This one is a Merry Solstice present to all the editors and writers out there in the world. It isn’t even really a post, it’s just a link and a bunch of quotes from a wonderful interview with one of the all-time great editors of our era, Robert Gottlieb—the Paris Review interview.
Read it. It’s gold.
Gottlieb on the state of contemporary publishing
The time I look back on as the golden age [postwar] was seen by people like Knopf as the age of slobs. . .When I was growing up in the business, editors, even if they were heads of publishing houses, tended to edit what they brought in. . .These days many editors don’t edit. Editors now basically make deals. Publishing has become far more complicated, fierce, and febrile.
Gottlieb on being an editor
I’ve never quite understood why people do what I say. But then, I’ve never taken myself very seriously. . .My impulse to make things good, good things better, is almost ungovernable. It’s lucky I found a wholesome outlet.
Gottlieb on editing
If you are a good editor, your relationship with every writer is different. . .When you deal with nonprofessional writers, you must give them tremendous encouragement simply to convince them they can write at all. . .I worked with one writer who wanted to call me up every day and read me what she had written. I discouraged her. . .An editor has to be selfless, and yet has also to be strong-minded. . .When I was a young firebrand, I could get into twenty-minute shouting matches over semicolons, every semicolon a matter of life or death. . .Your job as an editor is to figure out what the book needs, but the writer has to provide it.. . .Editors are the servants of the writers, and if we don’t serve writers well they leave us. . .The editor and the author have the same goal: to make the book as good as it can be.
Impoverished vocabulary disturbs me.
Author John LeCarre on Gottlieb and publishing
The speed with which books go on and off, shoot to the top of the best-seller list and are unheard of three months later, the market produces a much faster and more careless approach to the product itself. . .I don’t think writers need all that sympathy. They need to be told when their books are bad.
Author Doris Lessing on Gottlieb and publishing
Now [after Gottlieb's era] it is common to meet editors who talk about a second-rate book as if it were best. Commercial pressure brought them low.
Author Michael Crichton on Gottlieb the editor
There is absolutely no question that I see Bob paternally. Absolutely no question. . .You lay on your tummy side-by-side with him on the floor of his office, and sandwiches were brought up. . .I’d send drafts that were not cleaned up enough, and he’d be a little short about being shown something that was not ready. . .There’s jealousy: you don’t want to walk in the office and see another writer chatting with your editor—you’d want to kill them. You learn to schedule your appointments so you can see Daddy all by yourself.
Author Bob Caro on Gottlieb the editor
All through our relationship we’ve had a tacit understanding that the words delivery date are never to be mentioned. . .We could spend a long time fighting over an adjective. We had such fights sometimes he’d bring in another editor as a buffer. . .Bob never said one nice thing to me—not a single word. Then he got soft. He lifted the manuscript and said slowly, as if he didn’t want to, Not bad.
New Yorker deputy editor Charles McGrath on Gottlieb the editor
He has a great nose for highfalutin crap of any sort. He goes at it like a terrier. It’s as if he can smell it.
Author Mordecai Richler on Gottlieb the editor
Asked about my film work, I had told Maclean’s magazine I used other muscles. Yes, said Bob, his sphincter.
Literary agent Lynn Nesbit on Gottlieb the editor
People always say Bob has such an enormous ego, but I say that Bob takes this enormous ego and lends it to the writer.
Author and editor Toni Morrison on Gottlieb and editing
Editing is almost maternal: you deliver nurturing and corrective, and the pleasure is in seeing that show without your fingerprints. . .Bob and I used to joke about our egos being so huge that they didn’t exist.
Author Cynthia Ozick on Gottlieb and editing
An editor is often a father figure, a mother figure, a kind of ministerial figure…a teacher—someone who has something to tell you.
Author Chaim Potok on Gottlieb and editing
There is a certainty, an ease, an assuredness in Bob, and when you’re a writer to have that in an editor is valuable indeed.
And now I’m going on vacation for the rest of the year (my clients already know this), and when I get back I expect you all to have not only read the Robert Gottlieb interview, but perused the Paris Review site for their other interviews with your favorite authors. . .because they are all brilliant, they are all fascinating, and they are all sheer balm to the writerly soul.
