Lately I've received a little flurry of requests for manuscript reviews. This has been a real pleasure as I love reading and talking about work in progress. In my copyeditor role, I spend much of my day doing line-level repair work. When I judge a contest or choose work for a magazine, I have to think competitively: what's better? what's worse? what pieces speak to one another in this context? Manuscript consultation is a whole different story. I get to focus on larger questions such "What's going on in this piece?" That kind of question may seem obvious; but as a professional reader who gets hired to work at many specific levels, I've had to learn to hone my reactions to the situation. If I've been contracted to look at passive-voice and capitalization problems in your academic prose, I'm not going to have the luxury of standing back and saying, "So what internal pressure pushed you to write this book?" Neither the publisher nor the author has any interest in pursuing that question with me.

But when an author asks me to look at a work in progress, my eyes shift. It's like looking through a different glass: new elements come into focus; others withdraw into blur. My task now is to absorb these voices, these images, these characters; to exist within these structures and frames; to note where they wobble, veer, contradict; and to ask questions about those movements.

I don't want to make the author write like me. I want her to write more like herself.