Editorial Notes = clarifying information, additional insight, annotations

Hiya Reader,

In case you missed it, here's the list of 2026 Pulitzer Prize winners. Something to daydream about in case you need it. For what it's worth, I take strong exception to the winner in the memoir category. Good thing for Yiyun Li that I was not on this year's committee, because I have a LOT of feelings about this choice.

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Example of the Week

Sometimes this is a good example—or a great one. Sometimes this is a bad example—or just a funny blooper. Sometimes a combination. You never know.

In Gish Jen's auto-fiction Bad Bad Girl, the narrator remembers the writing classes she took outside her Stanford business school degree program. The "writing classes...were also reading courses, really," Jen writes. "One of my teachers, Stephanie Vaughn, showed me, too, her file of outtakes from her classic story 'Alpha, [sic] Baker, Charlie, Dog.' This contained eighty-five pages—my first glimpse of what revision entailed."

A great lesson in what revision — i.e., self-editing — entails. Almost 100 pages of outtakes for a ~5,000-word piece. The writing, friends, is easy. Getting it right? Not easy at all.

Also a great lesson in getting facts right, as Vaughn's story is called "Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog." You can read it here.

Actionable Tip of the Week

A trick to add to your self-editing toolbox right now!

There's a story about Michelangelo that gets repeated so often it's practically worn smooth, but I still think about it every time I sit down to revise something I've written. Someone asked him how he made the David, and he supposedly said he simply chiseled away everything that wasn't Adam. The figure was already in the marble. His job was subtraction.

Most of what we think about editing works the same way. Find the weak sentence, cut it. Find the flabby paragraph, tighten it. Find the scene that doesn't pull its weight, kill it. You've probably internalized this so deeply that when you open a draft, your eyes go straight to what's wrong. That's not a bad instinct. Weakness does need to be found and removed.

Most drafts aren't just weighed down by weak spots — they're also hiding greatness under too much other material. The paragraph where your ear for dialogue is really singing might be buried under three paragraphs of stage direction nobody needed. The one scene where your patience and control are the whole point might be getting rushed because you're worried it's "too slow," when slow is exactly your gift.

When we edit, we’ve already been trained to ask what's wrong here. But cutting the weak stuff is only half the sculpture. Are you asking where the good stuff is hiding? Where’s the Adam? This changes what you're looking for on the page. Instead of only hunting for flaws, read your draft and mark the passages where something just works, where you didn't have to strain, where the writing sounds unmistakably like you at your best.

But don’t stop there. Ask why. This is challenging for sure, but once you can name it, you can protect it, and even more importantly, you can go find where you're doing that same good thing weakly elsewhere in the manuscript and strengthen it to match. You stop treating your strong material as a lucky accident and start treating it as a standard, the target for revision that’s not remove what's bad but instead make more like this.

Reader Question of the Week

Reed wrote: I've been querying my novel for about eight months now. I'm at 45 rejections, mostly form letters, with a handful of personalized "not right for my list" responses. Is it time to shelve this book and start something new, or should I keep pushing?

Reed! Form rejections tell you almost nothing on their own. Agents pass on strong manuscripts every day for reasons that have nothing to do with quality: they just signed something similar, their list is full in your genre, the voice isn't to their particular taste. A stack of form letters is disappointing, but it isn't diagnostic.

Focus on the personalized ones. If a specific issue is flagged independently, that's a signal worth taking seriously, and it's fixable. If the notes are all over the place, or largely complimentary with a vague "not quite right for me," that's more often a fit issue than a craft issue, and it means the book may simply need the right reader.

Take an inventory of your query list itself before you touch the manuscript. Forty-five is a meaningful number, but if a large chunk of those were sent in a first batch before you'd tested and refined your query letter and opening pages, you may be looking at outdated data. Pull ten fresh agents who've sold books that genuinely resemble yours in tone or genre, ones you haven't queried yet, and send a newly polished round: tightened query, revised opening pages if any pattern emerged from the personalized notes.

Plenty of successful authors have a manuscript in the drawer that taught them how to write the next one. But don't retire this book on the strength of form letters alone. Make sure you're hearing from your best, most current version of it first.
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Link of the Week

If you’re like me, you have major frustrations with PDFs. Not that they aren’t fantastic, because they are, but that they are incredibly difficult to work with when you don’t want to pay for a service that allows you to manipulate them properly.

​Enter the free PDF editor that not only allows you to merge, compress, sign, edit, or redact in one place but runs completely on your own personal machine. Did I mention it’s free?

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Thanks for reading!

~Helene, your writing sherpa