I decided to write up a quick post to warn about some problems I’ve seen recently regarding editors. X (formerly Twitter) recently had writers talking about their experiences with editors. Some writers obviously do have problematic experiences and are rightly wary about working with another editor. However, I wanted to flag up a few issues.
Editors who are offering to return a manuscript in an unreasonably short period of time may be using AI, while charging YOU for time they never spent on your manuscript. Furthermore, they should not be feeding your copyrighted material into an AI without your permission in the first place. Consequently if you see someone offering a one week turnaround for a developmental edit of a full-length novel, reject it. Developmental edits, done properly, take weeks.
Also beware of writers who fancy themselves as editors because they ‘edited’ their own work. It is very common for these people to have no editorial training and no feedback from professional editors on their editorial work. Some of these writers are simply looking for a side gig to help cover their own publication costs, or they’re unaware of the sheer amount of work involved. If you want another writer to edit your work, ask them about their training or membership of a professional association. Some writers have undertaken training.
I will probably add to this post when I have more time, and I will list some of the training you, as a writer, should be looking for in an editor. I will also include professional associations which have codes of conduct, including the Editorial Freelancers Association and The Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading. I’m personally a member of the EFA, one of the organisations I trained with. The Chartered Institute is more focused on copyediting and proofreading.
If someone is offering to edit your work, and they have no training, no membership of a professional organisation, and they are offering a fast turnaround of your manuscript, WRITER BEWARE.
Is it ever too late to start writing? With some careers, youth is the best time to start – with more athletic careers, including ballet dancing, it’s pretty much a requirement. Some sports and forms of dance can be taken up later. And so can drawing, painting, music, and writing – even if you never mean to pursue them as a career. But what if you do want to be a professional writer? What happens with writers who start later in life?
While the publishing industry often seems more interested in younger and more photogenic writers, the truth is there are plenty of older writers too. Of course, they may have started out at a younger age. The average book buyer is older and if representation really matters in publishing, then it ought to apply to older readers finding characters like themselves in books too.
Of course, this is not to say that older readers always want to read about older characters.
Just starting out? But are you really just starting?
One thing I’ve noticed about many, many older writers who are starting out is that they say they’ve been writing since childhood. Or they started young and somehow life got in the way.
For women, who may have childrearing and carer duties on top of other demands, it can be especially difficult to make the time to continue writing. Indeed, some women writers feel guilty about the time they take away from parenting or domestic duties to spend time writing.
This can lead to gaps in writing experience. A passion that started early can often be sidelined to make way for more serious responsibilities. Plans to get started on writing again can get delayed indefinitely. Or they can be put off until the children grow up or retirement comes.
But that then leaves some writers looking around at the youth of so many writers on social media, thinking maybe it’s too late. Maybe I’ve missed my chance. Maybe no one will be interested in what I have to write. Maybe it’s too late to make my mark.
There is also the issue of not having a long career if you start too late.
Self-publishing versus traditional publishing
The reality is that it’s not too late and I will list some examples of different writers further down. Sometimes a writer has published earlier in life and then left a long gap before they return to writing. Sometimes a writer’s earlier books didn’t take off so well and the real masterpiece comes much later.
Joan Lindsay was 71 when she wrote her masterpiece, Picnic at Hanging Rock. And she wrote it fast, after a series of dreams.
While Lindsay was dealing with the mainstream or traditional publishing industry, self-publishing is the new game in town. Though by this point – 2025 – it’s far from new. Many working in indie publishing have long established careers by now.
In indie publishing it really doesn’t matter how old you are, or what you look like, or what your background is. You don’t have the publishing industry acting as a gatekeeper.
Working with older writers
As a developmental editor I’ve worked with a number of older writers. Sometimes they have retired and are now dedicating their new free time to their writing dream. That writing dream has often been around for a long time.
One writer I worked with, who must have been in her seventies, was going through old diaries from the 1960s and novelising them. She brought the world of 1960s San Francisco to life, complete with the social movements of the time, the music, and the vibrancy of her long-gone youth. Because she had her own journals, her writing was fresh and youthful.
During the Covid period, when many people were locked down, there was a sudden flurry of writers looking for developmental feedback. I was very busy during this period. Many of the writers I worked with then were starting out, or they’d been writing as a hobby for a while and were now looking to take their writing further. This led to me offering quite a bit of coaching feedback during that period, helping those writers develop their skills further.
Examples of writers who started late
Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are huge classics of the fantasy genre, right? But did you know that Tolkien was 45 when he published The Hobbit? His work is so influential that it’s impossible to imagine what fantasy would look like without his books. Tolkien was an academic, and that experience and background was hugely beneficial to his later career as a writer.
