(Noreen Tomassi, Jess Walter, Chuck Palahniuk, Gerry Howard, Calvert Morgan) Award-winning authors Jess Walter and Chuck Palahniuk sit down with editor Calvert Morgan of HarperCollins, who edits Walter's work, and Monica Drake, who is in a writing group with Pahalniuk, to discuss the alchemy behind creating such great works of fiction as "Beautiful Ruins" and "Doomed." More than just a conversation on the nuts and bolts of getting a book published, they will look at how the author/editor relationship affects the novel on the shelf.

Published Date: July 30, 2014

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:04):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2014 A W P conference in Seattle. The recording features Chuck Palac, Monica Drake, Jess Walter, and Cal Morgan. You'll now hear Pamela Mills and Noreen Tomasi provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:00:28):

Welcome everyone. I'm Pamela Mills, the director of development with a w p. Thank you for coming out this afternoon. I have just a few housekeeping things to remind you about and that's the obvious. No cell phones please, no flash photography. And after the session has ended, if you would allow the author's time to get to the book signing tables before approaching them, we'd appreciate it. So have a great session. Thank you for coming out. And now I'd like to introduce Noreen Tomasi, the director of the Center for Fiction, who will introduce our authors today. Thank you.

Speaker 3 (00:01:03):

Hello everyone. It's thrilling to see so many people here today or I thought there were about 11,000 people at a W P this year, but I'm told there are closer to 14,000 people, so that's pretty amazing, isn't it? We are from New York City, the Center for Fiction and for the last, this is our third year as a literary partner to a w p in this conference. I'm just going to, very briefly before I introduce a second, tell you a little bit about who we are. The Center for Fiction is the only literary center in the United States, solely devoted to the art of fiction. You can find us@centerforfiction.org, which is chockfull really of great content including essays and original fiction. You can also find us on Facebook in Tumblr and as Center for Fiction that is center the number four and fiction on Twitter. We present over a hundred writers per year at our home in New York City and you can see videos of all those events on our website.

Speaker 3 (00:02:08):

Everyone from Colson Whitehead to Elmore Leonard to Margaret Atwood with lots of exciting emerging writers as well. We also give an annual $10,000 first novel prize. We support all kinds of early career writers through fellowships. We have a writer's studio and we do lots of other exciting things. So I encourage you to visit our website and if you're in New York City, come visit us in our building. And I wanted to also let you know we have one more Center for Fiction event today and that is at 4:30 PM and that is a reading and conversation with Collum Tobin and Rachel Kushner. So please come to that as well. If you're here, let me start by saying that Chuck's longtime editor is not able to join us today, Jerry Howard. So instead Chuck in his usual wildly inventive way has suggested that author Monica Drake, who is a member of his writing group, join us instead, which I think will make for an even more interesting conversation.

Speaker 3 (00:03:13):

It will allow the panel to really dig into the editorial process, beginning with the process of revision that begins in a writing group like the one Chuck and Monica belong to, and continuing with in-house editorial exchange that takes place between an author in this case, Jess Walter and his longtime trusted editor Cal Morgan. We'll be discussing the alchemy between creating such great works of fiction as Beautiful Ruins and Doomed, as well as Monica's novel the Stud book. This is more than just a conversation about the nuts and bolts of getting a book published. In fact, it's not a conversation about that. It's a look at how relationship affects the novel that ultimately arrives on the shelf. I just am very briefly going to tell you a little bit about each of the people up here with me today. Cal Morgan is senior VP and executive editor at Harper and editorial director of both Harper Perennial and Harper Paperbacks.

Speaker 3 (00:04:09):

His list is an incredible list, notable for the wide range of authors he works with, which include Jess Walter, Kelly Oxford, Laura Redness, Stanley Crouch, Kate Zambreno, Tom Piazza, Blake Butler, Roxanne Gay, and just a really wonderful list, two long to name here. Jess Walter is the author of six novels in one nonfiction book. His work has been translated into 28 language and his essays in short fiction and criticism in journalism have been widely published. His recent Beautiful Ruins was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times notable book of 2012 Esquire's Book of the Year and N P R Fresh Airs Novel of the Year, and he lives in Spokane, Washington, so he's a homeboy here. Monica Drake's newest novel is a stud book published by Hogarth Now's The Imprint founded by Virginia Wolf and Leonard Wolf and recently revived by Crown and I think it's pretty amazing that under the name of Virginia Wolf's imprint, there's as great and interesting a book as Monica's new book.

