Advanced Editing Skills: Romance (June 15 – July 26, 2026)

Description

$450 (Members: $405) | How to edit romance – advanced instruction | 6 weeks | Instructor-led | Advanced

Ready to dig more deeply into editing romance? This new six-week instructor-led course is designed for editors who work with romance authors or intend to work with romance authors.

The class goes beyond the basics of genre description/definition and discussion of tropes. It delves into story problems associated with romance, including:

• not establishing a conflict between the main characters
• burying the story problem or introducing it too late
• privileging the overt plot over the central romance
• failure of the romance arc to drive character change or affect character arc
• lack of distinct characterization for main characters
• unclear or missing GMC for one or both of the main characters

Because romances are often part of a series, the class covers common series problems such as frontloading all the backstory, introducing all the characters in the story world all at once (even before they matter to the story), trying to force in plot events that matter to subsequent books in the series but not this one, and more.

It includes deeper dives into popular romance subgenres such as romantasy, slow-burn, vacation romance, holiday romance, and sports romance.

We’ll also touch on editing short romance fiction, such as might be included in an anthology or given away by the author to readers.

But the real standout element of this class is that it shows how to perform two rounds of development on the same manuscript, something that is helpful for any developmental editor to learn how to do. Instead of telling an author “this manuscript isn’t ready for development” you can help them make it ready.

The class shows you how to perform a manuscript evaluation (sometimes called an assessment) as the first round of development and then shows you how to perform a full developmental edit as the second round. It includes examples of how one editor has approached the edits.

A full romance manuscript is used in this class to help support a more in-depth study of the craft of editing romance. However, if time constraints make it too difficult for you to read a full manuscript, you can choose to perform your edits over a smaller chunk of the manuscript.

Each week includes a new lesson and a new assignment to be submitted for the instructor’s feedback along with online forum discussions about developmental issues.

Prerequisites: to take this class, you must have taken either the self-paced DE 1- 6 or the instructor-led Beginning and Intermediate Developmental Editing for Fiction AND Editing the Romance. The basics of editorial methodology will not be covered but students will be expected to know them.

The class is entirely online and asynchronous (you don’t have to be in any particular place at any particular time to participate) but weekly assignments are due by specific deadlines.