Ian Fleming, who created the iconic James Bond, was 44 when he published the first in the Bond series, Casino Royale. Imagine he’d decided it was too late to become a writer? Not only would publishing and readers be deprived of an iconic series, but Hollywood would have suffered too. Bond triggered a number of espionage films in the 1960s. Even Austin Powers owes his existence to Ian Fleming’s Bond.
Bram Stoker was 43 when he published The Snake’s Path, and 50 when he published the iconic Dracula, which changed the vampire genre forever.
Or how about Watership Down, published when Richard Adams was 53?
Then there’s The Wind in the Willows – published when Kenneth Grahame was 49.
Meanwhile Daniel Defoe was 59 when Robinson Crusoe was published.
Here are some more writers and the ages they were when they started:
Author of the Jack Reacher novels – Lee Child (44)
Tropic of Cancer author – Henry Miller (44)
Raymond Chandler (51)
Black Beauty author – Anna Sewell (57)
Writer of The Shipping News, Brokeback Mountain, and more – Annie Proulx (57)
Mary Wesley (57 for her children’s fiction, and 71 when she published her first adult novel)
Author of Little House on the Prairie – Laura Ingalls Wilder (65)
If you’re an older writer and you’re looking for feedback on your novel or memoir, feel free to contact me about your manuscript. I have different feedback options, ranging from alpha reads (giving you feedback on an earlier draft), to manuscript critiques (with different price tiers), and full developmental edits. I also offer outline critiques and opening chapters developmental editing packages.
If you want to check to see if we’re a good fit, I offer a free sample edit. I work in adult fiction – science fiction, fantasy, horror, historical, literary, thriller and romance. I have also worked with memoir. I have no experience with children’s fiction.
Wondering what the difference is between a manuscript critique and a developmental edit? Go to this post for more information: Developmental edit or manuscript critique?
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I’ve written posts in the past relating to how to research your novel locations online, and also how to avoid certain location problems in your fiction. In this post I wanted to address the specific topic of researching historical locations for your novel. I’ve touched on some tools for this before, but only in passing. The larger topic was left to a future post – which I’ve finally sat down to write!
Travel writing
If your novel is set in the 20th century or very late 19th century, you have the advantage of accessing travel guides from the period. In fact, the German publisher Baedeker started publishing travel guides in 1832. They also published in English and French. If you’ve watched or read A Room With a View, you might recall references to Baedeker from the English tourists in the story/film.
Some of these old books can be bought secondhand. I have travel guides from the late 1920s for Berlin, London, Paris, and Northern Italy.
How to Be Happy in Berlin by John Chancellor
How to Be Happy in Paris by John Chancellor
London 1929 – Illustrated guidebooks published by Wardlock & CoS
Muirhead’s Northern Italy – The Blue Guides
These books contain a treasure trove of information and advice on places and events like markets which no longer exist. Some districts in London and Berlin were badly damaged in the war.
Indeed, in the case of Berlin, you have a city bombed, and then subject to partition, with a wall running through the city and a no man’s land in between the inner and outer wall. This left tenements and even an old major railway station in limbo, abandoned.
The map that folds out from the inside back cover of How to Be Happy in Berlin represents a city that no longer exists in the same form. Rebuilding after the war, empty lots left derelict for many years, the wall, and finally the post-reunification building programme has changed the city to the point where areas around the old Potsdamer Platz, for example, would be unrecognisable to a Weimar-era Berliner.
That’s why a map of late Weimar Berlin is so valuable for anyone writing a novel set in that period. It’s fascinating to look at, and you can also cross-reference the map information with photo searches online. I have a book of photos of Berlin in this period. But there are images online and videos on the likes of YouTube.
Travel guide information
While you don’t want to overload your narrative with too much unnecessary information, travel guides provide useful snippets like the price of a taxi, the various railway stations for different destinations (which station do you take in Berlin for the boat train back to Britain), restaurant and food information, etc. Want to know the restaurants near Potsdamer Platz, just so you can throw in a real place? How to Be Happy in Berlin provides a list and the average price. It also goes into the different cabarets and nightlife. Just in case your characters are having a night on the town.
You can also deduce social customs of the period – some cabarets didn’t allow girls (women) to enter the main establishment unless they were accompanied by a male. According to John Chancellor, the girls therefore hung around the bar, waiting for a male to take them through the ‘magic door that leads to the lights and the champagne‘. He also assures us that the German girl is not ‘a fat, stolid and stupid wench‘. No, Berlin girls are fine girls!
