What an editor can demonstrate
Four findings recur, and each can be shown on the page rather than argued about. All four are properties of the manuscript rather than opinions about it.
The first is a shift the book did not appear to intend. A scene anchored in one character that briefly reports another character's private thoughts has changed narrator mid-scene, and a reader notices without being able to say what happened.
The second is a tense that moves. Past-tense narration that slips into present for a paragraph of reflection is a common and often deliberate effect. Slipping back inconsistently is not, and the difference is visible when the instances are listed together.
The third is a narrator who knows more in one chapter than in another. A first-person narrator reporting a conversation they were not present for has broken the frame the book established, and the frame is the book's own rule rather than an editor's.
The fourth is distance that varies without cause. A close third person that pulls back to summary for a page and returns without a transition has changed the reader's position twice, and the standards ask for smooth and effective transitions between paragraphs.1
Every one of those is a report about the manuscript, and each can be shown as a list of pages. None of them requires a view about how the book should have been written, which is what makes them safe to act on.
What no editor is in a position to answer
Two questions belong to the author, and an editor who answers them has taken over the book. Both look like editorial questions and neither is.
The first is whose story this is. Editors Canada places that work in structural editing, which assesses and shapes draft material to improve its organization and content, including clarifying plot and thematic elements.2 A structural report can say what the pages currently do and which character the reader spends most time with. Which character the book belongs to is a decision about what the author came to write.
The second is whether a deliberate break works. A rule broken once, at the right moment, is a technique. A rule broken twelve times is a fault. Nothing in any published standard tells an editor which of the two is in front of them, and an editor who guesses will sometimes remove the best page in the book.
The correct response to both is a query rather than a change. The useful query names the pages that prompted it rather than what the author should do about them.
Why the queries need a record
Editors Canada's copy editing standards ask for a style sheet tracking the decisions a manuscript has made.3 Point-of-view decisions belong on it. Authors are often surprised by that, because a style sheet is imagined as a list of spellings and nothing more.
The reason is practical. An intentional break approved on page 40 will be queried again on page 300 unless somebody wrote it down. A proofreader arriving months later has no way to know it was deliberate, and a one-line entry on the style sheet saves the same conversation three times.
Where the published conventions end
The Chicago Manual of Style expanded its coverage into fiction and other creative genres in its eighteenth edition, drawing on the material its editors had been publishing for creative writers.4 That material is explicit about its own limits. Many of Chicago's guidelines were developed for scholarly prose and apply to creative contexts, and the interest lies in how they can be reinterpreted rather than simply applied.5
An editor working on fiction inherits that position. The mechanical conventions are published and can be applied. The choices are the author's, and the useful editorial contribution is telling them apart in the manuscript rather than blurring them in the report.
EditFast marks what is inconsistent, what departs from the manuscript's own established frame, and what a reader is likely to misread. What the book is doing, and which character it belongs to, stays with the novelist. Everything a client sends is treated in confidence, including unpublished manuscripts and works in progress.
Our fiction editing is quoted on the whole manuscript, because point of view is a property of the whole and cannot be assessed from a chapter.