and feedback stops being a threat and becomes the fastest road forward.
Here's how I try to hear it:
The note is about the pages, not about me.
Look for the note under the note. "I got confused here" usually means the fix is somewhere earlier.
I don't have to take every note. I do have to understand every one.
A hard note on rough pages is a gift. It means someone took the work seriously enough to push.
Now, the part I really want you to take from this week. Remember, developmental editing isn't magic. It's a trained reader checking for a specific, knowable set of things. And once you know what those things are, you can check for them yourself. So I'm not just going to show you Korina's notes. I'm going to show you what kind of note each one is, so you can go find your own. Each one below ends with a question to ask on your own re-read.
This is developmental feedback, by the way, not line edits. She isn't fixing my commas. She's reading for the big stuff. Here's what she found, sorted by the kind of thing to look for.
1. Is it the character's choice, or yours?
The deepest pitfall in character writing: a character does something because the plot needs it, not because who they are demands it. When that happens, the reader feels the author's hand. On Dan turning back into the park to sound the alarm about Merv:
"Then, without realizing it, he found himself turning around and jogging back into the park. 'Hey, Gary!'"
Korina's note: as written, that leap to alarm isn't earned, and so "it looks to the reader like you, the author, are making that decision rather than it coming from the character." That's the whole ballgame, and it stung, because I'd spotted it myself while drafting and hoped I'd gotten away with it. You don't get away with it. Her fix was pure Korina: "Perhaps if we knew he rescued kittens regularly or something," we'd believe he'd go out of his way for a near-stranger. Give him a visible good-hearted streak earlier, and the turn earns itself.
In your pages: find a moment where someone makes a choice. Ask: is this coming from who they are, or because I needed them to? If it's the second, what could I plant earlier so the character does it on their own?
2. Does the reader know where they're standing?
A grounding pitfall: the reader is missing a basic fact they need to make sense of the scene, and they feel it as low-grade confusion. I thought I'd been clear that Dan was new to the group. My pages said otherwise, over and over, and then I finally clarified it far too late. Korina: "almost everything leading up to this implied it was his first run," and "it would be helpful to know sooner." I'd let Dan be a regular and a newcomer at the same time, and given the reader nowhere to put that.
In your pages: what does a reader need to know to follow this scene — who knows whom, how long, first time or hundredth — and have you told them before you lean on it, or after?
3. Does it all hold together?
Two flavors here, and both are worth a pass. The first is plain math. I wrote Sarah as "a few years older than Josiah," who's in college, made Dan 40, and never added it up. Korina did: "Sarah is a few years older than a current college student. So… 23-ish? You might want to re-think this, because Dan is 40." I established Dan as having some feelings for Sarah. Do I want it with that age gap? What would it mean for his character? No right answer here, but I need to know what I’m doing and have the character own it.
The second part is trickier: a character contradicting himself. She caught Dan believing he's a misfit no one would miss, while also assuming the group would be sad to lose him. Both can be true of a real person, but I hadn't done it on purpose, so it reads as a slip, not a depth.
In your pages: pick your key relationships and actually do the math — ages, timelines, distances, histories. Then check the softer logic: does a character believe two things that quietly cancel out? If so, did you mean it?
4. What's the one thing you keep doing?
A near-universal pitfall: you fall in love with a move and lean on it too hard. Korina liked my running gag of Dan measuring himself against Josiah's physique, once or twice. But by the park scene it keeps returning, and: "it starts to make it feel like Dan can't let it go." Worse, it recurs at the exact moment Dan should be worried about Merv, so my favorite bit was stealing focus from the thing that mattered. That's the trap. The overused detail doesn't just wear out; it crowds out what the scene actually needs.
In your pages: what image, joke, phrase, or observation do you return to most? Count them. Is it earning each appearance, or has it started running the scene instead of serving it?
5. Who are we going to miss?
A forward-looking pitfall, and Korina flagged it as down-the-road: right now Merv is a name and an absence. If the story's going to hinge on losing him, the reader should meet him before he's gone, so he's "not just a body, not just a person talked about by others." A whole-story note, not a chapter-one fix, but it changes how I think about the weeks ahead.
In your pages: is there someone the story needs us to care about later who's still just a name? Where could we actually meet them, even briefly?
6. What's already working — and how do I not break it?
The pitfall here is the sneaky one. Revision can quietly kill your best instincts if you don't know what they are. So find your strengths and protect them on purpose. Twice, in different spots, Korina noticed the same thing: that I'm getting backstory and a wider sense of Charleston onto the page without stopping the story to do it. On the line about why Dan joined the group:
"She was also the reason Dan had joined the group in the first place — she'd put her picture on the flyer Dan stumbled onto in their local coffee shop…"
Her note: "Nice way to slide in backstory without pausing for backstory." That's a technique, not a compliment, and now that it's named I can do it deliberately. So I'm locking it: backstory rides in on motion, it never stops the scene to explain itself. Whatever I change next, that stays.
In your pages: name one thing your pages already do well. Say it out loud as a rule ("I do X"). That's now something to protect, and to do more of.
And the rest. She also left a dozen smaller notes: a confusing bit of street geography, a clunky sentence, a spot where a number would help, a word that didn't quite fit. Real, but minor, the close-read layer. Developmental notes come at every altitude, from "this character isn't earning his choices" down to "this line is clunky." Both matter. They just don't get fixed on the same day.
One last thing, and it's important. Notice what Korina didn't flag: my setting, and my crack. Not because they don't matter, but because they happened to land. But those are exactly what we spent these five weeks on, so don't skip them just because they're not in my notes. On your own re-read, ask the two questions these lessons were built around: Can a reader stand in your place, or only see it? Does your crack raise a question it doesn't answer? The absence of a note is not the same as a clean bill of health. Check them yourself.
So here's where my head is. The Merv fix and the run-count clarity I'm taking without argument. They make the chapter truer. The Josiah overuse, easy, I'll thin it out. Sarah's age I need to sit with longer, because the fix touches more than one thread and I want to solve it once, cleanly. And I won't pretend any of it was fun to read in the moment. It never is. But not one of those notes made the work worse, and every one made it clearer. That's the trade, and it's a good one.
Now you. Take twenty minutes this week and read back over your own pages the way Korina read mine, with those questions and our lessons in hand. Don't fix anything yet. Just see it. Mark the spots and sit with them.
Take the week with it — no rush, no falling behind. Next Sunday, the other half: I take these notes and actually change the pages. You'll see what I keep, what I cut, what I hold, and the one fix that opened a door I didn't expect.
— Patrick / Stone Lyon Society