Elizabeth Gaffney, Adrienne Miller, and Adrienne Brodeur have grown accustomed to being topics of conversation in literary circles. Publishing insiders know the editorial positions they have held: advisory editor of the Paris Review, literary editor of Esquire, and founding editor of Zoetrope: All Story, respectively. But recently, each of them acquired a new, even loftier title: debut novelist.

Gaffney’s first novel, Metropolis, was published in March by Random House; Miller’s The Coast of Akron will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux this month; and Brodeur’s novel, Man Camp, is forthcoming from Random House in July. The three books could not be more different—either in plot or writing style. There is a sprawling, Dickensian narrative set in New York City in the years following the Civil War; a funny yet compassionate portrait of a dysfunctional family in Ohio; and a lighthearted story of two young women who hatch a scheme to bring out the “inner man” in the men they love.

The quality of writing in the books will speak for itself. Not reflected in the novels, however, are the challenges that each of these women faced—finding the time to write novels on top of their editorial workload, managing the influence that editing some of the best writers in the country had on their own writing, and negotiating the dual instincts of writer and editor in the creative process, to name a few. Their experiences offer insights into the industry, as well as lessons for every working writer.

Elizabeth Gaffney worked at the Paris Review for 16 years, starting out—as many staffers do—as an unpaid editorial assistant, soon after she graduated from Vassar College with a degree in philosophy. She worked her way up to managing editor, the highest-paid position when founding editor George Plimpton was alive. “I always thought I was a very good managing editor,” Gaffney says. “I was committed to it and I would work late, but I didn’t write enough. And I wanted to write.” In 1995, she decided to give up her job and the comforts that went with it—health insurance, a full-time salary, and a degree of security. But Gaffney had no doubts. “It was a big certainty. I knew that I really wanted to try.”

Plimpton was supportive of her decision, and kept her on staff as a part-time editor-at-large while she pursued an MFA at Brooklyn College. “I had a lot of anxiety about going to one of the better-known New York programs because most of [those students] had been our interns,” she says. “No one from Brooklyn College had even applied for an internship at the Paris Review since I had been there. Brooklyn College was a very isolated little island out there.” While the decision to cast off the chains of a full-time job and enroll in a graduate program allowed Gaffney to concentrate on writing, she didn’t consider an MFA to be a badge of legitimacy or a guarantee that her new goals would be achieved. “I don’t think the MFA is anything other than a kind of social construct that enables people to focus on their work, and maybe meet a good community of people,” she says.

The program at Brooklyn College did in fact enable her to focus on her own work. By the time Gaffney received her MFA, in 1997, she had written some early chapters of the manuscript that would eventually become Metropolis. It took Gaffney seven more years to finish the book, which weighs in at over 450 pages, all the while editing short stories for the Paris Review and freelance copyediting for New York magazine. “I still needed to make money, and I didn’t sell the book until I had finished the whole manuscript, so I was always working full time.” Gaffney set up a grueling schedule that involved doing all of her editorial work, including 12-hour copyediting shifts, within a minimum number of days. The rest of her week was open to writing. “So I was busy, really busy,” she says. “But it gave me whole days—a different structure to my time—and that was the transformation for me, to being able to focus on my work.”

Adrienne Miller was able to concentrate on the writing of The Coast of Akron despite her full-time responsibilities as literary editor of Esquire, a position she has held since 1997. Like Gaffney, Miller didn’t have a contract to write her book—she finished the novel before her agent, Christy Fletcher, sold it to her editor at FSG, Eric Chinski. “I just kind of wrote it in darkness and secrecy for years,” Miller says. At Esquire she edited stories by Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Tim O’Brien, George Saunders, and Elizabeth McCracken, among others, and wrote her book at night and on weekends. “You just kind of make time for it,” she says, and pausing, adds: “The early morning people I don’t really understand. The ‘I rise at four A.M. and write for eight hours’ people—I don’t get that. I basically just didn’t have an enormously exciting social life for several years.”

