Alexandra Shelley has over 30 years of editing experience. She worked as an independent editor with author Kathryn Stockett on The Help, and with Martha Hall Kelly on both Lilac Girls and Lost Roses. Her most recent projects include Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War, by Karen Abbott, and the upcoming The Tubman Command by Elizabeth Cobbs. Shelley also teaches at The New School.
12TH STREET: How did you get your start?
ALEXANDRA SHELLEY: I kind of blame it on the writer A.M. Homes. In the mid ‘80s, when I was a cub reporter at The East Hampton Star newspaper, I started a weekly fiction series. From the slush pile, I picked a fable about a Procrustean therapist who uses his couch to either stretch out or cut down his patients, depending on what he thought they needed. I called the author of the fable to tell her we’d like to publish the story, tentatively suggesting that the ending wasn’t quite right.
Homes, who was also in her twenties then, affably asked what I thought she should do about it. As a recently minted English major, it hadn’t occurred to me to respond to a piece of fiction with anything but veneration, or perhaps a ruler to measure the iambic pentameter. But, together we worked out a new ending. In the 30 years since then, as an editor and teacher of fiction writing, I’ve stretched out or lopped pieces off many a story.
Then some friends of mine, who also lived on the East End of Long Island, started a publishing house called Bridge Works, made me an editor, and gave me a lot of freedom to acquire books. The first book I brought in was a collection of minimalist short stories by an unpublished writer named Tom Perrotta, ultimately titled Bad Haircut: Stories of the ‘70s. Tom went on to write Election, Little Children, and The Leftovers, among other novels and story collections.
After some other successful books, Bridge Works was bought by a conglomerate. They quickly realized that this independent literary publisher wasn’t making much money and basically shut it down, and I went out on my own as an editor.
STREET: Is editing an art, or something more mechanical?
SHELLEY: There are different levels of editing—all creative, I think, but some more technical. Copy editors make sure all the grammar and word usage is right and consistent and check for continuity and factual accuracy. Once a semester I wear a t-shirt to workshop that says:
Let’s eat Grandma.
Let’s eat, Grandma.
Commas save lives!
So copy editors are crucial, and they can be really helpful to Grandma. On the other end of the spectrum is something called “developmental editing” or “substantive editing,” and that’s mainly what I do — tough I’m not crazy about those designations, which make it seem like the book is somehow developmentally delayed, or that other kinds of editing are insubstantial.
Not to sound too highfalutin, but this kind of editing involves empathy. You have to see what an author is aiming for and help them get there rather than superimposing your predilections. The same year we published Bad Haircut at Bridge Works, I also chose a novel by another first-time writer, Lorna Landvik, called Patty Jane’s House of Curl (we did a lot of hair-related books that first year). It’s about two sisters who run a beauty parlor in Minnesota and it’s heartwarming and stuff, but about as minimalist as a beehive hairdo. Lorna writes with such compassion for her characters, and that’s what I initially responded to, but I made her take out about half of the tragedies—and then I shaved off at least half of the dialogue. After it became a bestseller, she said in a newspaper interview that whenever she got off a phone call with her editor, she’d put her head in her arms and cry.
So even if we’re empathic, that’s not to say editors aren’t bossy. I try to imagine Harper Lee’s reaction when she submitted her first novel, Go Set a Watchman, to Lippincott and her editor there, Tay Hohoff, said something like, “Well, this story about the young woman from Maycomb living in New York and grappling with her bigoted father Atticus Finch is okay, but what about if we rewrite the whole thing to focus on Scout as a kid, and then make her father heroic? And while we’re at it, let’s change the title to To Kill a Mockingbird.”
This is kind of what happened when Kathryn Stockett came to me with her first novel. By then I’d learned to be really bossy, and I said, “Look, I don’t think this will ever be publishable, but we can use it as your learning novel.” And that’s what we did. She practiced constructing a scene, inhabiting a point of view, other elements of the craft. When she started a new novel, then called Help, she had the chops.