I just spent the day reading interviews on Writer Unboxed. Do you know about those guys? They’re pretty cool. And they’ve interviewed LOTS of people!
I went there originally this morning to re-read their interviews with Donald Maass and Lisa Rector and refresh my memory for the co-interview I’m doing with those two right now. (There have been unavoidable delays, but it is going forward nicely.)
However, I got hung up on an interview Writer Unboxed did with independent bookstore manager Robert Dougherty of Clinton Book Store, because it’s all about Indiebound. And I realized I ought to be bringing Indiebound to your attention. So you can bring it to other people’s attention. So they can pass it on.
Because Indiebound is the voice of independent booksellers online, and I can’t even tell you how important that is—to you, to me, to all the writers and readers out there.
Also, Mystery Man on Film kicks off his new series of appearances on the Story Department with a classic discussion of exposition. Take note, especially, of #2 under Other Considerations way down at the bottom. This is, in a nutshell, the logic behind saving backstory for Chapter 2 or 3.
And Laura at Combreviations posted a clip last November (which I am just getting around to pointing out) of Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner doing “The 2,000 Year Old Man,” which lead me to reading the interview she linked to, which lead me to Mel Brooks’ wonderful ad-libbed description of Jesus: “Always came into the store, never bought anything. Always asked for water.”
Apparently Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, now in their eighties, are best friends and spend most evenings together having dinner and watching movies. What I wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall—I love Mel Brooks’ delivery. That guy could read a shopping list and make me laugh. “ONIONS!”
And he had also the incredible good sense to be married to Anne Bancroft for 41 years. Way to go, Mel!
I’m going on vacation for a couple of weeks. Every year my family celebrates with great hope the extreme low point of the year at the Winter Solstice—like everyone else, I guess—and then takes the ten days between that and New Year’s Eve as time out of time, that gap in the Gregorian calendar between the Solstice and the New Year it inaugurates. We like to pretend there is no calendar, there is no schedule, there is, in fact, no movement of time. We will also be overhauling this website. . .at any rate, that’s the plan.
This year my husband’s starting his vacation tomorrow, so, hey! We’re making it a party. I expect to spend my days by the fire with my feet up eating chocolate. (Are you listening, sweetheart?) I will, of course, be checking email, so if you’re a client or considering becoming a client, you will still be able to reach me.
But I would not abandon you readers! Oh, no. I would never do that. Because I know that while I’m kicking back in my rocking chair with a cat on my lap, re-reading Ivy Compton-Burnett’s A Family and A Fortune (for that wonderful uncle Dudley and the dry, witty sniping about how the youngest brother Aubrey is “different” that the older brothers use to drive their mother crazy), you will all be hunched over your desks in your freezing garrets type-type-typing away at your beloved fiction, working on your craft, sweating over your plots, living with your characters in that ephemeral otherworld in which fiction writers prefer to live.
Glimmer Train, in case you don’t know, is a couple of sisters in Portland who run a quarterly literary journal of some serious repute. They’ve been doing this for almost twenty years now, and they’ve expanded into online submissions, monthly contests, and a writer’s magazine, Writers Ask.
I hope this tides you over.
Happy holidays! Watch for a new look for the website in the New Year, along with a co-interview with literary agent extraordinaire and author Donald Maass and independent editor Lisa Rector-Maass, a brand-new Free Edit project like the HOOKS project last fall, and hopefully even a brilliant way to bring back the old posts, which we’ve been mulling over lately. Yes, there is a very real possibility! Stay tuned—
This fund is a 501(c)(3) charitable trust made up of donations from writers like you to help freelance nonfiction writers in times of acute financial distress. As you can see from the stories, writers who receive funds (not huge, either) generally qualify through not just one financial disaster but two—double-whammies. We’re talking about serious medical conditions like cancer draining a freelance professional’s savings and preventing them from working to support themself.
Do you believe in writing? in writers? in being grateful when you’re on the end that gets to give and not the one that has to ask?
