What Line Editing Looks Like

What Line Editing Actually Looks Like

A Real Passage, Fixed Right Before You

Most authors hire an editor on faith. You send your pages to a stranger, wait, and hope what comes back is worth what you paid. That's a hard leap to make even with a big-name agency behind the name. It's harder still when the name is unfamiliar, and harder again when that person isn't down the road but on the other side of an ocean.

So what can I do to relieve your fears? To make you decide to take that leap? Instead of telling you I'm a good line editor, I'm going to show you how I think. (This is a new aspect of the famous show, don’t tell.)

Below is a short passage—not a real client's work, written for this purpose—with the kind of problems that show up in almost every early draft I see, regardless of genre. 

I'll edit it the way I actually edit: catching one issue at a time, explaining why it's an issue, and showing the fix. By the end, you'll know more about what a line edit actually does than most descriptions of "line editing services" will tell you.

The Passage, Before

Elenna walked into the great hall and saw that Lord Varlic was already seated at the head of the table, along with several other nobles she did not particularly like. She thought the room looked overly decorated for a meeting that was supposed to be about war preparations. She approached a window. She heard footsteps behind her and turned around slowly. Varlic stood there, his face completely unreadable, and she could tell that he had noticed the rider approaching from outside. "You know what this means," he said very quietly. Elenna understood that it meant war was now coming.

Read that once the way a reader would — fast, for story. It's not bad. Nothing in it is grammatically wrong. And that's exactly the trap: competent, correct prose can still be doing very little work. Here's what a line edit actually catches.

Pass One: Filter Words

Look at "saw that," "she thought," "she heard," "she could tell," "understood that." These are called filter words — verbs of perception that sit between the reader and the moment, reminding us that a character is perceiving something instead of just letting us experience it with her. Which, of course, is preventing us from fully immersing in the world of the story.

As a reader myself, I believe this is one of those things we actively strive to avoid, especially when we need some old school escape from the drudgery of daily reality. And isn’t this the reason we love fantasy novels?

"Elenna walked into the great hall and saw that Lord Varlic was already seated..." becomes "Elenna walked into the great hall. Lord Varlic was already seated..."

Nothing factual changes. But the reader is no longer watching Elenna watch the room — the reader is simply in the room, which is where you want them. This single move, applied consistently, is one of the fastest ways to make competent prose feel alive instead of merely described.

Something important to add, because this is where inexperienced self-editing tends to overcorrect: not every filter word is dead weight. "She could tell that he had noticed the rider" is doing something — it signals inference, not raw perception. Elenna isn't just seeing the rider; she's reading Varlic's face and drawing a conclusion. Cutting the filter there would lose that layer. The skill here isn't to "delete every instance of a perception verb" — it's knowing which ones are merely reporting and which ones are actually carrying information. The latter ones are those that get to stay.

Pass Two: Point of View Discipline

"Varlic stood there, his face completely unreadable, and she could tell that he had noticed the rider approaching from outside."

This sentence is in trouble, and it's a subtler problem than filter words. The passage is anchored in Elenna's point of view — we only know what she perceives. But "his face completely unreadable" followed immediately by "she could tell he had noticed" is a small contradiction: if his face is unreadable, how does she know what he's noticed? Either his face gave something away (in which case, show what — a flicker, a shift in his stance) or it didn't, in which case her certainty about what he noticed isn't earned by anything on the page.

This is the kind of inconsistency that readers feel before they can name it — a faint sense that something doesn't quite track, even if they couldn't tell you why. Fixed:

"Varlic stood right there. Something in his stance had gone rigid, and Elenna followed his gaze to the rider approaching from outside."

Now her conclusion is earned by something she actually observed, and the reader draws the inference alongside her rather than being told the outcome secondhand.

Pass Three: Free Indirect Discourse

"She thought the room looked overly decorated for a meeting that was supposed to be about war preparations."

This is a character's opinion, reported at arm's length. It's information, but it has no personality — anyone could have thought this thought, in this phrasing. Free indirect discourse lets the character's actual private voice bleed into the narration itself (even if it’s a third person narration), without a "she thought" tag:

"The room was absurd for a war council — more suited to a wedding than a siege."

Same fact. But now it sounds like someone with an opinion said it, not like a narrator summarizing that someone had one. This is where an editor can help a competent writer become a distinctive one — not by adding more words, but by finding the version of the sentence that only this character would say. Making sure the character is given this kind of individuality is what creates a lot of the magic in the story, bringing it to life.

Pass Four: Redundancy and Dead Weight

"'You know what this means,' he said very quietly. Elenna understood that it meant war was now coming."

"Very quietly" is an adverb doing a verb's job — if the moment calls for hushed intensity, a stronger verb choice ("murmured") often does it without leaning on a modifier. And "Elenna understood that it meant war was now coming" restates something the reader already knows from the previous line of dialogue — the "understood... meant" construction is telling the reader to feel an emotion that the scene, if built correctly, should already be producing on its own.

“You know what this means,” he murmured. It meant war.

Shorter. Colder. And the abruptness of that final three-word sentence does more to land the weight of the moment than a longer explanatory sentence ever could, which is really the whole argument for line editing in one small example: often, less isn't a compromise. It's the stronger choice.

The Passage, After

Elenna walked into the great hall. Lord Varlic was already seated at the head of the table, among several nobles she had little patience for. The room was absurd for a war council — more suited to a wedding than a siege. 

She approached a window. Footsteps made her turn around. Varlic stood right behind her. Something in his stance had gone rigid, and Elenna followed his gaze to the rider approaching from outside.

"You know what this means," he murmured.

It meant war.

Same events. Same information. A different reading experience entirely.

Different choices of spacing and paragraphing can also make a big difference in the pacing and atmosphere of the story. Separating each thought or thought group can escalate or de-escalate the scene.

Could this passage be better edited? Of course it could. There is always room for improvement, like in any profession. Other choices of words and sentence constructions could also work. But in this case, in the end, it wouldn’t be tremendously different because the situation/scene is quite simple and transparent. We choose the right words for clarity first, and then, if possible, refine the sentences to give them the right rhythm and musical quality. That’s why editors who are also musicians (like yours truly) can turn this into an improved aesthetic experience for the reader.

What This Means for Your Manuscript

If you’ve read this far and are still not sure what the main takeaway is, it’s this: 

None of these four issues — filter words, POV discipline, flattened interiority, redundancy — are errors a spell-checker or an AI grammar tool will catch, because none of them are grammatically wrong. Let that sink in.

They're craft issues, the kind that separate prose that merely functions from prose that actually holds a reader. This is what a line edit is actually for: not fixing mistakes (usually left to the copy editor), but finding the sentence you meant to write underneath the sentence you actually wrote.

If you'd like to see this done on your own pages, I offer a short paid sample edit — a low-cost way to see exactly this kind of pass applied to your own work before committing to anything larger. Get in touch to find out more.

Keep writing,

Ishan

P.S. In the PDFs on my home page, there’s a batch of such editing samples done by me, only without explanations—just two versions of each example, a draft version and an edited version. If you have a little patience, you can both learn from them and get to know my workflow even better.