Speaker 3 (00:05:23):

And I especially like that Virginia Wolf's imprint is carrying a title called The Stud Book that's really nice. Monica's earlier Clown Girl was a finalist for the 2007 Ken Kei Award for the novel through the Oregon Book Awards Saturday Night Live. Comedian Kristin Wig optioned the film rights for Clown Girl and it won the Eric Hoffer Award. For best micro Press title, Drake is the lead faculty in the writing program at Pacific Northwest College of Art, and she's a graduate of an M F A program herself at the University of Arizona. Chuck Ook, you probably know him, his 12 novels, damn Pygmy Tell All Snuff Ran, haunted Diary Lullaby, invisible Monster, survivor and Fight Club have sold more than 5 million copies in the United States alone, and some of you probably know that Fight Club was made into a movie.

Speaker 3 (00:06:25):

He is also the author of Fugitives and Refugees both published as part of the Crown Journey series and the collection of essays Stranger Than Fiction, his newest book, doomed Continues the afterlife Adventures of Madison Spencer that began in damned So I hope you will all buy books of all authors that are on the stage today. At the end of this session, there will be book signing right outside the door, books for sale and a book signing. The way the session will go is we'll have a conversation and then we'll take some questions from the audience and then we'll move outside where you're all going to buy so many books. Okay, thank you. Okay. I think rather than beginning with just a linear approach, moving from a writing group to what happens in house, I'd like to begin with a question that I think is important in both a writing group and in the author editor relationship. And that is how do you develop the level of trust that allows you to take seriously and work alongside another person in the very early stages of your work? And so I wonder if Chuck, you could talk about that first Chuck.

Speaker 4 (00:07:53):

I would say at least in three ways, and one is in recognizing the authority and the skill that the other person has in listening to the work and in contributing to the work. And with Monica, it almost never happens that she doesn't have something really brilliant to say about the work in its early drafts that I would never have recognized myself. And so she proves her authority, she proves her value by recognizing these things and making these contributions and being able to articulate them because most people, the people you don't want in a workshop are people who say, I just didn't get it or I didn't like it or I liked it, but I don't know why Monica can articulate what works and what doesn't work and she's someone that's worth stealing from. So you want to surround yourself with the most insightful, most honest people so that you can constantly steal their best stuff.

Speaker 5 (00:09:03):

Sounds like a good idea

Speaker 4 (00:09:05):

Speaks for itself. Number three, that they have a memory of your past work and that as you bring something in over years and years, sometimes they can harken back to something that you brought in in 1995, something that you yourself have forgotten about and they can link it back to this thing that you're working on now and that they have this kind of accessible inventory of every idea that you've brought in for years and years. And you realize that when they bring these things up, they're demonstrating this focus, this concentration and attention that they have and they become kind of this resource for bringing you back to ideas that you've since forgotten about. So proving that they're articulate, that they have the skills by demonstrating skills that are worth stealing and by proving that they're listening and that they're remembering your work ongoingly.

Speaker 3 (00:10:07):

Is that the same for an editor? The relationship between an author and editor?

Speaker 6 (00:10:12):

Yeah, I realized when Chuck was speaking, I'll have nothing to say because it is, no, I think it's very similar and I want to start almost with the third point, which is I think when I started out as a young writer, I was so full of ambition directed at nothing. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but that really meant just wearing a corduroy jacket.

Speaker 6 (00:10:34):

Beyond that, I didn't know what it was that I was going to write, but I was pretty sure it was going to change the world. And as you start to focus on what that ambition is, it becomes its own sort of narrative. And my favorite part of the process is sending Cal a manuscript and saying, sometimes I'll say, all right, you need to sit down with a cup of coffee. You can't take any phone calls. I need you to have 72 straight hours. And other times I'll just say, I give up, take a look. And the editorial letter back from him reminds me that he is as aware of what I'm trying to do as I am. And sometimes it's Cal who names the thing I'm trying to do, and then we can go back and make sure that I've done the thing. I've named the revision process.

Speaker 6 (00:11:18):

I have early readers too that I show it to, and there's a very different kind of trust. But I also from the beginning started out saying, I used to have a sign above my desk that said the pros from Dover, which is from Mash. And I was to remind myself to treat myself like a pro, not to use my editor or my agent as a therapist, as a friend, not to send them four pages of a novel and say, what do you think? Do you think this could be great? And so I like it to be done, and when I turn it in, then that part of the process where we start to really refine what it is you trust, their how well read they are, and that sense that they know what it is you're trying to do and can help you get there.

