Searching for Max Perkins: Are Writers Groups the New Editors?

By Elizabeth Langosy for Talking Writing

I have a smattering of books that address the relationship between writers and their editors. In nearly every case, the editor was Scribner’s legendary Maxwell Perkins.

Browsing through Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence and Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters, it’s clear that Max, in addition to serving as editor extraordinaire, was literary advisor (Max to Scott: If the Cosmop would give you $30 or $40,000 for the serial, I think the only strong argument that could be advanced against taking it would be the quality of the magazine.), book club leader (Ernest to Max: There were too many bayonets in it somehow. If you are writing a book that isn’t romantic and has that as one of its greatest assets it is a shame to get awfully romantic about bayonets.), bank account (Scott to Max: I see by the memo that I have had a $3,243.00 advance... Could I have $500.00 more?), and friend (Ernest to Max: Wish you could come down... We could make a whole succession of new good old days...).

My single experience of working with a book editor was highly professional—no insider gossip or savvy career advice. Long story short: My husband and I wrote a detective novel, had it placed by our agent as the first in a new series of mysteries, worked with the series editor for six months to get it in final shape, then had it rejected by the publisher at the last minute because he wanted the first five years of the new series to feature previously published authors (which we were not). Our agent shifted his focus from book to film writers, detective novels fell out of fashion, and I went back to penning short stories. All this happened 25 years ago. I really have no idea what sort of support one can expect from the average book editor of 2010.

Where, then, does a writer like me find both encouragement for my efforts and hard-nosed critiques of my work? While developing the list of Max Perkins’s value to Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and the other authors he nurtured, I realized that I could well be listing everything I value in the members of my writers group. Well, maybe I haven’t hit them up for $500, but they have come through for me in the difficult periods in my life. Could my writers group be my Max Perkins?

Max journeyed to Key West (in his suit, tie, and jaunty cap) to fish with Ernest Hemingway. My writers group travels from New Hampshire and various Boston-area towns for potluck dinners, story critiques, and mutual commiseration. A writers group as small and long-lived as mine is a sacred trust. You know everything about each other, and that knowledge is both helpful and traumatic when you’re called upon to be brutally honest about a creative effort.

As with the members of my writers group, Max Perkins was an excellent editor and softened his criticisms with praise. In most cases, his suggestions appear to have been well-taken (Ernest to Max: We’ve eliminated Belloc, changed Hergesheimer’s name, made Henry James Henry, made Roger Prescott into Roger Prentiss, and unfitted the bulls for a reproductive function).

My writers group alerts me to useless minor characters, unintended changes in point of view, and places where getting too close to “what really happened” actually weakens the story. Their suggestions for word changes and additional illuminating sentences can be so superlative that I can’t think of any alternatives and use them verbatim. Then I’m racked with guilt and doubt. Does this mean the story is no longer my own? Even if only one suggested sentence in an entire story has been used verbatim, I can torture myself by imagining that critics in the distant future will point out that specific sentence as an (undeserved) example of my writing excellence.

When I began editing the long (60-page) short story I recently completed, I realized that I had another model of productive editing, different from both the long-distance communiqués of Max and company and the intense meetings of my writers group. During my long (now ended) tenure at Harvard University, I worked closely with a colleague on the final editing of reports and proposals. We sat side by side for days on end, reviewing documents one line at a time. One of our primary goals was to ensure that each sentence was both accurate and understandable even to someone who knew nothing about the proposed or reported project. When problems were identified, we made a highly effective team in brainstorming solutions.

I asked this colleague, Judy, if she would help me edit my story using the same method that worked so well for the dozens of reports and proposals we finalized over the years. The experience ended up being phenomenal. Due to our differing schedules and the length of the story, we weren’t able to work side by side on the entire piece as I originally had hoped, but we did have one long afternoon session that was both very productive and more fun than diligent work is supposed to be.

Judy also read through the entire story and was especially astute at identifying previously overlooked places where a reader might question the accuracy of a word or concept. Her very first comment was on the names I’d chosen for my main characters (Judy to Elizabeth: I don’t really like the names–Chloe is too out of the ordinary and her parents probably wouldn’t have come up with that 40-50 years ago. Ishmael is too distracting...). I located a website that tracks government statistics on the use of names and found that she was right. The two names were not only generally uncommon (particularly Ishmael) but were given to few, if any, babies born in the 1950’s and 60’s. Because I didn’t want others to get bogged down by questioning the names, I changed them to ones that I verified were popular during that time period.

I have never been as pleased with the final version of one of my short stories as I am with this one. I’m sure this is due in large part to my recent retirement and my ability to now work on my writing all day, every day, for weeks on end if I choose to. But I also believe that my composite Max Perkins served me well.

How do you undertake the editing process? Who do you turn to? Do publishing houses still have a Max Perkins on staff or is this role filled in a different way today?

When Life Hands You Roses and Love

What does a writer do when the meaning of life changes and everything he's been writing for ten years goes against the grain of his new insights?

