Love that isn’t necessarily good for you. Families with things they’d rather not discuss. Characters who make questionable decisions for perfectly understandable reasons. I want to get to the end of a story and still be thinking about the people in it afterwards.
I’m also an editor, which means when I’m not creating problems for my own characters, I’m helping other writers solve theirs.
My background is in Creative and Professional Writing and Publishing, and my approach to editing comes very much from being a writer myself. I don’t believe an editor’s job is to turn your writing into the version they would have written. I want to understand what you were trying to do, what you want the story to be, and then help you get it there.
Because there’s usually a very good story hiding inside a messy draft.
And I happen to quite like the messy bit.
Kay Hart is where I write, edit, talk about books and occasionally disappear down a literary rabbit hole. You’re very welcome to come along.
ABOUT KAY HART
Author · Editor · Storyteller
I’ve been making up stories for as long as I can remember. Some of them have made it onto the page. Some are still living rather noisily in my head. And some started with one tiny idea that I absolutely swore wasn’t going to become an entire book.
It usually becomes an entire book.
I’m fascinated by people — particularly the complicated ones. The things we want but probably shouldn’t, the decisions that make perfect sense to us and absolutely no sense to anyone else, and all the things people mean when they’re saying something completely different. That tends to find its way into my writing. I like stories with something going on underneath them.
Creative Journey
The earliest inkings of a narrative voice.
The Beginning — Becoming a Writer
Chapter I
Long before I understood structure, pacing or the peculiar importance of a well-placed comma, I understood the pleasure of making something exist where nothing had existed before.
Writing began with imagination: characters, conversations, fragments of worlds and the irresistible question of what might happen next. Over time, instinct became craft — and storytelling became something I wanted not only to practise, but to understand.
Learning to see the story beneath the sentences.
The Craft — Writing & Publishing
Chapter II
Studying Creative and Professional Writing gave instinct a vocabulary. Character, structure, voice and form became things I could take apart, examine and rebuild.
Publishing widened that perspective. I became fascinated not only by how stories are written, but by what happens to them afterwards: how manuscripts are shaped, positioned and prepared to meet their readers.
Somewhere between writer and publishing professional, I discovered how much I loved the space in between
Where the writer meets the editor.
Present — The Other Side of the Desk
Chapter III
Today, I work across both sides of the page.
I write my own stories while helping other writers develop theirs through thoughtful, collaborative editorial support. I am interested in editing that strengthens rather than overwrites — preserving the peculiarities of a writer’s voice while helping the story beneath it become clearer.
Because the aim isn’t to make a manuscript sound like an editor wrote it.
It is to make it sound unmistakably like its author — only stronger.