Speaker 3 (00:12:01):

Monica, were you a member of the writer's group with Chuck from the beginning? And I'm just curious about the genesis of that and how you began to trust yourself to speak up and to critique. Really honestly,

Speaker 7 (00:12:19):

I have been a member since the beginning. We met through another writer who was leading a workshop, Tom Spanbauer, along with Susie Vitello who's in the audience, and that was a long time ago now, and we started back then and it was great. The whole workshop process just made writing this really exciting and wonderful thing. And then I left to go to graduate school, and so I experienced a different kind of workshop at graduate school that's based on bringing people together and paying a lot of money. I mean, just to be frank, people were competing to try to get the few scholarships and it put attention on workshop and I finished graduate school and went back and my workshop in Portland with Chuck and Susie and some other people was still meeting. So I had kind of two kinds of workshop experiences over a handful of years.

Speaker 7 (00:13:13):

And I just want to say this idea of trust in working with writers who are not aiming for a degree, just really trying to make good work. There's a different kind of trust, an open-hearted willingness, and you have to each other's work to keep coming back. There's no tangible reward of a degree or maybe a famous author who's leading the workshop who might like you, right? It's just building it between yourselves, kind of bringing it together that way. So being in workshop with Chuck, the reward is just going back in and bringing my work in and hearing his work, right?

Speaker 4 (00:13:52):

Another aspect is the good natured aspect of competition that when Monica brings in work, which is almost every week, that is Drop Dead funny, that makes everyone laugh and laugh and laugh. Nothing pisses me off more. And I think if she can go there, if she can go there, then I can go farther. I'll make 'em laugh harder next week, I'll get her. But is been a 20 year good natured competition. And in reading Lewis Hyde's book, the Gift so much about the gift of a talent is about not commodifying it, not sort of paying money to learn it. And what we create in workshop is much more about being a gift to one another.

Speaker 7 (00:14:46):

I think that's true, and there's a permissiveness to it too in that good natured competition. When Chuck brings in some stuff that's pretty crazy, it gives us permission to say, Hey, you can break down those doors and how are you going to respond to this? What are you going to bring back next time?

Speaker 3 (00:15:01):

Yeah, Carol, I was wondering from the editor's point of view, how do you know that it's an author you want to work with other than you've read the author's work and you think the work is wonderful, but are there times when the work is wonderful and you decide, no, it's not the right author for me? What gives you the sensation or the level of trust to let you know this is an author you want to work with and you want to work with them through a career?

Speaker 8 (00:15:33):

If you are lucky at the very beginning of the process, if I get a manuscript on submission and I read it, this just happened last week and I read it and I fall in love with, for me it's usually the language. First of all, some editors are absolutely transfixed by plot. I am happy to work with plot, but I'm transfixed by language. And so if I read a manuscript that I know is captivating to me and surprising to me on every page, that's the beginning of knowing that I want to work with somebody because it's somebody who devotes that level of intense attention to every squiggle on the page. And then the thing that furthers that sort of convincing process is getting on the phone with the author and starting to have a first conversation. And in that conversation I tend to be very broad.

Speaker 8 (00:16:26):

And after sort of talking a bit about what I admired in the book and trying to draw the author a little bit out about what they were trying to do with the book, I will sort of shamelessly start asking big embarrassing questions like what do you want your greatest book to be and what do you want to do with your career and whose career out there in the world do you admire? And for me, it's much less about career in any kind of professional or financial sense than it is about starting to know the narrative that Jess was talking about, where you were aware of the sense that you had ambitions before you had necessarily worked out in your mind what they meant. And I don't think any of us ever completes that understanding of what our ambitions are. And certainly the best writers that I've worked with, a great part of the joy of that relationship is seeing their ambitions change from book to book. And that's been the story with us. I mean, you have just built higher and higher Fenway green walls out there for every new book that you've written. And my watching that has been one of the great rewards of the whole time.

Speaker 3 (00:17:35):

Yeah. Can you respond to that, Jess? Because you did start with Cal writing one kind of a book, and your work is, all your books are beautifully written, but they've really evolved in a certain way, in a kind of unexpected way.

Speaker 6 (00:17:47):

Yeah, don't, when I set up to write, I mean in some ways Beautiful Ruins was the first book that I started, but I don't know that I had the chops to complete it when I started it. And I don't have an M f A. So I felt like with my first novel, I was teaching myself how to write a novel, and I chose a form that I thought would be accessible for me because I'd worked as a police reporter. So I wrote a crime novel, but I wrote it as a structural and thematic allegory for Ts Elliot's the Wasteland. And I was really shocked that it wasn't the New York Times Sunday book review, cover review that Sunday that instead it was like, this is a pretty good crime novel about a serial killer. And they're totally missing the point. Yes, there are some dead bodies and there's a serial killer, but so I was sort of stunned to have been to be put in this category as crime writer, mystery writer, when it wasn't really the thing I thought my ambitions were.

