Most writers will agree that completing a novel while working as a full-time employee is an impressive feat. To manage the pressures of a 9-to-5 job while maintaining the stamina to finish a manuscript isn’t easy. But when the job involves editing other writers’ manuscripts—when a writer is asked day after day to devote her creative skills to someone else’s masterpiece—her writing is likely to be affected. For Miller, editing short stories for Esquire enhanced her writing. In fact, she found it to be a better education than any MFA program could possibly deliver.
“I’ve felt like a student of fiction masquerading as an editor,” Miller says. “Working with these writers line by line has helped me think about how to structure fiction, how to do plot, how to do narrative. It’s made me much more articulate about fiction.” But learning this way, from the best writers, can be a little intimidating. As a result, Miller, who completed The Coast of Akron before it was sold, was not eager to invite scrutiny of her writing. “A lot of the writers I worked with were so amazing that it really made me want to work on my own writing for as long as possible and make it as good as possible without showing it to anybody in the world, before giving it a life in the world.”
Brodeur, too, learned much about writing while editing. But for her, an important lesson was how different the two activities truly are. Writing and editing, Brodeur says, come from two different parts of the brain. “I feel like, when you write, above all, you have to let yourself be incredibly messy, and when you edit, it’s all about neatening and tidying,” she says. “In starting to write, that might have been the hardest lesson to learn: not to stop and examine and beautify and make every little sentence perfect.” When it came time to revise her work, to apply her editing skills to her own writing, Brodeur says it wasn’t easy to switch roles. “Especially when you edit a literary magazine, you get this incredible work from someone, and you can make it just that much better by twisting and tightening,” she says. “It’s a lot different on your own work because you can’t see it as clearly.”
It’s easy to understand how editing stories by accomplished writers could positively affect one’s own writing, but for every brilliant piece of work that an editor publishes, countless other, less-accomplished stories need that same editor’s attention. For Gaffney, the rough drafts and the flawed manuscripts offered valuable lessons as well. “I learned an extraordinary amount from working with writers, the glamorous, famous ones, and from working on manuscripts that maybe never got published and writers who didn’t end up having a name,” she says. “In some abstract way I started to learn what made a compelling manuscript. I had always read voraciously, but reading the good and the mediocre and the not-so-good—that’s a lot closer to writing something yourself, because you start out writing something that’s really trash and you learn that great writers sometimes write lame first drafts and revise them. That’s an illuminating moment, to realize that you can actually get to something good from something that’s rough.”
Gaffney calls the editing process a “sympathetic kind of reading.” An editor attempts to understand fully what the writer is trying to do in a story—despite its flaws—and suggests ways to bring that vision into focus. “And just doing that over and over again—sometimes successfully and sometimes less so—was a wonderful education.” But applying that education to her own writing, while continuing to edit stories for the Paris Review, was a difficult process for Gaffney. “I had so many voices in my head that it was hard to sit down and think about my own voice,” she says. “And there’s also kind of a textual exhaustion that one hits, and it doesn’t really matter whether it’s your work or some other writer’s. There is a time when you can’t really read anymore, you can’t really think in words anymore.”
It’s during that time when a good editor can cast an objective, well-rested eye on a writer’s work. All three writers—that is to say, all three editors—were all too familiar with the editorial process. They were aware of the editor’s responsibility to cut or reword the occasional sentence if necessary, but they discovered that the experience of being an editor is very different from being edited. “It is still incredibly hard to be edited,” Gaffney says with a laugh. “It’s terrible when somebody wants to cut half your stuff and it’s terrible when they think your metaphors are clichéd—it’s all terrible.”
Brodeur credits her editor at Random House, Lee Boudreaux (who has since moved to Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins), for the necessary “tightening up” of Man Camp. “I remember doing that for writers at Zoetrope and not really realizing how important that was.” Not only can an editor improve a manuscript, she can also save a writer from what Brodeur calls the “humiliation factor.”
“If there is someone who is going to help us, we love that person,” Brodeur says. “Protect us from feeling foolish.” Gaffney would agree, but she acknowledges the sting of criticism. “Intellectually I can always see how the editing makes sense,” she says. “But there is always an emotional level that may or may not understand the intellectual level.”
