You're Smarter than You Think (and Your Drafts Will Prove It): Developmental Editing Insights for Nonfiction Writers

When I was teaching writing, I would tell students, “You’re smarter than you think you are.”

I didn’t mean they were underestimating their IQ. I meant that the real depth of our ideas often doesn’t reveal itself until we start writing them down. And in nonfiction—even in argument-driven academic work—those ideas almost always have a story to tell. It may not look like a novel’s plot, but it still has a sequence that is logical and engaging: a progression of steps that carry a reader from curiosity to understanding. The challenge is in identifying and articulating those steps, because they’re often hidden, even from ourselves.

Very few of our best insights arrive fully formed straight out of our heads; rather, they emerge through the process of writing (and rewriting). Once your thoughts, examples, and half-formed hunches leave your head and land on the page, patterns start to appear. Reading and rereading what you’ve written, you begin to see the connections and implications you couldn’t have spotted before. The draft becomes a mirror, reflecting the more complex, overarching ideas at the heart of your thinking.

This isn’t only true for college students. It also applies to the academic and nonfiction writers I work with. Maybe you have a collection of seemingly unrelated thoughts, anecdotes, or research notes. Some pieces feel clearly connected, while others just keep insisting on themselves and so you intuitively keep them around, not yet knowing why.

If they’re showing up together in your writing, there’s a reason. Somewhere, a bigger, more intricate idea is taking shape, and it has a story worth telling.

A good developmental editor or book coach can help you find that story faster. I work with clients to connect the dots, strengthen the progression of ideas, and uncover the throughlines that turn a collection of insights into an article or a book that readers want to read—and that they will remember long afterward. My role in developmental editing is to make the depth and interest of your thinking unmistakable to your audience, with fewer headaches and dead ends for you along the way.

If you’ve got a stack of notes, a partial or tangled draft, or even just an outline, you may be closer to a fully formed manuscript than you realize. My free guide, 7 Steps to Your Breakthrough Draft, walks you through a simple process to draw out and map the throughline that’s waiting just beneath the surface.