Speaker 6 (00:18:46):

I love those kinds of novels and I still tend toward noirish things sometimes, and I don't think there should be genres in a perfect world, but I was sort of surprised to be there. And then what's still saying one lousy foot, they call you a cannibal. No, you put one serial killer in your novel, they call you a crime novelist. So yeah, there was a bit of a journey I guess, getting back towards some vision of what I wanted to do, but it took two or three books to accomplish that. And Cal was there every step of the way with my frustrations and saying, well, all we, and really all you can do is write the best book you can, and all you can do is write the next book you want to write and the next book you want to read And Cal was so great at. As those books came in, other people would say, why are you switching genres? Why are you all over the place? Cal would just get excited when Maxwell Perkins sent back his long note about everything that was wrong with the Great Gatsby, the first line was, it's a wonder. And to get a note back that says, this is great. Now here's what we can do. To me, that's where the relationship really starts to build. You trust that compliment as much as you trust the notes that follow

Speaker 8 (00:20:03):

It. And every book proved out where Jess wanted to go and where I think to some extent, even your instincts were drawing you in terms of what the attention that you were paying to the characters and the way the storylines were being shaped. And we had one funny dramatic moment where after the publication of your third book, and I think we were already working a little bit on your fourth, which really was the dividing line between the third novel, still something of a kind of crime novel mobsters and cops and stuff, but to my mind, entirely a literary novel. And the fourth, which was Incontrovertibly, a literary novel, just went and did the awkward thing of winning the Edgar Award for the best crime novel of the year and got up. And here I get to get a laugh that he got last time he got up and to accept the award very sheepishly and said into the microphone, are you sure? But at that point, we knew that that third novel was called Citizen Vince. And then the fourth novel to Zero ended up being a finalist for the National Book Award,

Speaker 6 (00:21:08):

Which happened about six months apart. Yeah, I had four people at a reading and slept in my car and checked the next morning after sleeping in my car, got a phone message from Harold Agen Bram in New York and saying, this is Harold Abram, you're a finals for the National Book Award. I immediately thought, which of my friends has a 2 1 2 area code? I was so sure it was a joke. But yeah, that was sort of a nice moment and to share it with, I mean, Cal and I have done seven books together now, six novels in a book of short stories. So you really have someone along the way really has shared all that with you, and it's remarkable. I feel like he celebrates the successes as much as I do in some ways.

Speaker 3 (00:21:54):

I wanted to ask you Chuck and Monica about, Chuck sent me the list of who is in the writing group and an amazing group of people and some pretty dark times over there at the writing group. Pretty funny as well. I think it's a group of writers who writes some dark work, some incredibly hilarious work, but I wonder, is that purposely done and how are you raising the stakes for one another all the time? You spoke about this a little bit before, but there's a sense of competition, a healthy competition. Are you saying to each other, you're not going far enough, you're not going far enough ever.

Speaker 7 (00:22:41):

There might be some of that pushing each other further with ideas in a wonderfully inspiring way. But I think there was another part to your question, which is that we're all working in different, very different kind of, I guess genre is the word. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. Chelsea Cain is part of the workshop and she's a thriller writer, a very different kind of work than say what I'm doing perhaps. But to me, everybody just has such great insights and when you work together, as long as we have, you kind of know what direction people might take, but then they'll still surprise you with their specifics. Sometimes before I bring something in, I might run through my mind, what's Chuck going to say? What's Chelsea going to say? And it helps me think about the work, but then they'll still always surprise me with brand new stuff. So I think it's really beneficial to have that mix. How

Speaker 6 (00:23:34):

Often do you meet?

Speaker 7 (00:23:35):

Every week. Every week. Still every week.

Speaker 3 (00:23:38):

Chuck said something to me at the beginning while we were waiting for the session to begin, that I thought was so interesting, and that is contrasting the writing group experience a little bit with the in-house experience that whether it's because of online access or the information load people have or what's going on in the world, I don't know, but people are willing to go further. You can go further in fiction, you can be more extreme. What the reader will accept and embrace is very different than it was 20 years ago. And that's something that maybe you can work with. A writer's group is not always so easy to work with within a house. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Speaker 4 (00:24:27):

One of my favorite stories, evolving stories is one year I toured with a short story called Guts that made hundreds of people faint. And I read it at Columbia and my editor and his wife, his very elegant wife, they're right there in the front row. And part of the way through the story, a young man started to stand and he collapsed and he went into convulsions and I kept going, and another young man stood, collapsed, and as he lay on the floor sort of twitching, he was just making these animal sounds, these horrible guttural sounds. And my editor, Jerry comes to the edge of the stage and he waves me over really angry. He goes, you stop this right now. You don't read another word of this. And Suzanne, his wife, shouts, is Random House liable for this? Paramedics came in this huge auditorium full of people, and they took these two poor young men out. But two years ago I was in Austin at the festival of the book and I did a big nightclub event. And backstage I heard Jerry telling the story of that Columbia reading to Aaron Morganstern who wrote Night Circus. And Jerry was telling that story saying it was so great, this kid fell down, he had convulsions, he puke, he almost drowned in his own puke.