I’ve mentioned before my addiction to the Hugh Laurie characterization of P.G. Wodehouse’s quintessential dingaling, Bertie Wooster. Bertie is everything hopelessly one-sided about the British upper classes: white, male, rich, privileged, and a complete brainless gorm. He’s melodramatic, narcissistic, and self-glamorizing to the point of insanity. He’s also, fortunately, good-hearted, talkative, impulsive, surrounded by people even more harebrained than himself, and driven relentlessly by something he calls the Code of the Woosters—which simply means Wodehouse put him into predicaments and refused to let him take the sensible way out.
And Hugh Laurie has given Bertie the flamboyant mannerisms and puzzled jolliness he needed to round him out perfectly. In Laurie’s hands Bertie suffers a constant, unending series of facial expressions, ranging from baffled to appalled to triumphant and everything in between—even when he’s not talking, his wonderfully-mobile face simply never rests.
My husband has gotten so fond of Laurie’s Bertie that it’s causing hitherto unknown resources of genius to surface in him. He announced recently he’s discovered how to read Moby Dick without getting bogged down in Melville’s nineteenth-century loquacity.
“Picture Bertie dragging on a gasper,” my husband says, “while holding captive one Jeeves standing in the doorway with a trayful of empty glasses enduring the moments until he can retire to the kitchen. Sometimes I mentally put in an ‘I see, sir,’ or ‘Quite so, sir.’”
And damned if it doesn’t work! Suddenly Melville takes on a whole new personality. Talk about your layering!
So today we’re linking to Moby Dick, to be read as told by Bertie Wooster.
This week we’re linking to an excerpt from a novel by Millicent Dillon, A Version of Love.
I know who Dillon is because in 1995 I stumbled across her biography of Jane Bowles in a bookshop in lower Fillmore in San Francisco, A Little Original Sin, introducing me to the extraordinary, baffling, intriguing world of Jane, ever since one of my favorite writers. In the process of researching her biography, Dillon got to know Jane’s husband, the writer Paul Bowles, quite well and eventually wrote a biography of him, too: You Are Not I. Dillon went on to edit the collected letters of Jane, Out in the World (the bulk of them “agonizers” to Paul, as they traveled extensively and often separately throughout their lives, while maintaining an extremely close marriage) and The Viking Portable of Paul and Jane Bowles.
NOT ONLY THAT. But Dillon is an award-winning fiction author herself. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a resident writer at Yaddo and won the O’ Henry Award five times. Her novel Harry Gold was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2000.
AND. I have been having a long, luxurious, protracted conversation with her for months now about Jane Bowles, during which she’s commented periodically about her work on her latest novel, which she’s been working on for five years. She just finished it. Take note: you heard it first here.
So I’m recommending that all aspiring writers take a good, hard look at these early chapters of A Version of Love. Notice what she puts in. Notice what she leaves out. Notice the telling details, the significance of the dialog, the exposition that exists only to say something she couldn’t have said any other way.
Most of all, notice the polish. Dillon is a craftsperson of the highest order. This work of hers—in its deceptively simple, meticulous, factual tracking of characters through experience—is the essence of literature.
Boy, I’ve been sick as a dog all week and am just catching up with work. And guess what I discovered this afternoon? Some of you agents giving advice on Twitter? I really don’t think it’s such a good idea to insult aspiring writers in public.
Particularly a writer you’ve actually requested a manuscript from and are hoping will turn out to be a client.
I just took the heat this afternoon for standing up for aspiring writers and suggesting that advice can come without insults, and it was not a fun experience. I don’t like dealing with rude people, and I certainly don’t like doing it in public. But I felt sincerely bad for aspiring writers out there, who know less about this industry than I do, thinking, “Thank god that agent offered me that advice. Too bad about the sacrificial lamb, and yes, if it’d been me they were talking about, I’d know and I’d be feeling like crawling under a rock right now. Nothing like having your innocent hopes twisted in a knot by an agent who thinks they’re funny when they’re actually just mean. But I guess that’s the rough-&-tumble biz.”
No business is any more rough-&-tumble than the participants make it. The “thick skin” everyone talks about is about accepting the reality of rejections, not ridicule in the guise of snark. There is absolutely no need for discourtesy from professionals to amateurs.
No need at all.