They also include warnings about places to avoid or what not to do (because the locals don’t like it).
My Italian guidebook, once owned by someone called Dorothy in 1924 (because she pencilled it inside the book), has passages she’s underlined warning of dangers to tourists. Or perhaps someone else underlined them for her, as an example of what to watch out for.
Dorothy left some evidence of her holiday in the guide – a pencilled itinerary, and a small flier for a Venetian shop (whose address I tracked down on Google Street View – only to find the shop is no longer there and something else occupies the building).
Yes, old travel guides, when used with Google Street View, can turn into fascinating rabbit holes, where you can spend all day checking out what those old places look like now. Some addresses and streets will obviously be gone. While some street names will be changed.
I also have this Regency A-Z of London, which I found in a used bookshop many years ago:
You can also check out diaries. If you want to know about an eighteenth century masquerade ball in London, you could check out Fanny Burney’s diaries. If you want to check out the opera in Italy, read Casanova’s diaries.
Diaries and letters can tell you a lot, including descriptions of old eighteenth century pleasure gardens, the entertainments there, and the kinds of people who visited.
One of my historical novel clients had her characters visit these places, as well as real period shops, etc. While you can just make things up, it’s fun to throw in actual places.
If you’re researching via history books on specific locations, you’ll often find they reference primary sources like diaries, letters, and other accounts. Don’t ignore these – they can be tracked down online and downloaded if they’re in the public domain.
I have a book called Glasgow in 1901 by James Hamilton Muir which likely has its foreign equivalents – it’s a tour of the city, with plenty of details and descriptions.
Period journalism can also be a great source of information on location and social custom. I have a book on Glasgow called Midnight Scenes and Social Photographs: Being Sketches of Life in the Streets, Wynds and Dens of the City. It’s from 1858. It contains interactions with some of the poorest people, and one account describes someone lying in a basement under blankets because they shared clothing with someone else who had gone out.
These are details many modern authors wouldn’t even think to include.
The book also includes sensory information from the author about smells, etc.
Paintings and sketches
Pre-photography, our main visual reference point for locations is art. I collect books on Glasgow history, and the earlier periods are represented by artists’ renderings of the city. This shows the development of the city over time, the disappearance of rural areas as the city expanded and gobbled up more territory. It also shows old bridges, old building styles, and women standing in the Clyde washing laundry before the river was later deepened in the nineteenth century for shipping.
All of this will also apply to other cities and towns in the UK and other countries.
Sometimes artists were commissioned to record a location. Later photographers would be commissioned by some cities and towns.
Photography and film
The photographic record starts in the 1840s. For a city like Paris, this allows the modern viewer to see Paris before it was redeveloped by Haussmann. The old rickety buildings had not yet been replaced by the Parisian terraces we think of today. One of my historical novel clients wrote about this city around the time some of the new builds were up while other slum areas still existed. You can read my interview with her in which we discuss her research.
The city of Glasgow commissioned photographer Thomas Annan to record the old slum district next to the High Street and the old Jacobean university college, before they were demolished. The old tenements would have been more sanitary before the industrial age, when the tenants had a free run down to the river, but boxed in during the industrial age, and crowded out by Irish and Highland immigrants, they had fallen into ruin.
The celluloid record in terms of moving film starts in the 1890s, and is another useful source of information. Fiction films shot on location can show a lot of background detail. You can even cross-reference a street sign on a city building with your period map, allowing you to build a picture of that district if it’s a significant location in your novel.
Fiction films often have fascinating backdrops, but you can also look to documentary film. If you’re interested in late Weimar Berlin, I recommend People on Sunday, which is an invaluable insight into the lives of young people in the city.
Genealogical and other records
Don’t forget to check out the following:
census records (which have fascinating references to professions that no longer exist and which can show the social makeup of a tenement or district
Parish records (pre-census in the UK)
valuation rolls are another record in Scotland – I can’t comment on anywhere else
Post Office directories
Cemeteries and gravestones
Old newspapers and magazines (another rabbit hole!)
ordinance survey maps
Novels, poetry and songs
Period novels are always a useful source of information. I also have a book of bawdy English songs which likely includes little social details about the various periods. Likewise, the poetry of Jonathan Swift has thrown up some juicy details, even when he’s being downright cutting. Check out the link to his poem below!
Researching for historical fiction can lead to going down endless rabbit holes. So while research can help bring your historical world to life, it’s important to remember that much of the information you find is not something to include in your novel.
However, understanding the location, the social customs there, the prices of things, the venues, and the social demographics, can help you and your characters navigate your period world more realistically. Sometimes all you need is a tiny detail, mentioned in passing.
