True Imaginary Literary

Editing • Writing • Coaching

Turning ideas into reality

About Me

The Basics

Who Am I? Jessica de Bruyn. I am a substantive editor, writing coach, writer and speaker currently living in Toronto. 

How Long Have I Been Doing This? I have been working professionally as a writer and editor in some form since 2008. I began working primarily within the Publishing industry in 2015.

I also have more than 20 years of experience as a performer and speaker. I have worked on and off as an instructor for children, teens, and adults for 20 years and have been a private writing coach for three years. 

What Are My Qualifications? 

Schooling: 

  • Publishing Certificate – Toronto Metropolitan University (formally Ryerson)
  • Writing for Film & Television – Vancouver Film School
  • Drama (with an emphasis on writing) – University of Toronto at Scarborough
  • I also enhanced my knowledge of storytelling with studies in Musical Theatre Performance and Acting

Affiliations:

What Are My Specialties?

I work with both self-publishing authors and authors entering into traditional publishing. I often work with authors who are getting their manuscripts ready to be seen by agents. 

The majority of my work is in genre/popular fiction for adult, middle grade, and young adult audiences, but also work with literary fiction and creative non-fiction projects. 

I am known for being especially good at dealing with structural issues and plot-based stories with strong character development. Also, thanks to my background in performance and writing for film, I have a knack for dialogue and scene building. 

My Passion for Story

There is nothing I love more than a good story.  Some of my best memories  of childhood were of making my grandparents read me Cinderella for the thousandth time or reading my brother’s Roald Dahl books in bed after dark (and being terrified by Angelica Huston in the film version of The Witches).  As I grew up, I discovered that storytelling came in so many amazing forms and fell in love with film, television, and theatre.  I pursued acting and singing as new ways of entering other people’s shoes and learning more about the world through true and fictional stories.

As an adult, I still firmly believe in the power of imagination and storytelling.  It is our ability to create something from nothing that allows us to grow as unique people and as a species.  It is the tales we tell that help us to connect and encourage us to explore the world.  I get immense joy and a sense of purpose out of creating new stories and helping others to tell their own. 

The Editor

As part of my training at Vancouver Film School, we were taught collaborative writing and how to effectively critique other writers.  This was a tough program where rewrites sometimes meant weeks of work were thrown in the recycling bin in favor of new and better ideas.  I learned not only how the spark of an idea can form into a compelling story, but also how to use structure to translate that story into something that can be best understood and enjoyed by others.  I learned that readers’ opinions are invaluable and a good editor can help to make a unique story into one that you hear or read and never forget. 

I feel honored to work as an editor with seasoned and first-time authors who are getting ready to send their stories out into the world – whether that be to agents or publishers in the hopes of being traditionally published or to help frame their work for self publishing.  I understand that sometimes I am the first person to read a manuscript outside of friends and family and am always excited to help writers take that next step from early drafts to a effective narrative that satisfies, entertains and ignites readers’ own imaginations.  I believe in telling authors the truth about what they have created and its potential within the current publishing market.  I also believe that every story has the potential to be great.  Sometimes it just might take multiple rounds of adapting, rewriting and learning to get there. 

I currently concentrate my editing work on developmental or substantive editing, and line editing. While I also trained as a copyeditor, I believe my talents lie in big picture problem solving. 

The Writing Coach & Speaker

While coaching writers is a newer venture for me, I believe that it is the perfect accumulation of work and passions that I have devoted myself to throughout my career. I have always loved education and teaching. I worked as an acting instructor for children and teens throughout my university years and have always loved helping others to develop their creative endeavours. 

As I writing coach, I believe that I serve many roles for my clients. I am someone to bounce ideas off of and can be a story or character therapist as writers work through their first drafts. I can be a cheerleader and guide through writer’s block, imposter’s syndrome or difficult rewrites and can be an accountability partner, checking in to see if words are consistently hitting the page. I can also be a guide through the stages of writing, editing and publishing. 

This is work that I truly love. I feel elated when I am able to help a writer work through a trouble area of their work, feel fulfilled when a draft comes back better than the last and, admittedly, get a little excited when I sense a writer is ready to be pushed to the next level. 

I also believe in adapting coaching sessions to each individual writer and project. I have created packages that work with a number of different budgets and needs. 

As a speaker, I not only bring decades of experience as a storyteller, writer and editor, but also as a performer. There are few places I feel more comfortable than in front of an audience. I am available for panels, talks, workshops, or as a moderator for publishing events. 

For more information on coaching & speaker rates, fill out a form on my Get In Touch page. 

The Writer

In high school I wrote my first one-act play.  It was a terribly depressing story of a teen girl who had died and how all of her friends dealt with the loss.  I wrote it for a school drama night and it was meant to be an “audition” to see if the head of the English department would let me write the school’s entry for a provincial drama festival.  After the show, she told me that she didn’t like the play or my writing style.  As a seventeen year old, I remember thinking that she was likely one of the most horrible people I would ever meet in my life.  I now think that I was definitely an over-dramatic student and teenager who was probably more difficult to deal with than I realized.  I also think I might have been very right about that teacher.

I went on to write 4 more (increasingly better) one-act plays while I was in university.  After that, it was movies, television pilots, short stories and poems at Vancouver Film School.  I started to see that everyday life could be an inspiration for telling great and sometimes epic tales.  Any moment could turn into a short film and any conversation could lead to a twist on a story we have all heard a thousand times before. 

I got my first job as a writer working for a company that did SEO and wrote articles relating to everything from real estate to car parts.   Periodically throughout the last 15 years, I have continued to work for websites and e-commerce businesses, writing and editing content, in branding, and as a social media manager.  I have created hundreds of blog posts and articles and managed content for a clothing store, as well as created marketing tools ranging from press releases, to newsletters, to quizzes for a self-help app. 

In my own writing, I am currently working on a number of book ideas, as well as some works for the stage. I also still work as a ghostwriter for creative non-fiction pieces.