Young Adult Fiction Editing and Proofreading Services

Teenagers can hear an adult in the room. Not in the vocabulary — nobody is fooled by slang either way — but in the shape of the thinking. A sixteen-year-old narrator who understands what her anger is really about, who forgives her mother in chapter nineteen because it is time, who arrives at a lesson: that is a grown-up writing a memo about being sixteen, and the readers it was written for put it down.

We work on what YA writers produce — full manuscripts and partials, opening chapters and submission packages, first-person narration and its consistency, series planning and continuity, synopses for agents, crossover and upper-YA work, material dealing with difficult subject matter, author notes and resource pages, and the material that goes to agents and editors. Our editors work on where the adult becomes audible.

Voice is the whole thing in this category, and the leak is almost never the vocabulary — it is knowledge and resolution. We work through manuscripts so the narrator only knows what they could know, since a teenager who accurately diagnoses their father's midlife crisis has been handed the author's understanding and has stopped being a character; so feelings are described at the resolution the character has, which is often none, because "I was angry and I didn't know why and I said the worst thing I could think of" is truer and better than three sentences of insight; so adults are allowed to be right sometimes and wrong sometimes for reasons of their own, given that a book where the grown-ups are obstacles reads as written by someone who is not one; so the ending resists the tidiness that publishing pressure creates, as a resolution where everybody learns something is the surest sign of an adult hand; so difficult material is neither flinched from nor resolved into a lesson, since the readership can tell when they are being managed; and so the humour is the character's rather than the author's, because a joke the narrator would not make is the loudest tell in the book. Manuscripts edited this way sound like somebody rather than about somebody.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including unpublished manuscripts, series plans and submissions. We are editors rather than agents, publishers or safeguarding advisers, and we offer no view on your subject matter or your book's prospects. What we can do is find the sentences where you can be heard behind the narrator.