Ellie Barton

Do you have a true story to tell? Whether it’s one from your own life or a subject you’ve researched, I’ll help you shape and craft your book to captivate readers.

I work with indie authors of memoir and creative nonfiction who are self-publishing or preparing to submit their work to an agent or independent publisher. I’ll assess your manuscript and talk with you (by phone or Zoom) about the level of editing that would be most helpful. 

Many manuscripts benefit from a structural edit (also called developmental editing), which I communicate through an editorial letter and comments in the margins. Structural editing for memoir and creative nonfiction helps you to develop “big picture” elements like the premise, title, overall organization, themes, narrative arc, pacing, characters (real people become “characters” in your book), timeline, and voice. For research-oriented nonfiction, the structural edit considers your purpose in writing, the thesis or unifying concept, persuasiveness, logic, parts that could be condensed or expanded, and so on.

If the structure of your manuscript is sound, you may be looking for an editor to strengthen your work at the line level. Line or stylistic editing improves clarity, flow, paragraphing, sentence construction, transitions, and word choice. For creative nonfiction and memoir, I also look at elements of storytelling like beginnings and endings, showing versus telling, sensory details, scenes and dialogue, interior monologue or reflection, and moving around in time.

I started out as an academic editor, and I still do copy editing for two university presses and scholarly authors.

I’ve worked as an editor for 20 years. Before that, I was a freelance writer and a communications officer. I’m the author of two local history books, and that’s how I learned the craft of creative nonfiction. I read widely and analyzed how talented writers corralled a bunch of facts into compelling story. In my books I tried to capture the struggles of big personalities trying to work together for a cause bigger than themselves. Writing those books was hard! 

I have a Certificate in Publishing from Metropolitan Toronto University. In what feels like another lifetime, I earned a BA in English and history from Trinity College, University of Toronto; an MA in Canadian literrature from Queen’s University, and a B.Ed, also from Queen’s. Since becoming an editor in 2004, I’ve attended oodles of conferences, seminars, and webinars, and read dozens of books on editing and writing. I’m a sporadic Nose in a Book blogger, a member of the Creative Nonfiction Collective, and an advanced professional member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading. 

I teach structural and stylistic editing in the editing certificate program at Simon Fraser University; I revised the structural editing course (EDIT330) in 2021. Before that, I taught at editing at Queen’s University. I also worked at the Queen’s Writing Centre for a decade, where I coached students in the craft of writing and self-editing.  

Outside my professional life, I enjoy playing the flute, going to the Family Y, travelling, gardening, reading, walking long distances and filling my senses with nature. I live in Kingston, Ontario.