A Quote by David Bergen
I usually submit a novel at a certain number of words, and when I've finished working with my editor, the novel is longer than when I submitted it. I need my editor to help me open up the story.
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It's great to create a story and then to submit it to your editor and see what her reaction is to it. It's great to have your editor tell what her suggestions and ideas for the story are. It's great to explain to your editor why her ideas and suggestions are bizarre and to ask her why is she trying to ruin my story.
Which editor? I can't think of one editor I worked with as an editor. The various companies did have editors but we always acted as our own editor, so the question has no answer.
If you're working on a novel, whatever you do, don't say, 'I am almost finished with my novel.' It's worse than chanting Bloody Mary three times in front of a mirror.
The truth is, you have about three paragraphs in a short story, three pages in a novel, to capture that editor's attention enough for her to finish your story.
Newspapers have been likened to steamships that move very slowly, in terms of their direction. And when a reporter is sent out on a story, if that reporter has his or her own personal standards and is given a certain amount of time, they're going to probably do as good a story yesterday or tomorrow as they did the day before yesterday when there was a different editor there. But an editor provides vision. An editor decides what's going to be on page one, what gets rewarded, who's given more time, who's given what beats. They set a direction.
Never submit an idea or chapter to an editor or publisher, no matter how much he would like you to. Writing from the approved idea is (another) gravely serious time-waster. This is your story. Try and find out what your editor wants in advance, but then try and give it to him in one piece.
A good novel editor is invisible.
It's all about who's where on the food chain. When I'm the story editor, I expect my writers to follow my vision. When I'm working for another editor, I'm obliged to follow their vision.
Before I wrote my first novel, 'The Expats,' I spent nearly two decades at various arms of publishing houses such as Random House, Workman, and HarperCollins, mostly as an acquisitions editor. But a more accurate title for that job might be rejection editor: while I acquired maybe a dozen projects per year, I'd reject hundreds upon hundreds.
Sometimes I write less than I'd like but do research. Other times, editor's notes or a copy-edited manuscript or page proofs for a forthcoming novel mean that I need to put my attentions elsewhere for a day or two, but I always come back to writing.
The story and the poem are obviously changed by being placed in the novel, so in a sense they're no longer the works that preceded the novel.
The short story, free from the longuers of the novel is also exempt from the novel's conclusiveness--too often forced and false: it may thus more nearly than the novel approach aesthetic and moral truth.
A novel means a new way of doing a story. If you go back the origins of a novel, 'Clarissa' - that's not a novel; it's just a bunch of letters. But it isn't! Because it's organised in a particular way! A novel is what you make of it.
But for me, being an editor I've been an editor of all kinds of books being an editor of poetry has been the way in which I could give a crucial part of my time to what I love most.
The DNA of the novel - which, if I begin to write nonfiction, I will write about this - is that: the title of the novel is the whole novel. The first line of the novel is the whole novel. The point of view is the whole novel. Every subplot is the whole novel. The verb tense is the whole novel.
Before I begin a novel I have a strong sense of at least one central character and how the story begins, and a more vague sense of where things may wind up, but at some point, if the novel is any good at all, the story and characters take on lives of their own and take over the book, and the writer has to be open to that.
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