Despite her self-imposed seclusion, the position in which Miller found herself—editing stories by famous writers for a 72-year-old, award-winning magazine while writing a novel that would eventually be bought by a major publisher—is sure to elicit a fair amount of literary envy. But Miller, who was born in Columbus, Ohio, and grew up in Akron, says she never envisioned such charmed circumstances. “I come from a very practical, midwestern family, and the idea of becoming a writer was to me, for years, just so outrageous, so unheard of. If I had come from a different kind of family, and if I had different values, I probably would have gone to graduate school right out of college and tried to make a go of it as a writer. As it is, I feel like I’m getting a little bit of a late start in publishing this book,” says Miller, who is 32. She got her start in publishing at 22, when she was hired as an editorial assistant at GQ.

When it became clear to her that the work-in-progress had the potential to become a book, Miller, like Gaffney, approached her boss and asked to take some time off to pursue her writing. “David [Granger], the editor in chief, was really wonderful and flexible about letting me continue to do fiction but scaling back my other roles at the
magazine.”

Unlike Miller and Gaffney, Adrienne Brodeur sold the idea of Man Camp to a publisher before writing the book. For her, juggling the demands of a full-time job with those of writing a novel was not a practical option. “I get very involved in what I’m doing,” she says. “I would really have to find a ‘very administrative, not involved’ job to try to figure out how to balance both.”

Like Gaffney, Brodeur started out in publishing as an editorial assistant, at the Paris Review, but in late 1995 she teamed up with director Francis Ford Coppola to cofound Zoetrope: All Story. The first issue was published in 1997, and within five years the literary magazine had won a National Magazine Award for Fiction, an honor that Brodeur says was the high point of her career. For Zoetrope, Brodeur edited and published stories by such luminaries as DeLillo, Gabriel García Márquez, and Cynthia Ozick.

But in 2002, Brodeur was looking for a change. “I knew I wanted to step down from Zoetrope for quite some time—not because I wasn’t happy—but because I think a magazine can have a life under a certain editor and [then] it needs some new blood,” she says. When Coppola expressed his interest in moving the editorial office of Zoetrope from New York to San Francisco, Brodeur decided it was time to find another editor for the magazine. “I really didn’t know what I was going to do next, but I’d had a couple of books in the back of my brain for a long while,” she says. “One thing that became apparent is that I didn’t immediately want another really grueling job.” So Brodeur met with an agent, Heather Schroder, and told her about the idea for Man Camp. The two agreed that Brodeur should write a proposal and a few chapters and try to sell it in advance of writing the whole book.

“I had this very romantic notion that I would take the summer and go to Cape Cod—my first big restful period,” Brodeur says. But when she received an offer to serve as a judge for the 2002 National Book Awards, Brodeur couldn’t refuse. “It fit into this romantic notion so easily,” she says. “Of course, it meant that 300 books arrived at my little cottage in Wellfleet, and I had no summer and no writing—just frantically reading and stressing out.” After the winner was chosen—Julia Glass, for Three Junes—Brodeur started writing the proposal and sample chapters in earnest. In May 2003, she received a book deal for Man Camp from Random House.

Once again, Brodeur was about to get “very involved” in what she was doing: writing her first novel. But this time she didn’t have an office and she didn’t have a staff. Nor did she have the director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now checking in to offer his support. “It sounded so wonderful at first—and I won’t pretend it isn’t pretty great to have your own schedule and flexibility and all that—but it’s also, as any writer will tell you, quite crazy-making to be alone in a room and not to have all of the typical things that you have when you’re at work that provide you the feedback that you’re doing a good job each day,” Brodeur says. “No one is patting you on the back and no one writes you a little fan letter. You’re just sort of thinking, ‘Is this good, is this horrible?’” Brodeur knew a little something about the support and encouragement—not to mention the editing—that most writers need. She had been offering it to her authors at Zoetrope for years. But now the roles were reversed, and Brodeur, like Gaffney and Miller, was in the unique and sometimes awkward position of applying what she had learned as an editor to her own writing.

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.