A hands-on education in writing and close proximity to successful writers weren’t the only benefits that Gaffney, Miller, and Brodeur received on the job, of course. All three are quick to admit how fortunate they were to have gained inside knowledge of the industry, knowledge that changed—some might even say simplified—the publishing process for each of them. The clearest advantage: finding an agent.
“I remember reading something, when I was a senior in college, by Martin Amis, in which he mentions something about a literary agent, and I didn’t even know that there was such a beast as a literary agent,” says Miller, who attended Miami University in Ohio. “I think I probably would have thought that the steely geniuses just work alone in darkness and in silence and send their manuscripts in, and the arm-patched titans smoking Cohiba cigars decide to publish it and make you a star—that’s how mysterious it was to me. I would probably think the same thing, had I not lucked into my position.” Through her job at Esquire, Miller learned all about literary agents, and it was through Esquire that she met Christy Fletcher. Miller says that when she took the job at the magazine, Fletcher was one of the first agents to call her and schedule a lunch, during which she pitched her client’s stories. “I always knew Christy and I always liked her, and I liked her taste.”
Brodeur doesn’t attempt to diminish the importance—indeed, the privilege—of her working relationships with agents, either. “I would say the most helpful thing was knowing agents, because that is everyone’s first hurdle: how to get anyone to read your work,” Brodeur says. “I knew people because they were sending me stories. They were familiar faces and I wasn’t writing a cold letter to some stranger in zip code 10011.” But Brodeur emphasizes that the quality of the work always speaks for itself—regardless of connections. “It’s not going to make people like your book if it isn’t good or if they just don’t like it.… Maybe people in the publishing world knew who I was more than they would know Joe Schmo, but I think in the end they have to like a book and think they’re going to be able to sell it.”
While Gaffney acknowledges that she was lucky to have met agents, she doesn’t think that being an insider is essential to the publishing process. “I think, somehow or other, every writer will hugely benefit from getting a certain amount of inside information, but it could easily be from reading Poets & Writers Magazine or going on some chat rooms,” she says. “It can be a lot harder if you have things backwards. It’s an industry like any other industry. There are ways things are done.”
Gaffney, who now teaches writing at NYU, says she tries to give her students publishing advice that will help them—just as her education with George Plimpton at the Paris Review helped her. “So many people just go out and send their work to agents, and they haven’t figured out how to pick an agent who might like their work—that’s just hopeless,” Gaffney says. “You can spend years sending manuscripts out and getting rejected and thinking you stink, and you might be great. I believe for most people who are brilliant, it will eventually happen, but it can be easier or harder.”
One of Gaffney’s tips? “I always tell people they need to find out who represents five books that they like and were published recently, and those are the first people they should approach.”
As the transformation from editor to author manifests itself in each of these three women—as the books are published, the critics weigh in, and the multiple-city book tours are traveled—not all of them remain connected to the magazines at which they received their unconventional education in creative writing and publishing. Last month, Gaffney resigned as advisory editor of the Paris Review, a move that coincided with the expiration of Brigid Hughes’s one-year contract as editor. Miller is still the literary editor of Esquire, although she says she doesn’t consider herself a “career editor,” which is something she never entirely wanted to be. And Brodeur, as the founding editor of Zoetrope, holds a seat on the editorial board and contributes ideas and advice when needed.
For now, all eyes are on these women as novelists. And each says that she would prefer to be remembered as a great writer rather than a great editor. They admit this begrudgingly, of course, because all three are far too young to be making such grand statements for posterity. “That is such an unfair question, although I like the adjective ‘great’ before either of them,” Brodeur says, laughing. “But right now I’m focused on the writing. I have to say that’s where my immediate dream would be.” Gaffney favors her identity as a writer over being an editor, too, but she finds one aspect of the editor’s role just as rewarding. “To be an editor is to be very selfless, it is to help other people, and I love doing it.”
For Miller, the decision to concentrate on writing, rather than editing, seems to have been a slightly more visceral one. “I knew I would probably spontaneously combust if I didn’t write this novel, which is, I guess, why anybody does anything artistic. I knew that I had to.”
Kevin Larimer is the senior editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
