A common developmental concern is a problem or error in the timeline of a story. Usually the copy editor is expected to track the timeline very carefully, but you want to avoid having a big problem at the CE stage that could have been solved at the DE stage if only you’d been paying attention. (And with indie authors, there may not be a CE stage.)

So, you need to be able to spot that if in story time today is Tuesday and tomorrow is Friday, something has gone wrong somewhere. Similarly, if Penelope is in Los Angeles at 9 a.m., she is almost certainly not getting off the plane in New York at lunchtime. In other words, we have to keep track of clock time as well as elapsed time.

For the author, fixing a timeline isn’t always as simple as changing the reference from Friday to Tuesday. It may require significant revision, depending on the story—which is why it’s better to catch the problem in dev than to hope the CE catches it.

You can use a spread sheet to track the timeline. If you’ve done a chapter-by-chapter summary, you can add timeline (and even location) tracking to that (Chapter 1—noon on Tuesday—Rome).

For beginning editors, tracking this in a chapter summary document can be extremely helpful. I still do this for complex edits. You wouldn’t send the author the tracking spreadsheet—that’s for your use. You would use queries and any necessary ms edits to deal with timeline issues. If they’re extensive, you would also need to address them in the revision letter, as fixing the issues may require the type of rewriting that’s beyond the DE’s typical role.

Many developmental concerns relate to the story arc—what happens and why. The what and the why are of course interconnected but they can also be looked at separately (at least to some degree) to help you identify problems in the narrative. For example, a story may have a clear conflict, interesting characters, and carefully explored cause-and-effect (the “why”) but if the pacing is too slow or uneven, none of this matters. The reader will lose interest and wander off.

One technique I often use, especially with beginning writers, is to simply summarize what happens in each chapter of their novel. This approach that helps you see whether each chapter is pulling its weight as well as how the chapters (and the scenes within chapters, if necessary) link together – or don’t.

The chapter summary is just a sentence or two that describes the action of the novel. Note that by action I don’t necessarily mean guns blazing. It can be a decision made, a conversation that moves the plot in another direction, etc.

Recently I edited a novel where I came up with an outline of the first five chapters that went something like this:

In Chapter 1, the heroine rents a car.

In Chapter 2, the villain tells his minion all the things the author wants the reader to know.

In Chapter 3, a secondary character moves back to her hometown and has some mixed feelings about it.

In Chapter 4, the hero has an inciting incident but it’s told as a flashback.

At this point I made a note to myself: I have no idea what any of these characters want and I don’t know what makes them unique, interesting, engaging. What are their quirks and foibles?

In Chapter 5, the hero and heroine meet. They info-dump about their pasts. We are told he immediately feels deeply about her but this not shown. Then we find out that the two are “meant to be” together.

My note to myself says: “Meant to be” just doesn’t work in fiction. It robs the narrative of uncertainty and suspense. If everything is meant to be, then all these characters are just playthings of fate and nothing they’re doing matters. Their goals, choices, decisions, and actions are meaningless. They have no consequence. But what drives narrative/fiction? It’s the character’s goals, choices, decisions, and actions. You can’t tell the reader these don’t matter and then expect the reader to follow along.

At this point, the end of Chapter Five, we’re a hundred pages in and nothing has really happened. The author couldn’t see this because there were lots of words involved and any number of conversations and descriptions. But boiling it down into a brief outline helped her see that her novel consisted almost entirely of telling the reader things instead of showing them unfold. (The pacing was glacially slow.)

Once she was able to see that she made big improvements. Doing the outline also helped me identify what my concerns with the story were, as evidenced by the notes I made to myself as I went along.

While the outline is meant for your use, you can share it or parts of it (carefully edited for tone) with the author to help him/her understand where the manuscript is failing to live up to its potential.

One of the curious conundrums I’ve experienced as a book editor is encountering characters that the author clearly has contempt for but expects readers to be interested in engaging with.

Contempt is as poisonous in writing as it is in relationships.

The goal of the author should not be to judge character but to explore character. The reader can judge.

One of the reasons this contempt happens, or seems to happen, is when authors view characters as tokens to be moved around on a backdrop—chess pieces, as it were, having rules of engagement but no volition.