Speaker 4 (00:25:58):

It was so fantastic, but at the time it was not terrifying. And so what I kind of like is with Jerry at least kind of proving to him that you can go places that are beyond his comfort zone. And in workshop, when you go to those places, I find that you have to make a case for it. Monica will not allow me to be racist. That's true.

Speaker 3 (00:26:26):

That's true.

Speaker 4 (00:26:28):

I had a short story I got weeks ago in which I referred to some black men as Leroy's, and I thought it was a kind of innocuous way of making sort of secondary characters just calling them Leroy's. And Monica said, no, you can't do that. That's cheap. You're not doing that. So I didn't do it. Chelsea says, I can't say fag. Chelsea says, I can't say homo or fag. I let

Speaker 7 (00:26:52):

Him say fag and homo. I said, that's okay.

Speaker 4 (00:26:54):

But everybody in workshop has got one line that they won't cross. And by saying you can't do that, they force you to do it in a better, more inventive, less ready-made, cliched way. And so I can get around Jerry's reservations by being more clever. I can get away, get around Monica's by being more clever. They hold us to a kind of higher standard of seduction. We can't be kind of cheap. Yeah,

Speaker 7 (00:27:28):

I think that's true. We're accountable to each other.

Speaker 3 (00:27:33):

So it sounds like everything is pretty perfect in your writing group and hardly, and also in your relationship Callan, Jess, just it's,

Speaker 8 (00:27:43):

I'm not speaking to him right now,

Speaker 3 (00:27:46):

All flowers and happiness. Let's start maybe with you and Jess Cal. Aren't there times when you just want to kill each other? Aren't there times when he gives you things you hate or when he delivers something to you and you think, what the No, that

Speaker 8 (00:28:02):

Has never happened.

Speaker 3 (00:28:03):

Or

Speaker 8 (00:28:04):

There have been times where I simply can't once or twice where I simply couldn't understand why a point that I wanted to make to Jess. He was looking at me like I was crazy. I was sure that it was just some sort of mental block of yours that you hadn't gotten past it. The one that sort of comes to mind is a fairly recent one, and it's really sort of almost maybe the only editorial, and it's barely editorial, but the editorial argument we've ever had, which was about one word, and that was originally the first word of the title of Beautiful ruins, which when he handed in the manuscript was the book was going to be called The Beautiful Ruins. And I thought that was fantastic. And then you had a change of hearts somewhere along the way, and I thought you were out of your mind. I

Speaker 6 (00:28:53):

Think I accidentally left the on when I turned it in and it started showing up in ad copy and things as the beautiful ruins. And I said, no, it's not the beautiful ruins. It's just beautiful ruins. And yeah, the other part of that trust is, and we really haven't had to do it very often where we can't convince one another one way. And I love the idea of me of defending yourself. The group has, you have to be able to defend these things. And so we went around and around on why it is not the beautiful ruins. It's this state of ruination that I'm talking about, which am I going to walk around and explain to every person who buys a book. The reason it's called Beautiful Ruins is because I'm talking about a general state of ruination. But yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:29:40):

You all know,

Speaker 6 (00:29:40):

Yeah, it made sense to me. And I did win that

Speaker 8 (00:29:44):

One. That's after I, two or three months, I backed down mostly because it wouldn't fit on the cover in the right way.

Speaker 6 (00:29:50):

And I would do this thing where I would poll people and everyone who got back to me said, beautiful ruins, or I didn't tell them that, or I didn't tell Cal about them. So I just ignored everyone who said the and said, look, I sent it to this person. And they said,

Speaker 8 (00:30:05):

Beautiful. A hundred percent of the people who agree with me are on my side, agree with me. Right,

Speaker 6 (00:30:09):

Exactly.

Speaker 3 (00:30:10):

I did note that Cal said after two or three months I backed him.

Speaker 6 (00:30:16):

I kept putting beautiful runs on the versions. I would turn in and on everything I did, and he kept putting the on it, and it was very passive actually. It's like a couple who's been married for a long time. We're going to see your sister for the weekend, huh? I don't think so.