Kathryn has an amazing ability to hear voices, and she had all these stories of African-American maids in Jackson, Mississippi, which she wanted to tell, but she didn’t yet have a structure for them. We worked together over the course of about five years, building the plot and characters and line editing. Probably more ended up on the cutting room floor than was in the final draft, but in the end it was worth it. The Help sold 10 million copies across 35 countries and was made into a movie, and even though I agree with some of the criticism now of cultural appropriation, I think on balance it was a novel which opened a window on the world behind the kitchen door.
STREET: In Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, A. Scott Berg writes that at various times Perkins had been a “psychoanalyst, lovelorn adviser, marriage counselor, career manager, [and] moneylender” to his writers. Have you found that the role of editor extends beyond the manuscript?
SHELLEY: I don’t hold a pencil eraser to Max Perkins. I think of him in part as an architect. I always picture Thomas Wolfe arriving at his office at Scribner’s with what I imagine would be a liquor box full of disordered pages, which Perkins shaped into Look Homeward, Angel. He cut 90,000 words out of that book. And do you know what the original title of The Great Gatsby was when Fitzgerald brought it to Perkins? Trimalchio. That wouldn’t have jumped off the bookstore shelves.
Sometimes I do feel like an unlicensed and probably dangerous therapist, especially when working with the authors of memoirs or autobiographical novels. I’m representing the readers, so I always want the author to go to deeper, scarier places.
Career-wise, I try to help first-time authors find agents, get their stories published in magazines to make their collections more salable, or do whatever else it takes to get their books Out There. A lot of the authors I work with now have already published a number of books, and might even be critically acclaimed, but have fallen into the crevasse of the “mid-list author,” which is short-hand for doesn’t earn big bucks for the publisher. With these authors, the goal is often to help them “break out” into a different kind of book. One of the seasoned authors I’ve worked with recently had to basically join the witness protection program to get her latest novel published. At the behest of her agent and HarperCollins, she changed her name. There’s no reference in the publicity to her seven previous novels, and this latest one has the buzz of a “debut.”
Another thing I feel honored to get to do is work with successful writers, like the best-selling author Richard Preston, on forays into new genres. While Richard was working on updating The Hot Zone, his book about the Ebola virus, he was also writing a fantasy novel, which I helped with. And I haven’t saved any marriages, but the authors and I do often become friends—because it’s a really intimate process, someone trusting you with their book, their baby. It often lasts for many years and many books. I’ve been to the weddings of their kids, if that counts.
STREET: What is the best advice you can give to an editor starting out? To a writer?
SHELLEY: To both: Don’t major in English. Chop some wood before you start to build the house. One reason I love teaching at The New School is that most undergraduates here are not coming straight to college from a comfortable bubble. They’ve had adventures, dislocations, struggles, tough jobs—like you [12th Street Fiction Editor Kyle Millman, who conducted this interview], and your experience in the military. That’s the stuff of fiction—both the literal experiences and the range of emotions and insights into human nature.
If you want to study editing, one way to do it is to read the earlier draft of a famous novel, like The Great Gatsby, which seems to have sprung fully polished from the pen of the author. Comparing it to the final version, you can then see the revision process and possibly the hand of the editor. Trimalchio is available, as is a new edition of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, which includes some of the early chapters that Max Perkins and Fitzgerald urged Hemingway to cut. That Hemingway was a maudlin, wordy guy!
The New Yorker published the version of Raymond Carver’s story “Beginners” with editing by Gordon Lish, who also retitled it “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” You can tell from just that change the tenor of Lish’s editing. It turns out Raymond Carver could also be a pretty wordy, sentimental writer before Lish Carvered him up.
I mention these before and afters because we editors say that if we’re doing our job right, you won’t know we’ve been there. One New York Times article, which came out around the publication of Go Set a Watchman, about the editor Tay Hohoff was headlined: “The Invisible Hand Behind Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.” But who wouldn’t want to emerge from the margins once in a while?
I really like that you ask about advice for an editor starting out, which implies that there’s a career path. I don’t think many people set out to be editors. You can’t major in editing. There’s no editor school. A lot of people fall into it because they like to write or to read—or to be grievously underpaid to work as an editorial assistant for a large publishing house. I’ve been doing this for over 35 years, and I still can’t believe I’m lucky enough to get paid to work with words and imaginations, to help people bring their stories out onto the page and, hopefully, from there, into the world.