75 POETS & WRITERS^brought about your shift from fiction
writing to editing?
Somewhere along the way I realized
that I was better at editing and that the
world was not going to suffer for lack of
my fiction. In the end what I wanted was
a literary life. I think Susan Sontag has a
phrase about “want ing to be part of t he
project” of literature. Editing was how
I could be part of the project.
How has your editing process developed
over the years?
I wasn’t aware of it consciously at the
time, but being a student in the MFA
workshop was my editing education.
The workshop taught me to try to
imagine myself into the writer’s mind.
But my editing process, to whatever
extent I have one, is just an amalgama-
tion of the habits of a lot of really smart
people. I would pick up little gnomic
pronouncements. I remember Gary
Fisketjon, editor of Raymond Carver,
Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford, and so
many others, saying that he tried to
read the text more closely than any sane
person ever would. And I felt, Ye s , that’s
what’s required.Was your shift to big publishing at all
disorienting, having come from the small
press world?
Well, the excitement was that with the
muscle of Viking Penguin, and then
Little, Brown, you wouldn’t have to
miss out on working on a book just be-
cause you couldn’t afford the advance.
But the pressure was that now, without a
nonprofit underwriting the endeavor, it
wasn’t only about whether a book was of
superb quality. It was about whether you
could also make money with it.Did you have to get used to pitching to the
sales department and so on?
I figured out pretty quickly that I’d be
doing my books a disservice if I didn’t
learn how to put them across in a con-
centrated way. With the sales force you
have one opportunity, at each season’s
launch meeting, to make your book
stand out and help the reps instantly
grasp its allure, so they’ll be able to
communicate that to booksellers and
start the whole chain of finding as many
readers as you can.With a newly acquired writer, how do you
assess the level of editorial involvement
the writer will need or want?
It always starts with a conversation
with the writer before you acquire the
book, whether on the phone or in per-
son. If I love a manuscript enough to
try to acquire it, there aren’t usually
make-or-break editorial points for me.
Maybe on rare occasions there’s some-
thing essential that I feel would have
to be addressed for the book to suc-
ceed, and in that case I might want to
suss out the writer’s openness to such
a change. But in that first conversation
I’m mainly trying to communicate my
passion for this manuscript that the
writer has spent years of her life mak-
ing and to articulate what I see the work
trying to do—so the writer understands
how closely I’ve read it and how much I
believe in it. Honestly, if I start readingAGENTS & EDITORS BEN GEORGE