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A dependable source of professional and creative advice, this regular series features anecdotes, insights, tips, recommended reading and viewing for writers, and more from leading agents and editors.
When working with an editor, don’t roll over easily. If you feel strongly about something, make your case for why that phrase or that scene is vital to your piece. Editors usually have your best interest at heart, but just because they’re “The Editor” doesn’t mean they’re infallible.
My best advice to writers can be distilled into one word, in the imperative: Risk. Take bold, huge, scary risks in your work—at all levels: form, content, the sentence. Get addicted to that writerly adrenaline. Leap. Trust that your readers are as intelligent and soulful as you are (and quite possibly more so). Write up to them, never down. Then be ruthless with what you’ve generated; be willing to throw away a lot of failed experiments and submit only what continues to give you chills—or, to use Theodor Adorno’s term, that “shudder” of aesthetic recognition.
Agents receive a ton of queries: I average about one hundred a week. But a lot of those queries are for books in genres I don’t represent—which sadly means the writers have wasted their time by reaching out to me.
There’s an old episode of Marc Maron’s podcast, WTF, wherein Maron is interviewing actor Bob Odenkirk and, at a certain point, they start talking about what it means to be a person versus an artist. Odenkirk says something like: “I don’t care how much fame or acclaim you get. I don’t care if you're Picasso. At the end of the day, you still have to be a person, someone who might create masterpieces but who doesn’t simply rest in that self-absorbed mastery.
It is easy in the buzzy age of social media to look around at other authors who are hitting all the milestones, whose publishing journeys seem charmed, and wonder why it’s not happening for you. I think this creates a sort of artificial urgency—the idea that you’re falling behind, or not a good-enough writer, or failing somehow because you haven’t found your dream agent, you haven’t sold your book yet, and you didn’t get a six-figure deal or hit the New York Times best-seller list.
One thing that writers should keep in mind is the truth that sometimes publication really does boil down to timing.
Being a writer isn’t a one-size-fits-all experience. Just like being an editor doesn’t make me a god. You (yes, you) have the autonomy to create and challenge the expectations within publishing.
The book you’re trying to write lives within your body. This means that without patience, care, and grace you risk breaking your body in the process of writing said book. You may find your back in so much pain you are immobile. You may feel pain in your chest so deep that your shoulder blades ache when you take a deep breath. You may feel crazy for how tired, weak, tingly, sweaty, and/or restless you have become. You may become convinced that something is really wrong, which maybe it is.
I edit mostly narrative nonfiction, and I think in publishing and writing we tend to take that word “narrative” for granted—as if any text, just by being the length and shape of a book, is a narrative. Give me strong characters and vivid scenes: We say this in a way that can make those attributes feel like their own objects, separate from the author’s purpose. But the narrative-nonfiction story itself isn’t just a tool to baby the reader, to make the book “feel like fiction,” or to create an entertaining reading experience.
When I’m reading for pleasure or screening manuscripts for a book prize, I marvel at the many ways that a poetry collection’s images, themes, and conceits can work in concert with one another. But when I’m reading for Southern Indiana Review, with my editor hat on, I’m looking for a poem’s standalone excellence, freshness—the kind of work that announces itself within the first few lines.