Speaker 3 (00:30:33):

Are most of the disagreements you have over language, over words like that? I don't. Not over structure

Speaker 6 (00:30:41):

Over, no. Early on every author, I really thought every publicist in house should be on my book. And that not enough attention and time was being given in some way. Cal has to bear the brunt of those, but he's on my side in them. I think that's where most of the grief comes from. And we're on the same team in that. So we will debate certain points. Often what usually happens is Cal will tell me this part isn't working for this reason. He's great about this reason. I don't feel like we're grounded with this character in the right way. And he doesn't usually offer solutions. He just says, this is the reaction I'm having at this section. He's very specific about it though, so then it's up to me to figure out what I'm not doing that that isn't getting that across. But no, I don't think we've had any big knockdown drag outs. I certainly, I can't remember if we have, I may have blocked them.

Speaker 8 (00:31:38):

I would remember. I would've been the one knocked down and dragged out.

Speaker 6 (00:31:41):

Yeah, maybe. No.

Speaker 3 (00:31:43):

I wonder if the experience is different for you, Monica, and for you, Chuck, when you have a longstanding writing group and you've already worked and worked and worked the book within that writing group, and then you are with your editor at Hogarth or at Doubleday, and so you've vetted and vetted it already. And now are the disagreements and conversations differently weighted for you?

Speaker 7 (00:32:12):

For me, it overlapped a little bit more than that linear sort of progression. I'd start getting comments back from an editor, my editor at Hogarth, but things were still coming into workshop. So it gives you sort of a backup place to check, double check what you think you're hearing. They worked together. It works together that way.

Speaker 3 (00:32:29):

And how about for you, cha?

Speaker 4 (00:32:33):

I really hesitate to answer this honestly, because if it is a podcast, Jerry might someday see it. And I've developed a strategy of writing something in that is just too much. So that later when Jerry comes to me and says, you cannot have these people making soap out of liposuction fat, that's just too distasteful. I can say, well, how about if they don't cut off the police commissioner's testicles? How about that? And so by writing in these kind of sacrificial lambs, okay, so what if Leona Helmsley isn't butchered by the psychopath in the fifth act? Okay, Jerry will go for that and I'll get what I want. I didn't want her there anyway.

Speaker 4 (00:33:29):

So it is kind of this little dance where I find that if I can get away with what I want, if I offer up things that I'm happy to get rid of, but more and more there is the kind of court of popular opinion where recently I had a story in Playboy called Cannibal that's going into a collection next year. And when Jerry read it, Jerry said, is this story what I think it's really about? If so, I think it's absolutely appalling and we can't have it in the collection. And I sent him the first a hundred tweets that came in response to that story, and they were all so excited and so over the top loving the story that Jerry had to kind of collapse and say, okay, it's in. And when I was doing my book Snuff, Jerry had said, we are not publishing a book called Snuff about the making of a snuff film, but I just happened to get invited to speak at Carnegie Hall to children to high school students. And I told a bunch of really distasteful stories and they laughed and they roared and they roared. And in the front rows there were these blind Amish children. They all held hands because they were blind, and they came and went holding hands, and even they laughed. And as we were leaving, Jerry said, okay, we'll do the book.

Speaker 4 (00:35:01):

There's all these different kind of negotiations and dances and ways of defending what you're doing.

Speaker 3 (00:35:09):

We'll try and get that cut out of the podcast, please. Yeah. Is there ever a point where any of you feel a writer no longer needs an editor? I ask this because I see some being booked feel like they don't have an editor's hands on them, and I am of the camp that thinks anyone, yeah, let's edit Middle March. Any book couldn't be edited. Do you ever feel I'll reach a point where I don't need an editor where that relationship isn't important to me? Maybe I won't start with Jess on that one. Monica,

Speaker 7 (00:35:50):

I am certainly not there. I can't imagine that actually. I think that's part of the process to work with somebody else. So at some point you want a sounding board and some input and no, I can't imagine that it's a short answer. Okay,

Speaker 3 (00:36:06):

Chuck? Yeah.

Speaker 4 (00:36:08):

Years ago I was talking to Douglas Copeland who wrote Generation X and he said that Generation X was such a success that for his next five or six books, they really did not edit them. And he really regretted that. He really wished that especially for those sophomore subsequent books, he had had a fantastically strict editor because he thought that he got away with less than he should have.

Speaker 8 (00:36:35):

Can I tell a heroic story about Generation X, please? A heroic editor story. I was in St. Martin's Press when Generation X was published. What most people don't know about that book is that it was sold to St. Martin's Press as a nonfiction book about Generation X. And then Doug went away and his editor was Jim Fitzgerald, who's a guy I worked a lot with who's now an agent. And Doug sold the book off a proposal, went away for a year or whatever it was the time that he had to, and then when delivery day came in, he showed up and he said, oh, whoops. I wrote a novel instead. Is this okay? And St. Martins could easily have canceled it. And Jim said, no, not only will I not cancel it, this is so much more brilliant than the thing that I thought I had bought.