By David Biddle for Talking Writing

The fiction I’ve been writing over the past decade is about the day-to-day pathos of love between married people. During the past several years, close to 20 of my friends and family members have had to deal with infidelity and other versions of crumbling love. It’s very likely that for every marriage challenged by affairs and anomie, there are probably another 20-30 other couples out there either headed in the same direction or struggling with the humdrum day-to-day of children, jobs, mortgages, commuting, shopping, and periodic, hurried, and quite periodic sex.

Every bit of my prose is informed by the emotional lives around me. I am currently shopping seven different stories about infidelity and obsession to literary publications everywhere. The main theme of these stories is that love is tragic but somehow desire is still life affirming. This is a cynical view of married life in America, but to a certain extent it describes the reality.

Out there as well is a manuscript for a novel I wrote about suburban sexual intrigue that is both amoral and pathetic. My intent was for the reader to come away in pain, pondering why life’s beauty still made it possible to go on finding meaning in living. Yes, so far the book has been rejected by three agents and two small publishers. I’m proud of my work on it though. It’s kind of Henry Miller meets John Cheever in post-9/11 America (at least, that was my intention). I feel that it's honest and true and the writing reflects this.

Something’s happened in my own life though. My children have grown up. The youngest is 14. In the past year my wife and I have been able to spend a frighteningly huge amount of time alone together. The pressure of raising a family is off us. We each have gone through soul-searching transitions that were not easy. Our own partnership was challenged. We realize now that we have struggled together for at least the past decade. Maybe longer. But in the last six months we have grown closer and closer. In the past month we’ve become like two young lovers again. I’ll spare you the details. Let’s just say, I’ve learned there can be happy endings; or, rather, in our early 50s maybe we should say happy new trails can indeed lead off into the sunrise of mature and tested love.

But now I’ve got a real problem. I don’t see love so cynically anymore. I see hope and I see redemption for those of us heading into these last phases of our lives. I want to share this new revelation with all my friends and readers. Most surely this will pop up in future stories I write. But for now, the dilemma I face is whether I need to go back into the stories I have floating around out there, particularly my novel manuscript, and rewrite them to reflect my newfound zest for living and my hope for all married couples once giddy for each other everywhere.

It’s not clear what I should do. Tragic, cynical, amoral characters and stories have a lot of traction in this modern crazy sickened world. Shifting gears so abruptly back toward the notion that love conquers all (which I firmly believe is true) would certainly mean major re-writes, but it could also mean that my stories go out there designed to enhance life rather than depict it as tragic and inevitably painful. What do you think? Should a writer re-visit stories that have not been published if he or she has had a dramatically life altering experience that changes their world view?

An awfully big adventure?

By Elizabeth Langosy for Talking Writing

9/9/09 seems like an auspicious day to start blogging. No one has succeeded in convincing me (despite more attempts than I care to recall) that dates and times that align do not have mystical significance. When I glance at the clock and it reads 11:11, all is right with the world.

My entrance into the blogosphere is made possible by my decision, six months ago, to accept an early retirement offer from Harvard University so that I could focus on writing short stories. At that moment, I was 58, exactly half a century older than I was when I discovered that books did not magically appear in shops and libraries but were created by people who wrote down stories they made up. What a fantastic concept! I immediately knew that I wanted to be a fiction writer when I grew up. Not only did I love to read, but I was constantly inventing stories in my head. I never gave up on that dream—it just took me a very long time to get here.

In the past five decades, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to put words together to convey everything from the benefits of a home database to the emptiness of a shattered friendship. I married an artist, raised two daughters, and worked full-time at a freewheeling assemblage of mostly creative jobs that included stints as a computer game designer, video scriptwriter, and communications manager. I wrote fiction in spurts of varying intensity, in inverse proportion to the intensity of whatever job I happened to have at the time and the amount of guilt I felt in squirreling myself away from my family on fleeting weekends at home.

Then, with seven years to go before my expected retirement date and the freedom to finally focus on my own writing, I suddenly found myself with the chance to do it NOW. And exactly where am I now? Well, let’s see…I’m a Harvard retiree (as of one week ago) living in a happy, somewhat chaotic two-family house with my artist husband, oldest daughter, son-in-law, and two irresistible grandchildren, ages three and five. My younger daughter, who recently moved back to Boston from Los Angeles to be closer to all of us, lives around the corner. I have a room of my own—the former pantry of the 1890 Victorian that was converted into the two-family—that contains the essentials for fiction-writing and has great views of my daylily garden and the sunset.

I’ve spent the past week clearing my writing desk of accumulated junk mail, Spongebob Squarepants tattoos, old business cards, outdated Whole Foods coupon books, stray buttons and coins, and other detritus of a too-busy life. The opportunity I’ve been waiting for is at hand. I have three stories drafted and honed over the past decade and new (perhaps better) ideas on the back burner. The Writer’s Market lists both literary agents and magazine editors. Poets & Writers warns of approaching contest deadlines. My loyal writers group waits for my manuscripts, red pens poised.

Now where do I begin?