Novelist and story editor Lesley Krueger reveals three powerful techniques screenwriters use that can transform your fiction manuscript

Editing Your Novel the Way a Story Editor Works on a Screenplay

What if the best tool for fixing your stalled novel was not another writing workshop or another read-through, but a set of techniques borrowed from the world of professional film? Author and story editor Lesley Krueger, writing on Jane Friedman’s publishing resource blog, makes a compelling case that the discipline of story-editing screenplays can unlock problems in fiction manuscripts that conventional literary editing often misses.

Two Different Jobs, One Useful Overlap

Krueger writes from a position of genuine expertise on both sides of the divide. She has worked as a novelist and as a professional story editor on screenplays, and she argues that these two crafts approach problems differently. Story editing is visual and structural. Literary editing is more intellectual and interior. But the tools of story editing, applied to a manuscript, can expose problems that a purely intellectual reading glosses over. The key insight is structural: in a screenplay, the formal architecture is visible on the page. Scene headings, action lines, and dialogue blocks make it easy to see whether scenes are advancing the story or standing still. In a novel, that structure is implicit, buried inside paragraphs and interior monologue. Making it visible is the first step to fixing it. You can explore more of Krueger’s writing through her Substack newsletter at Alive to the World, which focuses on research and writing craft.

Technique One: Read the Pages Without Reading the Words

The first technique Krueger borrows from story editing is simple but counter-intuitive: flip through your manuscript without reading it. Look at the pages as physical objects. Is there too much dense, paragraph-heavy text with no dialogue? This may indicate you are too deep inside a character’s head, describing emotional states rather than dramatizing them. Is there so much white space from dialogue that the action disappears? Your characters may be talking more than they are living. Krueger applied this technique to her own manuscript and discovered that the first five chapters — which her early reader had found slow — looked visually different from the rest of the book. They were all dense paragraphs, a relentless march of interiority without the give-and-take of action and speech. Once she recognized this visually, she knew what to fix before she knew how to fix it.

Technique Two: Something Must Change in Every Scene

The second technique is one of the oldest maxims in screenwriting education: something must change in every scene. In a big studio film, the change might be explosive — a spaceship crashes, someone dies, a city burns. In a drama or comedy, the change is more subtle. A character learns something she did not know. She reveals something she has been hiding. She takes a step she has been avoiding, or fails to take a step she needs to. The Writers Store and similar resources on screenplay craft consistently list this principle among the foundational rules of scene construction. What makes Krueger’s application interesting is that she ran her novel scene by scene, asking this question at each transition: what changed here? Scenes where nothing changed were either cut or had their revelations replaced with material borrowed from later in the book. The result was a manuscript that accelerated and deepened simultaneously.

Technique Three: Give Secondary Characters an Agenda

The third technique addresses a problem common to both first-draft screenplays and first-draft novels: secondary characters who exist only to serve the protagonist. In a screenplay, the solution is mechanical and efficient: you use script software to pull out every line of dialogue spoken by the secondary character and read them in sequence. If there is no arc, no contradiction, no development — if the character only reacts to the protagonist and never pursues anything of her own — the character is what story editors call a “wing-man,” a narrative device rather than a person. Krueger describes doing this for her own manuscript’s secondary characters, applying a modified version of the same technique by using the Find function to locate every scene in which a key secondary character appeared. What she found was not that the character lacked an agenda, but that her agenda was being revealed too slowly — the same structural problem that afflicted the protagonist in the opening chapters. The fix was the same: accelerate the revelation, make the character’s interiority visible earlier. The result, she writes, deepened the entire narrative.

What Novelists Can Learn From the Screenplay World

Screenwriting craft has produced some of the clearest and most teachable writing instruction available. Books like Syd Field’s Screenplay and Robert McKee’s Story have influenced generations of both screenwriters and novelists. The techniques Krueger describes draw on this tradition without reducing fiction to a formula. They use the external structure of the screenplay as a diagnostic tool for revealing internal structural problems in the novel — a different form serving as a mirror for another. The Jane Friedman blog, where Krueger’s piece originally appeared, is one of the most authoritative resources on the craft and business of writing available to working authors. For any novelist staring down a difficult revision, Krueger’s approach offers something valuable: a fresh set of eyes borrowed from a different medium, asking the simplest and most productive question a story editor knows how to ask: what changed here, and why?