In other words, Beatrice does not murder the blackmailer Malcolm because that is the type of thing Beatrice would do when threatened with exposure, but because the author needs a dead body on the floor. Action then becomes motivated by the author’s need to check off a plot point on their outline rather than as something integral to the character.

The most important question we can ask in helping authors develop characters is: “Would this character really do/think/say this thing right now?”

Authors often create characters who are perfectly suited for the story that is being told. The brilliant detective is put to the task of finding out whodunnit, the brilliant surgeon must operate on the life-threatening tumor, the brilliant commando must rescue the hostage.

If these characters have suitable antagonists to oppose them, then enough conflict can be generated to make following along on their adventures engaging enough that readers will do it.

Fish Out of Water

But readers like to see characters both in and out of their element.

One of the best ways to define character is to plunge the character into unfamiliar territory.

So, what happens if the author promotes the robbery investigator to homicide detective? What happens if the life-threatening tumor must be operated on in a field hospital miles from the nearest blood bank? What happens if the commando is injured and tactical support for the operation completely withdrawn?

Now the character is tested in ways that will engage readers.

One of the most common character development problems I come across in developmental editing is the introduction of the cast of thousands. We’ve barely met Harry and Sally when we are also introduced to Bernadette, Jose, Terry, Maximilian, Duane, Lisa, and their children and pets. The reader can barely figure out who any of these characters are, let alone develop any kind of interest in or empathy with them.

Unnecessary Characters Create Character Development Problems

When there are too many characters jostling for page time, it is difficult for the author to develop any of them in a way that will engage a reader’s interest. It is true that certain stories require a lot of characters, but when and how they are introduced matters. As with any type of exposition, character introductions can turn into info-dumping:

“And that’s Miranda, married to Michael—the blond—and their children Margaret and Mitchell, not to be confused with Michel, over there, who is seeing Angelique, whose ex, Antonio, is standing by the bean dip.”

I can’t keep track of any of these people and further I don’t care about a single one.

Authors sometimes try to fix this problem by turning all of the characters into viewpoint characters, thinking that this will allow us to engage with them more fully:

“Miranda overheard Penelope pointing her out to the new neighbor. She went over and introduced herself. When Michael saw Miranda abandon the shrimp cocktail, he knew something was up and went to follow her. Margaret, their daughter, watched her parents leave the buffet table and decided now was the time to snag all the crab cakes.”

But while this is a slight improvement over an undifferentiated list, the approach still creates only superficial engagement with the characters.

How to Reduce the Cast List

Some suggestions I often make for authors who have overcrowded their pages:

• As with any exposition, characters should only be introduced when they are needed for the story to make sense.
• Only the most important characters to the story should be viewpoint characters
• Character roles can often be combined to reduce the number of characters readers have to remember, especially minor characters who only show up occasionally. For example, in the above scenario, maybe only one child really matters to the story, so Margaret and Mitchell can be rolled into one character.
• Minor characters should be defined by their role, not given names (as the giving of names implies that the character is important and needs to be remembered). So unless the barista is a close confidante of the protagonist, she can just be “the barista.”

Helping Authors Understand Character Development

Authors often use character sketches to understand their characters better. They’ll haul out a template and fill in the blanks with descriptions of the character’s appearance, when they were born, where they went to school, who gave them their first kiss, and more.

While some of these details can be important in character description—it’s useful for the author to remember that Murgatroyd is bald—this type of fill-in-the-blank exercise is fundamentally flawed. Character development isn’t saying, “Murgatroyd went to Yale.” Character development is saying, “Murgatroyd punched Nicholas for claiming that Harvard was a superior school.”

In other words, character development happens through action and dialogue, reaction and thought, motivation and goals—not details of biography.

An author doesn’t need to know where Murgatroyd went to school so much as the author needs to know what Murgatroyd would say and do if he felt insulted, and what kinds of things would make him feel insulted.

One thing I often recommend that authors do—rather than fill in yet another mundane character sketch—is to have the character take an aptitude test or a personality test, like the ones employers and career coaches do. These tests do not ask where you went to school but what your interests are and how you would react to common situations. An introvert character is going to act differently from an extravert; a doer differently from a thinker; a loner differently from a social butterfly.

Here’s a collection of such tests to try: https://www.themuse.com/advice/14-free-personality-tests-thatll-help-you-figure-yourself-out