Speaker 8 (00:37:21):

That he put heart and soul into publicizing that thing and pre publicizing it in a way that was in my mind the first time I had ever seen what we now think of very commonly as sort of viral marketing that didn't really exist back then, but what it consisted of, in Jim's case, we didn't have the internet yet. What we had was fax machines and Jim's, Jim used to come in every weekend for a period of about a month, and he had xeroxed up a big letter X like this to fill the sheet of paper. And he spent the entire weekend just faxing that to every fax number of every media person that I could think of. So they would all come in on Monday morning and 16 people would have a big X in their fax machine. And that was the thing that began people talking about Generation X. And then I think he followed up and they said Generation X, et cetera, and he knew it had worked. When he saw Ad Age talking about generation X as a phrase, he knew all of that had paid off. That's

Speaker 6 (00:38:25):

Amazing. Which is another answer to the question. I mean, it isn't just the work itself that needs editing. You have a champion who at the publishing house, who does those kinds of things, who pushes. But besides that, I can't imagine, and I've read those same novels where I've thought there really needs to be an editor here. And I've known writers who've gotten to a place where their editor is 24 years younger than them and studied them in school, and they're not likely to make some of the changes they need. But I think we also always need writers. And I've gotten probably less likely to show my stuff until I have a full draft. I was in a writer's group and one other writer and I sort of escaped from it. And he would be my first reader and still is a wonderful English professor in Spokane named Dan Butterworth. And then I would show my wife, who was an editor for the newspaper in Spokane, she was an editor also. So having those early voices, it is a communicative thing you're trying to do. I actually had to stop showing my wife when I gave her that early draft of a novel, and I said, here you go. And I went downstairs and got a glass of water and I came back up and she was reading Bel Canto.

Speaker 6 (00:39:37):

So now she doesn't get to read anything as good as Bel Canto is. I would much rather have found her in bed with Anne Patchett than with the book.

Speaker 3 (00:39:49):

I know there aren't very many editors at big houses in New York or at a w P this year. So I wondered if you could give us just a little sidebar of your perspective about working as an editor in a big house and also about what you see going on in the world of fiction right now, especially how it relates to boundary breaking. Cal in New York probably goes to more readings and sees more unknown writers and reads more unknown work than anyone I know, and you'll all be sending him work tomorrow and he's going to kill me. But I just wondered, first I would like to hear from Cal about what you feel about the state of fiction today and where it's going, and then I'd like to ask that general question to all of you. Actually,

Speaker 8 (00:40:39):

I've been in publishing for a little more than 20 years, and during that time, in the first half or so of that time, publishing looked to me about the way publishing looked in all the books that I read when I was growing up that made me want to go into publishing, which were biographies of Thomas Wolfe or Hemingway's letters or what have you. And it all seemed to be very cloistered and very much a game of a few houses and a few individuals at those houses who had great strong one-on-one relationships with their authors. Then when the internet came in, and especially in the past five or six years when a sort of concatenation of factors gave rise to not only the internet but the availability of small press publishing, I think, and if we were all sitting around a massive coffee table, I would want to know what all of you guys think about this.

Speaker 8 (00:41:35):

But I think that it has fundamentally changed the nature of the writing that we're seeing, not just the amount of it and not just really even the sources of it, which is a big important thing that we're seeing writing from, I think more diverse voices writing that is not just the material that makes its way through the very narrow bottleneck from M F A programs through literary agents to a few editors at a few houses. But that is coming into realization in cities, cities and towns all over the country through a much more diverse kind of network of capillaries that is bringing work into people's hands that would not have surfaced 20 years ago. To me, what it is made for is a lot more diversity of thinking about what a book is, things that are 68 pages look like fantastic books now in a way that they didn't before for what you can do in a book.

Speaker 8 (00:42:33):

Chuck, I think your experience seeing that people are reacting to more challenging stuff in an open way is something I've seen as well. And I attribute that in part to the fact that it could be that the old model was protecting us from challenging work in a way that it might not shouldn't have necessarily. And I think sometimes the stuff is raw. It does not necessarily get the same kind, and I don't mean that as a qualitative thing, but just the same nature of editorial working through before it hits pages as it might've in the old model. But to me as an editor who's sort of reading that stuff, looking for people who might have interesting careers, that's exciting because I'm seeing it in its rawest form and I'm seeing also people reacting to it in its rawest form. The people I know out there in the world who are excited about young writers today, they're excited about material that is being worked out almost in real time through small press publications, through stuff that's published online. And we as readers get invested in those writers very early on because of the chances that they take

Speaker 9 (00:43:41):