It’s best not to info dump, but you can impart information in a less obvious way that helps your reader immerse themself in the story. Remember to include sensory information. The past, for example, didn’t always smell very nice, but you also have visual textures, noises (carriage wheels on cobblestones), and more.
Some writers research as they go along, and others research up front, before they even start. In the case of the latter, the danger is in delaying the writing of the story for too long. Research can be very seductive. It pays to exercise restraint and remember the purpose of the research – it’s not a form of procrastination! It is meant to serve the novel, not provide a useful avoidance technique for never starting your book.
There is more to be said about historical research. I might keep some for another post. In the meantime…
Are you a historical novelist looking for feedback?
I have worked on novels set in the following periods:
Paleo period – with mammoths and cave lions, etc!
18th century
19th century
20th century
World War Two
I particularly like 18th century onwards, though I do have a substantial collection of 17th century history books. And I’m not averse to the medieval period either!
I am currently open for manuscript critiques and developmental edits. One of my historical novel clients sent me a very long and detailed outline of her book to edit first, before she went on to write it. Outline critiques are also a service I provide – I can also include useful recommendations on books or documentaries/films that might be useful.
I write a weekly post on Substack, usually on a Monday or Tuesday. These posts are sometimes blogs I’ve posted here, which you can receive directly in your inbox. Sometimes they are newsletters or announcements featuring writing competitions I’ve heard about. You can sign up below.
As a fiction editor, I sometimes see manuscripts which have fairly basic problems like dialogue formatting and other issues which are relatively easy to fix. While you can buy a book on how to write and format dialogue, and how to use dialogue tags and action beats, the best way to learn is to copy. Because copywork can improve your writing in a short space of time.
And by copy, I don’t mean plagiarism.
I mean copywork, an old method of teaching writing skills, and one used by famous writers from Robert Louis Stevenson, Benjamin Franklin, Jack London, Joan Didion, and Hunter S. Thompson.
In the case of Thompson, he copied out The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms not to steal, but to learn how they were written and structured. It’s a good example of learning from the greats. You don’t have to write like them when it comes to your own writing, but you might learn from their techniques and narrative choices.
Using copywork to improve dialogue writing
For those who struggle with writing and laying out dialogue, you don’t need to copy out a whole story or novel to learn. You can simply choose dialogue scenes from novels you like, then write them out. Try doing it longhand. It forces you to think more about each word you’re writing down.
That way you learn where the speech tags go, how they are punctuated, and when you can drop them altogether. You learn how to use action beats. You also learn how to write dialogue that doesn’t run on forever.
Studying scenes in published books can teach you how to keep dialogue on track and succinct. You don’t need to show an entire conversation, for example. You can cut into the middle of a conversation and then exit before the meeting is over.
How copywork teaches other writing skills
Copywork can also teach you about basic formatting and indented paragraphs, the use of line breaks, use of punctuation, pacing, and more. You can examine how much an author describes the world of their novel or short story early on – whether they take time to feed in details, and whether they leave most things to the reader’s imagination.
If you write historical novels, you can look at the opening pages of well-regarded books in the genre, and copy them out to see how much detail, info dumping, and world building there is. You can see how the writer introduces the main character(s) to the readers – in terms of telling versus showing.
If you’re struggling to write a battle scene, you could find battle scenes in published novels and copy them out to see how the author choreographed the action, dialogue, point of view, internal dialogue, etc, to create a powerful and pacy scene.
Copywork can teach you how the greats tackled basic writing skills. While you can read ‘how to’ books (and the best will include examples), copywork using targeted passages to solve particular weaknesses in your writing can go a long way to improving your skills and techniques.
Again, this is not about stealing other people’s work. It’s about learning from the greats – learning technique, layout, rhythm, and more.
Copywork exercise
You can give yourself a regular copywork exercise by choosing a short passage – could be dialogue, opening scenes in a novel, more dramatic scenes – and copying them out longhand to study, word for word, how these passages work. If you struggle with writing tension or conflict, you could choose several relevant passages from published novels and copy them out to see what the author is doing that you’re missing.
Are they using shorter sentences to drive pacing?
What else might they be doing?
While you can simply read the relevant passages slowly, it won’t have the same impact as writing them out. Writing longhand takes more time and thought.
Need feedback on your novel?
I’m a developmental editor currently open to new clients. I work with adult fiction – SF/H/F, historical, literary, thriller, and romance. I’ve worked on both standalone novels and series. I particularly enjoy working with newer writers and my manuscript critique and developmental editing packages have tiered options for different budgets.
I offer a free sample edit. Check out my services page at the link below:
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