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I know how you feel.

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At least most of you. I’m sure there are writers who don’t find writing to be a bone-crushing, nausea-inducing festival of self-loathing. I just don’t happen to be one of them. Faced with a blank screen, I am invariably seized with the overwhelming desire to clean out my garage. Give myself a root canal. Do anything other than write.

The problem seems to be standards. I have some. And I’m terrified I can’t live up to them. Does that sound familiar? I’ve found that to avoid paralysis, I have to begin by actually trying to write something bad. Don’t even write, I tell myself, just type.

Because once the story is out there, even in a horrifyingly inept and inarticulate form, the real work can begin. Now I can see where the words are working, and where they’re not. I begin to grasp the possibilities and see the deficiencies. The ideas that should be in the piece, but aren’t, speak loudly with their silence. The holes flash like neon signs. The awkward phrases swell up and stink. The good ones hum.

This is the fun part, especially when someone else has done the miserably hard work of writing the first draft. It’s why I’m a good editor, and why I love editing.

And that’s why I can help you, as I’ve helped innumerable writers over 25 years as editor of The Washington Post Magazine and Tropic magazine of the Miami Herald. Among those I’ve worked with are multiple Pulitzer winners and some of the biggest names in fiction. But I’ve also worked with hundreds of regular folks who had never published a word, but had a compelling story to tell. In the end, the most powerful thing I’ve learned about working with writers is this: it is always about the story.

Your story.

If you’re a published author or a neophyte, if you have a manuscript you want to improve, are just struggling to begin, or desperately trying to get unblocked, click the SUBMIT A FILE  button above. Let the fun begin.

About Tom

Tom Shroder has been an award-winning journalist, writer and editor for more than 30 years. As editor of  The Washington Post Magazine, a story he edited and contributed to, Pearls Before Breakfast, won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. In addition to being an author and editor of ground-breaking narrative journalism, Shroder is one of the foremost editors of humor in the country. He has edited humor columns by Dave Barry, Gene Weingarten and Tony Kornheiser, as well as conceived and launched the internationally syndicated comic strip, Cul de Sac, by Richard Thompson.

Tom Shroder

Tom Shroder

Shroder was born in New York City in 1954, the son of a novelist and a builder, and the grandson of MacKinlay Kantor, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his civil war novel “Andersonville.” Shroder attended the University of Florida where he became Editor of the 22,000 circulation student daily newspaper despite the fact that he was an anthropology major (an affront for which the university’s journalism faculty was slow to forgive him). After graduation in 1976, he wrote national award-winning features for the Fort Myers News Press, the Tallahassee Democrat, The Cincinnati Enquirer and the Miami Herald. At the Herald he became editor of Tropic magazine, which earned two Pulitzer Prizes during his tenure. In that same period, with humorist Barry and novelists Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard, he concocted and edited “Naked Came the Manatee,” a satirical serial novel that became a New York Times bestseller. Shroder is the author of “Old Souls: Compelling Evidence From Children Who Remember Previous Lives,” a consideration of the life and work of Ian Stevenson, a University of Virginia psychiatrist and researcher who spent four decades investigating cases of small children who claimed to remember previous lives; and “Seeing the Light”, a biography of Everglades naturalist photographer Clyde Butcher.

Shroder is also known for his creation, along with Barry and Weingarten, of the Tropic Hunt, which has become the Herald Hunt in Miami and the Post Hunt in Washington, a mass-participation puzzle attended by thousands each year.

Services

I can help you fully realize your fiction or non-fiction, from short pieces to book-length manuscripts. To submit an article for a read and critique, you can upload your manuscript, along with a payment of 3.5 cents per word via Paypal using the form below. For example, a critique of a 1,000 word manuscript would cost $35. The critique will include an analysis of  your work and  suggestions for improving it, as well as a price list for more intensive editing. Word documents only, please.

Testimonials

“Tom Shroder is the best in the business – the rare editor who has the analytical skills to see what needs to be done, and the writing ability to show you, when necessary, exactly how to do it. He is especially good at finding the flaws in long, complex pieces, and getting writers to perform at the highest level they’re capable of. I’d trust him with anything I’ve written.”

~ Dave Barry | Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and author


“I am extremely grateful to the basic principle of journalism holding that all communication between reporter and editor is privileged — as private and sacrosanct as between doctor and patient or priest and penitent. This means, thank God, that no one will ever know how much of my Pulitzer Prize in feature writing belongs to Tom Shroder.”

~ Gene Weingarten | Pulitzer Prize winning writer, columnist and author


“Tom Shroder is a tough-love editor, a demanding behind-the-scenes coach who pulls the best work out of you. He sees more potential in my writing than I’ll ever see, and he doesn’t quit until I’m sure I’ve maxed out. He’s a magician who makes my work shine—and if he were editing this paragraph he would say, “You sure you want to mix up so many metaphors in one graf?”

~ Jeanne Marie Laskas | author, columnist, national magazine writer


“Throughout the course of my career as a feature writer and investigative reporter, Tom Shroder stands out as one of the best and brightest long-form editors in the business. He routinely transforms raw copy into award-winning prose with his deft touch, impeccable judgment and mastery of the written word.”

~ Scott Higham | Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter


“Great editors are so rare, in my experience, that most writers don’t even know if such creatures truly exist. Well, Tom Shroder is the real deal—he makes your ideas better, makes your sentences better, and leaves no fingerprints showing. Amazing.”

~ David von Drehle | Time Magazine correspondent and author


“Tom Shroder has the qualities all writers treasure in an editor: he sees the strengths and weaknesses in the work, manages to convey those to you gently, and most important, has the tools to fix it. He improves every piece of writing he touches.”

~ Sally Jenkins | author, sports columnist

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Editor Tom Shroder writes, "This is the time: Write Now."

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