Novellas Editing and Proofreading Services

A novella is not a short novel and it is not a long story. It is a form with its own physics: one pressure, followed all the way down, with no room to look sideways. Most novella manuscripts that do not work are novels that stopped early, and the tell is always the same — a second storyline, introduced around the midpoint, that would have been fine in ninety thousand words and is fatal in thirty.

We work on what novella writers produce — full manuscripts and drafts, opening sections and sample material, submissions to novella-specific presses and prizes, synopses and covering letters, structural plans for the form, work being cut down from a novel or grown from a story, linked novellas and paired volumes, and the material that goes out to publishers who take the form seriously. Our editors work on what the length can hold.

Deciding what must not be in the book is the whole craft of the novella, and it is a subtractive discipline that runs against every instinct developed by writing novels. We work through manuscripts so there is one central pressure and everything present is doing something to it, since a subplot in a novella does not enrich the main line but competes with it for a space that does not exist; so the cast is small enough that each person is fully themselves, given that six thinly drawn characters read worse at this length than three drawn properly; so time is compressed or the structure carries the leaps, because a novella covering forty years is usually a novel with the middle missing; so the backstory that a novel would dramatise is compressed into a clause or cut, as the form permits assertion in a way the novel does not; so the ending arrives while the pressure is still building rather than after it resolves, since novellas end best slightly early; and so the prose is dense enough to reward the reader's full attention, because that attention is the one thing this length reliably gets. Manuscripts edited this way stop apologising for their size.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including unpublished manuscripts and submissions. We are editors rather than agents or publishers, and we offer no view on where a novella should be sent or whether it will find a home. What we can do is find the second storyline and ask you the hard question about it.