An edit focused on how your story is organized, examining plot structure, scene order, chapter breaks, and narrative flow.
A structural edit zeroes in on the architecture of your manuscript. It asks whether scenes are in the right order, whether chapters earn their place, whether the timeline makes sense, and whether the story's backbone is solid enough to support everything built on top of it. While it overlaps with developmental editing, a structural edit is specifically concerned with organization and sequence rather than character depth or thematic resonance.
A brilliant scene in the wrong place can sink an entire chapter. Structural editing ensures your story unfolds in the most effective order, that your pacing serves the narrative, and that readers always have a reason to turn the page. It's the difference between a story that meanders and one that builds momentum.
Plot is what happens. Structure is how you arrange and reveal what happens. The same plot can be structured in wildly different ways, from linear to nonlinear to braided timelines.
Moving one scene changes what the reader knows at every subsequent point. After restructuring, do a continuity pass to make sure information still flows logically.
Each chapter needs its own arc with a reason to keep reading at the end. If three slow chapters stack up in a row, readers lose momentum no matter how good the overall structure is.
Create a reverse outline of your current manuscript or story. For each scene, write one sentence describing what happens and one sentence describing what it accomplishes for the reader (new information, emotional shift, tension increase). Circle any scene where you can't clearly state what it accomplishes. Those are your structural weak spots.