Introduction

Welcome to our newsletter/blog! We (Jenny and Dylan) are full-time fiction editors by profession and writers by trade. Between us, we’ve edited well over 500 novels, and we’ve coauthored one of our own, currently represented by our lovely agent Lauren Khan of FinePrint Literary, with our second book in progress.

We’re starting Trust the Reader for a number of reasons. 

1) We spend an obscene number of hours talking about editing and writing, sometimes greeting each other in the morning with things like “I had the weirdest dream that a book I was editing misused the past perfect.” It feels slightly less like a descent into folie a deux to push some of that outward. 

2) It feels meaningful to talk about the inherently human experience of writing and creativity, especially now. Writing is about connecting with yourself and with others. Every word you see here will come from us (we don’t use generative AI, period, and we’ll talk a fair bit in our posts about why everyone should avoid it).

3) A lot of the editing notes we leave come up again and again, including in our own writing. We want a place to point authors/clients to that reflects our experience and editorial ideology (with enough interesting tidbits for writers and readers of all kinds, whether you’re working with us or not!)

Why Trust the Reader?

It’s what most of our writing and editing experience boils down to: trusting your reader to meet you where you’re at, and trusting yourself to successfully bring them there.