Sure, I know there’s a kind of brat pack of young literary agents out there who are very visible on blogs and Twitter. I link to a lot of their articles and retweet a lot of their advice. They post some incredibly smart and helpful information. I also sympathize deeply with their problems with people who are neither writers nor aspiring to be, just nuts who want someone to pay attention to them. I deal with some of those people, too. And I know some of those agents are quite funny on their blogs and trade a lot of commiseration about their jobs among themselves. My editor friends and I commiserate about our jobs, too. Sometimes about nuts agents.
But Twitter is not the place to be snarky about potential clients. If you think they’re idiots, that’s your business. If you flaunt your opinion in their faces though, they’re going to take their business elsewhere.
Do agents not have competition in other agents? Um. Yes, they do. The world is full of aspiring literary agents. The big names—who are completely out of the snarker’s league—actually compete rather stiffly among themselves. And with current lay-offs from the publishing houses, there are more and more hungry literary agents every day, many of them seasoned professionals who know publishing insiders personally. People with long, illustrious publishing careers behind them, sometimes as the heads of whole publishing imprints. People also out of the snarker’s league. Hungry for clientele.
So here’s some advice for hopeful agents in these troubled times: Don’t expect writers to flock to submit to you and then sharpen your wit publicly on their mistakes. In my professional experience that is called, “Shoot self in foot. Repeat as necessary.”
The really successful professionals—with the great accounts and the brilliant authors and the big reputations—don’t have any need to publicly make fun of the writers who submit to them.
It’s a small planet, folks. We’re all in this together. And we all have feelings. Let’s remember to treat each other like human beings.
So today we’re linking to peace, because, you know, it’s all we’ve got that actually works.
Mira is a visual artist, educator, and author with a list of MFA’s you could stack books on. She appears to have been everywhere and done everything, and I also like her because she was an adult in the eighties. (I have very specific interests, I know.) And because she’s been published in the Bellingham Review, from my hometown Bellingham, for whose annual poetry chapbook contest I was a semifinalist when I was 19. (That’s the only poetry contest I’ve ever entered. A few years later, I drew the cover illustration for another poet’s Bellingham Review chapbook, The End of Forgiveness by Joe Green.) Also because she likes bluegrass. We are very big on bluegrass at our house.
However, Mira is important to you, personally, because her website is entirely devoted to researching and publishing information on grants, fellowships, and other such resources for artists and writers. You heard me right—she does this free, just because she likes you. I suppose.
And, even more important than that, she’s an educational consultant for the Transcultural Exchange, whose mission is to promote world peace through an understanding of the many cultures that make up this amazing planet we call home and this human species we call ours.
Today we’re linking to the Red Room—specifically to an interview Andy Ross, past-owner of Cody’s Bookstore in Berkeley, did with Alan Rinzler, Executive Director of the San Francisco Jossey-Bass imprint of Wiley and Sons and an independent editor. Andy has a previous interview with Alan, too.
I had lunch with Alan yesterday. Such a very nice man—conscientiously polite, considerate, approachable. Unfailingly gentlemanly. It wasn’t an interview, although I may someday ask him if he’d like to be interviewed here. But I did write a post about the experience today on Pulp Rag.
Thank you, Alan. Yes, I do like the Grand Cafe dining room. Especially those tiled pillars.
Short story author Scott Warrender is a Mentoring Program client. I have done full Copy, Line, & Developmental Editing on a number of short stories for him, the first of which was his poignant fictional memoir of Africa, ''The Boy With the Newsprint Kite,'' now published in the Foundling Review.
Clients’ Books
Bhaichand Patel is the author of two nonfiction books: Chasing the Good Life (Penguin Books India, October, 2006), and Happy Hours (Penguin Books India, October, 2009). I edited Patel's debut novel, When the Streets Were Cold and Dark.
I've edited a number of nonfictionessays for my friend Lucia Orth. (Many years ago, my contribution to Baby Jesus Pawn Shop was simply a peer critique and participation in a standing ovation.)
The poet Chris Ryan is the author of The Bible of Animal Feet (Farfalla Press, 2007). He has recent stories in Pank, Anemone Sidecar, and A Cappella Zoo. I edited Ryan's novel The Ishmael Blade and worked with him on his debut novel Heliophobia and WIP Pogue.