Jess. Do you have

Speaker 6 (00:43:42):

Any, I mean, I had a long short story that I don't know I could have published anywhere except Byliner, which I think chuckle. Also, I think we had Amy Grace Lloyd, we had the same editor at Byliner. Yeah. And there are these places, the Avis now where you can publish novellas, which a while ago they were dead in the water. And I remember when I finished a novel at one point, and I had an agent years ago who said, this is a really thin novel. Everyone's buying thick novels this year or something. She said something like that, it was a hemline or something, and I hear the sort of hand wringing and it's the end of the world. And I wrote a zombie short story out of my loathing of zombie short stories called Don't Eat Cat. And the whole reason I wrote it was to build to this rant that this character has where he says, imagine you were born during World War II or when they were feeding priests to lions or when people were born into slavery.

Speaker 6 (00:44:43):

This is the end of the world. Fuck you. It's always the end of the world. And I think that about publishing sometimes. Yeah, we're writing into headwinds all the time. It's changing. It's not what it was. It's hard to sell books. The digital books have changed things, but it's kind of always been that there's a probably fake golden age of being a novelist that we still hold up Fitzgerald and Faulkner and Hemmingway, and I don't know that that really existed. They probably thought, this sucks. Everything's changing. I don't know how to do this. I have to blog all the time, whatever. I mean, if you read Fitzgerald's letters, all he wanted to do was be extravagantly, admired. That never changes, but I think the device changes the way it comes out. It doesn't change what you do. You try for something with a platonic pureness of heart and you approach it whatever it is, like a religion and the rest either takes care of itself or doesn't, but you kvetching about it doesn't change that either. I don't think

Speaker 7 (00:45:48):

I can say a few things to that in the future of writing. My intention is to keep writing novels is my thinking. But I also just designed and launched a B F a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Writing where I'm working with young people and I've been teaching in art school for 13 years and I just love what they bring to it. So when I designed this program, I tried to leave a lot of open space to see what people who are growing up now, what their direction for what they call writing is. So I define writing as broadly as possible down to the point where if you want to project one word on the side of a building, we count that as writing because it has a word in it. So it's really broadly defined, and I am having a great time seeing what students bring to the idea of writing, including one thing that blows my mind is this idea of writing for multi screens, right? They actually watch more than one screen at a time. So it just shifts every element of the narrative, how they're working together and how they're not working together. And even just things like Google Earth technology in terms of narrative structure is just amazing and exciting. So I feel like I'm just on the edge of watching where students take writing. It's really fun.

Speaker 7 (00:47:07):

Back to you, Chuck.

Speaker 4 (00:47:11):

One of the changes is audio books. The books have to be in a way more performed now. And in our group we got really bored doing book events. Chelsea came to me and said another reason not to podcast. Chelsea had been sent on one of these junkets where you have to have these round robin dinners with all these taste makers and mavens and critics and reviewers, and between every course of the meal, you know where this is going. You have to switch seats and make small talk with another person you'll never see again. And Chelsea takes me aside and she said, I wish I could just give them all hand jobs under the table. That would be far more interesting and less taxing

Speaker 4 (00:48:02):

Is so boring to do that standard book tour where you go out and you read the thing and you're that thing that's withheld and then it's presented and then you sign the thing and then you are admired in that Fitzgerald way. And then you go back to your hotel room and drink everything in the mini bar, please, you have to sleep for four hours and do the whole thing again the next day in Baltimore. So we thought, why not as a group, not just be an editing group, but be a marketing group and let's tour the way a band would tour. And last year we toured as a group doing adult bedtime stories because we all recognize that our love of storytelling came from being read to his children. That luxury of being performed to by your mother or your father that gave you that craving to be able to do that performance yourself.

Speaker 4 (00:48:57):

And we staged these enormous events in nightclubs and college auditoriums with a lot of shtick and everyone wore their pajamas. And if you brought stuffed animals, you got prizes. And it was about looking like idiots and giving people permission to look like idiots. And that aspect of having to write toward the performance I think is something that's growing, whether it's audio books or whether it's taking the work on the road and having to present it. But I'm seeing that the marketing side of things is having to get really creative in the same way that bands are now making their money from touring instead of from royalties. Maybe authors will be making more of their money from touring and performing rather than just waiting for that check to come,

Speaker 6 (00:49:48):

Which is sometimes a difficult thing you imagine. Would Don DeLillo perform? Would you worry about some of the work coming up? And authors will ask me, should I tweet? Should I do this, should I do that? And I think if it's something great and cool that you would do anyway, you should do it. Those other questions of what you have to do to get a book out there, those things, they aren't the same as writing sometimes. And it's worried me, would we have discovered Cormack McCarthy if he was j