Welcome to Utopian Editing 2.0
Hi! I’m Kerri Miller, founder of Utopian Editing. I’m neurodivergent, as I suspect many of you are, and you’ll see me talk about it pretty frequently. After all, neurodivergent traits can be superpowers (helloooooo, hyperfocus), and they can also create challenges (I’m looking at you, executive dysfunction).
As someone who has been on a journey to better understand her own brain and whose ADHD is primarily controlled by caffeine and duct tape, I have a soft spot for writers with similar struggles. I know what it’s like to write twenty pages in a head-down, forgetting-to-eat-and-pee marathon, then beat myself up over a subsequent dry spell as it suddenly seems impossible to write another word.
I’ve been a freelance editor since 2017, but I started helping writers long before that. Excuse me while I grab my cane and reading glasses . . . [continues in a querulous voice] Back in the year twenty-aught-zero, when I was still a young pup, I wanted to edit novels. But in the olden days, while we did have internet, this “remote work” thing hadn’t caught on yet. So the places I’d really want to edit for—Tor, Del Rey, DAW—were all headquartered in New York, quite far (physically, culturally, emotionally) from my suburban home in Texas. One of my professors suggested I develop some relevant experience by tutoring at the university’s writing center, which I did. I tutored there for a year and a half as an undergrad and another year and a half as a graduate student. At that point, moving to the Big Apple still didn’t appeal to me, so I went another direction, first spending a few years as a paralegal, then doing a ten-year stint as a high school English teacher.
All this to say, by the time it hit me that freelance editing online had become a thing, my approach to writers and their manuscripts had been firmly shaped by those tutoring and teaching experiences. Every student I sat down next to had their own background, their own experiences and hangups with writing, their own often-fraught history with teachers and tutors. I learned not only to diagnose the immediate writing problem but to start understanding the relationship this human being beside me had with writing in general. Fears, frustrations, failures, insecurities . . . and believe me, I could identify with all of it.
That’s why I never assume any editing project is simple and straightforward. What I agree to do might be (like copyediting a 70k sci-fi manuscript), but that’s still a human being on the other end of that document. I may know little or nothing about their particular history with writing, but in my experience, it’s HARD getting feedback and corrections from another person—even if that’s exactly what you asked for.
So while I don’t try to baby my clients, I do treat each and every one with respect and kindness. It’s not my job to be Sister Beatrice whacking your hand with a metal ruler every time you end a sentence with a preposition (sorry, my dad had vivid stories about Catholic school back in the REALLY olden days, and that image always stuck with me). I’m here to help you along on your writing journey, perhaps to help you read the map or hand you a cool drink of water or remind you to rest.
So, why “Utopian Editing 2.0”?
I was a novice at this freelance editing thing when I first built Utopian Editing. Since then, my editing and teaching and tutoring skills have all evolved toward what I think is a more coherent philosophy of the editor’s role and relationship to the writer. UE 2.0 is about making that more intentional, communicating that philosophy to writers and other editors and inviting discussion about it.
I’ll continue offering developmental, line, and copyediting of full manuscripts as usual, but I’ll be playing with more flexible ways for writers to get coaching. That includes short, targeted sessions to address whatever a writer is struggling with at the moment, whether it’s making a character arc more compelling or finding the right balance of action, dialogue, and exposition in a particular scene or learning how to vary their sentence structure more in order to keep their prose from feeling clunky.
So, you tell me: If you could have a writing coach sit next to you for thirty minutes today, what would you ask for help with?