Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do (49 page)

Essentially, this was a novel about two families in a small town in northeastern Florida. The two couples are quite plain, everyday folks who just happened to have gotten married the same day in 1945 and were honeymooning at the same beachside motel. Later, they found themselves living next door to each other in Tiama, a town distinguished primarily for having an inordinate number of penitentiaries. These people, the Looneys and the Jewels, have been friends—and enemies—for nearly twenty years during the present time of the novel, when the Looneys’ son, Emory, is a teenager who makes his philandering father’s life miserable. Each of these characters tells part of the story, and there were five other voices besides. So it shouldn’t be hard to imagine that there would be problems with such a
novel; indeed, plenty of them jumped out at me as I read. But I did keep on reading.

I should point out that I’m not one of those people who can’t put a book down no matter what. I find putting most books, and surely nearly any manuscript, down the easiest thing to do (not to mention that it’s probably the only way I can survive). Indeed, it’s almost like a scientific test: if I can’t stop reading a manuscript, I’m bound to publish (or at least try to publish) it. This novel was pretty mixed up—the prologue didn’t fit with the rest of the book; the fields (yes, fields!) were speaking; the lushest character (Soleil Marie, a voodoo-practicing cane-field worker who becomes Emory’s beloved when his father exiles him to an uncle’s plantation) came in too late and all her passages were lumped together instead of threaded through like the others’—but I was in the hands of a real writer. This Connie May Fowler, this wise and caring and careful person, was not playing out some writing-school exercise; she was not offering up some gee-look-what-I-can-do-to-shock-you stuff. This was the real thing, a writer who creates a world, puts flesh-and-blood, true-sounding characters in it, and, most important, makes the reader care about them.

So, yes, I tell the agent, I would be interested in publishing this book, this writer, presuming my reading of her manuscript does not go against her vision of it. But, in light of all the work that the author (and I) will have to do to make it the book it wants to be, I don’t feel comfortable committing to an advance of more than a third of what the agent is hoping for. This meant that the agent had to decide whether to accept my projected offer or to go ahead with her earlier thought of a broad multiple submission. My reasoning was that I didn’t feel the novel was in good enough shape to be widely read—by the people inside the house who would have to make the determination of what the various markets would be. Or to tell the real truth, it was not in good enough shape to show to the outside people who might or might not purchase rights for book clubs and reprinters. In other words, it was not yet, to my mind, in a state that would enable us to obtain assurances that this book would earn the kind of revenue in its lifetime that would support the agent’s financial hopes. What I did succeed in persuading the agent was that the book that would emerge after my ministrations and, especially, the author’s reworking (presuming that she was willing to proceed) would indeed be worth what the agent foresaw. There was a bit of hedging, a tentative foray with another editor, a little limbo time, before the agent agreed. She did trust my impulses about the novel, and she did think that I was the right editor for this novel and that the house was the right house. We negotiated the possibility that some early success would redound immediately to the author’s pocket even before the advance was earned out
(and the part that was to go to her in the event of a six-figure reprint sale was indeed paid very soon).

But now it was time to talk to the author.

Connie May Fowler turned out to be a woman in her early thirties, although the astonishing wisdom both the agent and I had perceived in her work had led each of us to guess she might be twice that. I was frank with her, telling her what made me uncomfortable as a reader. I told her how the prologue made me think the novel belonged to Rose Looney, how I felt Soleil Marie wasn’t being given her due. I said it seemed to me that, because the book had nine actual characters’ voices, the fields could be done away with. And, I added, the balance of the voices seemed to be off and the book itself seemed rather unshapely.

The magic of that phone call was that it was obvious that Connie was eager to hear all this, was in fact more responsive than almost any author I’ve worked with. But she claimed she couldn’t talk well over the phone and would instead send me a letter describing her plans for revisions.

The letter came within days. She said she’d thought of opening the novel with Inez, the black maid who knows things she doesn’t want to know (such things as that Martin Luther King is going to die). Doing this, we both recognized, would allow Inez to become the framework, as well as a thread throughout the book, instead of a minor presence. Connie responded to the other points, and she knew exactly what I was asking for, exactly where I was having trouble. It was immediately clear to me that we were on the same wavelength and that we could work very well together. We were under way.

Six months later, after the author had done an extensive revision, I sat with her at her dining table in a small house near the beach in St. Augustine. The external shape of the book seemed pretty well controlled by now, but internally there was a lot of “business”: each chapter had a number, a title, a date, the speaker’s name—information that I thought had to emerge from the story rather than being stuck on at the top. We talked and talked and came up with a plan to divide the book into two (later, four) distinct sections, instead of the string of chapters it had been. We agreed about which parts needed cutting, which needed to be moved about, and where some characterizations still needed tuning up. And so Connie went back to her word processor, and I went back to New York.

In about a month, Connie sent up a complete revision. We were nearly there. It was the book we wanted it to be, but it needed some tinkering, some cutting, and a lot of “line work.” For me, line editing—pencil editing—means many things. It is making sure a voice is consistent in tone or inflection or diction—doesn’t this young boy sound too old in this exchange of dialogue? is this person really likely to swear? It is recommending
cuts or compressions in scenes that seem attenuated and thin, that could gain greater punch with brevity. It is spotting anachronisms, infelicities of language, soggy passages, anything that might pull the reader out of the novel because The Writing is sticking out.

This might sound like a lot of work, but it isn’t that at all. It is the most pleasurable part of what I do: working with an author—I emphasize the “with”—and hearing her respond, seeing her come up with fixes and revisions that express what she really wants to say, witnessing the evolution of a work of fiction the way one might watch a sculptor, observing as she makes things deeper and sharper and delves into her characters to draw more out of them.

