Experiences With Editors - Pamela Erens

Experiences with both book and journal editors from Pamela Erens (who I had the pleasure of including in the anthology Visiting Hours):

Time is my best editor. My drafts don’t come out fully formed, or even close. I circle my sentences for a long period of time—months, years. That’s time I need to muse, plan, attack, retreat, incorporate new material from what I’ve read or heard or experienced since the last time I approached a particular paragraph or scene.

            With my novel, The Understory, I was lucky to have an editor, Jin Soo Kang of Ironweed Press, who gave me both the gift of time and a major insight into my story. The Understory is narrated by 40-year-old Jack Gorse, who becomes attracted to and obsessed with another man. Jin Soo told me that the relationship between the narrator and the other man, an architect, was “too realized,” by which he meant that the two forged too much of an actual relationship. He was skeptical that my young and attractive architect would get involved with a man as solitary and eccentric and physically unprepossessing as my narrator. The heart of the book, he insisted, was what goes on in the main character’s mind—his longings, fears, and projections—not what might conceivably end up happening in the “real” world. To that end, Jin Soo wanted me to remove many of the scenes in which the two characters interact.

            As a writer who’d always worried that my fictions were meager on story line, I was surprised to be told to remove plot, not add it. But I came to see that Jin Soo was absolutely right. The story of the book was the story of a mind. Once I understood this completely, I had a kind of truth detector against which I could check my revisions.

            It took me a long time to make the necessary changes. Every time I removed or altered an element, something else seemed to fall out of kilter and I wanted to rework that, too. It was like removing one triangle of a quilt thinking I could just stitch in a new one, then realizing, over and over again, that the excision altered the whole pattern.

            Jin Soo let me take the time I needed, which turned out to be two years. In truth, it wasn’t just faith and generosity on his part—he runs other businesses, and was happy to be inattentive to my project for long stretches. But he was sincere in his philosophy that works of fiction have their own imperatives. A funny thing happened as I reworked The Understory: it kept getting shorter. Watching it shrink from conventional-novel to novella length, I fretted that soon I was going to be left with an awfully long short story. Jin Soo urged me not to worry, saying that every book has its own ideal length. (Luckily mine clocked in at 142 pages, just enough to pass as a short novel.)

            My experiences with literary journal editors have been very different, neither particularly good nor particularly bad. With one exception, I’ve never been asked for anything but the most minor changes to my stories or essays--a circumstance I’ve found disappointing, especially when I was younger and hungry for mentors. So, the exception: a well-known journal took a short story of mine, on the condition that I lop off the ending. I wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do, but I wasn’t sure it wasn’t, so I agreed.

Later, as we got down to line editing, my editor requested other changes that just didn’t make sense to me. Above all, he wanted to remove a line of dialogue that “didn’t sound like the character.” I felt that the line of dialogue in fact expressed something essential about the character. The editor and I wrangled about this for a while, and finally he offered to send me a version of the passage in question reworked to his satisfaction (taking out the line of dialogue meant having to recast sentences around it). I read the passage, which I tried to but couldn’t make myself swallow. I was about to e-mail the editor telling him so, when I happened to scroll through some previous pages of the story and found that he had made other significant changes that he’d never told me about.

I’ll cut to the chase: I pulled the story. The editor and I got past the changes-without-telling incident (he apologized) but he refused to run the story with the one line of dialogue he disliked, and I couldn’t stand behind the story without it. I was sorry not to appear in this particular journal, but I found a new home for the story within a few weeks.

            It might seem silly that this editor and I fell out over a single sentence—really, over one word. One word! But what else do we writers have besides our words? Money? Glory? Hardly. I admire those editors who can see into the essence of a fiction, who will request demanding or even exhausting changes if they serve that essence, but who will step back when the writer, after honest thought, says, “No. These are the right words.” I’ve worked as an editor myself, and I know this stepping-back is really tough. An editor who can both demand and retreat, each at the right time, is a hero in my book.

 

 

Pamela Erens is the author of The Understory (Ironweed Press), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for a first work of fiction, as well as a finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, which honors the best work of fiction by an emerging writer published in the previous two years.  Her short stories and essays have been published in Chicago Review, Boston Review, The Literary Review, Redivider, New England Review,  Michigan Quarterly Review, and other journals. She is a two-time recipient of a New Jersey State Council on the Arts fellowship in fiction.