Connie’s response to all my suggestions—and, remember, they are always only questions and suggestions, as far as I’m concerned—was to send another complete revision a couple of weeks later, with a few phone calls in between. At this point (ten months after submission, eight months after contract), I was ready to let other people in the house read the manuscript: it went to publicity, subsidiary rights, sales, other editors, and, at the same time, I sent it into copy editing. The feeling was very high. We sent the manuscript out exclusively to a single reprinter (instead of holding an auction) and, after some negotiating, they made the six-figure offer we were looking for. (There’s no way to be sure, but I know in my heart that there’d never have been such an offer for the original manuscript.) Same with the clubs; they were so keen we had several rounds of bidding before it went for a nice five figures. Other departments—and, notably, the publisher—were also enthusiastic, and I know the excitement wouldn’t have built nearly as well if I had shown them the original manuscript and the various reworkings. To arouse that essential in-house enthusiasm it was necessary to show people something like the final version.

Copy editing was reasonably routine. We had already caught most of the obvious problems, and the copy editor was painstaking. But when I was going through the manuscript, taking down Connie’s changes over the phone, I noticed a few points that had been nagging at me. Each time, Connie would come up with a line or a thought that brought some new emotional resonance. The most striking of these, to me, was the scene in which Emory, as a young man, is preparing to go into the army, to be sent to Vietnam, and must get rid of his father’s car. He finds a bobby pin as he cleans out the glove compartment;
he
is sure it is his mother’s, left there years before, but I kept wondering how he knew it didn’t belong to his father’s mistress, or how
we
knew it didn’t. Connie was completely persuaded that it was the mother’s, but she was adamant about wanting to avoid any ambiguity, as the issue of the mistress had long since been
resolved. She hung up and fifteen minutes later called back with a new passage. She was blubbering as she read it to me, and I welled up as I listened:

I checked the interior for any personal belongings. Nothing—clean as a whistle except for the glove box, which had one of Mama’s rose-colored scarves in it. We used to always give her something rose-colored for her birthday. Jesus, that was a long time ago. The scarf must have been in there since before Daddy died. For a second I considered leaving it, but then thought, No, maybe it belongs with me. It was dusty and soft, and there was something so sweet about it I almost wanted to cry, which was stupid, since that scarf had been in there all the while I owned the car and I had never given it a thought until now. But shit, the army was soon going to own my ass—why not take a little bit of my mama with me. I put it in the duffel bag.

“How did you ever think that up?” I asked. “Where does it
come
from?”
“You just ask the right questions,” she said.
I could be happy with that as my epitaph.

…

Editing is only so much about words: the rest of the job is a lot of politics.

First, the book itself. The jacket matters, because it has to be right for the book, has to suggest the character, the tone, the content—at best, to be a visual representation of the emotional quality of the novel. For this book, I wanted something that would convey a feeling of heat, Florida/Caribbean heat, but not be specific to any character or element of time in the book—and it had to be pretty, too. I hired an art researcher to come up with some paintings, and the art director and I spent about a week choosing the most eye-catching and colorful. There was a long process of getting the background colors right, the size of the image on the cover right, the hue and tone of the reproduction right, but after several months, consultations with all departments, and two separate daylong visits to the printer, we had something we were happy with.

For the inside of the book, the designer and I decided on the type, running heads, and all the other elements that, however subliminally, give the reader the sense of being within a special, separate world, the world only of this book. We spent hours selecting ornaments for the beginning of each chapter and assigning a different one to each of the nine characters who narrate.

At the same time, I sought early comments. Each stage of a new book’s
life—especially a first novel’s—requires some tool to help it reach its next audience. Before publication, this means the people who will be selling it—the publisher’s representatives, who must persuade bookstore buyers to stock and display it, and the bookstore people, who (the publisher hopes) will recommend it to their customers. A first book has no public notices, no previous reviews, so endorsements from known writers are often the most believable support the book can have, and it is my job to find people who are willing to read the book early and whose names and reputations mean something. At this point, all that was available to read was the typescript, which is the last thing any potential reader wants to be handed by the mailman (or, worse, have to fetch from the post office). Besides, what ruder imposition can there be than to ask a writer to interrupt that precious time, free of touring or teaching or reading for pay, that is most happily spent with a manuscript of one’s own? Connie Fowler knew no one whose name would signify on a jacket blurb (how refreshing in this day of anxious “networking” and cultural inbreeding), so it really was up to me alone. I don’t like asking the writers I work with to do this for each other. But once in a great while—and only when I think there may be a genuine affinity—do I beg a no-strings, only-if-it’s-honest reading from a couple of them. After all, I figure, if we all know we’re maintaining our integrity, why should these writers be deprived of each other’s comments just because they have the same editor? They do it, when it strikes them to, for writers with other editors. I have to be sure, though, that they’re adhering to their own standards. So I went to three authors I thought would be responsive, and they outdid themselves with, they assure me, legitimate blurbs. Now we had quotes from Alice Hoffman, Lee Smith, and Amy Tan, which I circulated in-house and put on the bound galleys.

Next, sales conference, where the editor must persuade the thirty-plus sales representatives who actually go into the bookstores that this book is worth their efforts with the book buyers. As it turns out, they were way ahead of me, having read the galleys, and they asked me to come up with a special personal letter to the bookstores, editor-to-seller, that could accompany early reading copies they would present to their customers. Writing that kind of institutional letter wasn’t my favorite idea. I’d never done it, because the ones I’d read always sounded hucksterish, and I can’t stand to oversell a book, especially one I have such strong feelings about. I like to present a novel with a message that says, in effect, “I like this and I hope you will too.” I can’t stand those popular catchwords: brilliant, wonderful, stunning, dazzling, and (save us) unique … unless, of course, a
reviewer
uses them in print. But the sales department wanted this letter and I agreed.