This week, I’m talking with literary writer and editor Alle C. Hall. We discuss how to spot a bad critique, six elements sentences must convey in your writing, what to expect from a literary magazine editing your work, privilege in publishing, editing sensitive material, and more!
Music: Harlequin by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3858-harlequin
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Show Notes:
@allechall1; Facebook: Alle C. Hall, Writer; site: About Childhood: Answers for Writers, Parents, and Former Children. (allehall.wordpress.com)
Tom Jenks of Narrative Magazine: https://tomjenks.com/about-tom-jenks
Ploughshares: https://www.pshares.org/
Prairie Schooner: https://prairieschooner.unl.edu/
Richard Hugo House: https://hugohouse.org/
Toad Suck Review: https://uca.edu/news/legendary-uca-publication-to-relaunch-as-toad-suck-editions/
Susan Shapiro (https://twitter.com/Susanshapironet), The Forgiveness Tour and The Byline Bible: https://www.susanshapiro.net/index.html
Transcript:
Ariel: Hi there and welcome to Edit Your Darlings, a podcast that tries to take the sting out of editing by talking with darling authors about their experiences. This week I'm joined by Allie C. Hall. Alle is a literary writer and former editor at Vestal Review and JMWW Journal. Her own work placed as a finalist in the 2020 Lascaux Prize, and appears in Dale Peck's Evergreen Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Creative Nonfiction Magazine, Another Chicago Magazine, Brevity’s blog, and elsewhere. My goodness! She is in the process of finding an agent for her first novel: As Far as You Can Go Before You Have to Come Back; which is "a girl and her backpack in Asia" sort of story. Thank you so much for making time to talk with me, Alle.
Alle: You know, it's my good fortune. Thank you.
Ariel: When we talk about editing, that term is just so broad it encompasses everything from revising your own sentences to getting critique from other writers to pulling stories together in anthology, acquiring novels nitpicking grammar and copy editing, just so much more. And you've worked with many different types of editors both freelance and in house, and you're an editor yourself. So, can we start with what type of editor are you, and how has that influenced your own work in literary fiction?
Alle: I come from a background of journalism, so I think my strength and my weakness is that I move swiftly through a fair amount of manuscript, you know, giving detailed notes. But while I'm moving fast, I forget to tell the writer a lot what I like about their work. And I'm very, very detailed. About five writers I've worked with just up and quit during the process around the sixth or seventh draft. But most writers I know really love having their work examined at that level.
Ariel: Yeah, I feel like if I put too much praise into a manuscript—which I love leaving those little comments that are just like, “This line resonated so much with me.” I love getting to do that, but I worry that if I put too many of those in there, not only will it feel like the author won't believe me, even though I'm being authentic, but also they have so many other things to focus on in copy editing, it might be distracting for them. So I'm really jealous of the editors who just get to say nice things.
Alle: I don’t know any editors of success that just saying nice things. It's not our job. The job is to find the problems. It's presenting it in a generous and kind fashion so that the writer can improve. I had one editor who just, the first thing I turned in got like the whole sheet was red pencil. And at one point, a little word was circled around a paragraph and it said, “Bunk.” And I burst into tears.
Ariel: Oh no!
Alle: I was younger, I was in my early thirties, so I didn't have the tough skin I have now.
Ariel: I hear a lot about tough skin, and I still don't want to believe it. I want to believe that like little plumbs of writers can make it without getting stabbed by editors.
Alle: I don't think the editors are out to stab you. But I think, I mean the ones that I've worked with, they're moving fast, they're getting their job done. And that's their job. And depending on the personality, they have the ability to deliver it kindly or not. I don't think they're thinking about the writer, so much as they're thinking about the work. And the other thing, well if you can look at it as “This makes my work better,” or “What is it about this perhaps negative critique that they're really trying to say to me?” This is boring means, time to edit that, you know, time to trim that. This is stupid means, this book is not resonating with me.
Ariel: Oh my gosh, I hope no editor has ever told you that something in your work is stupid.
Alle: I have not had an editor say that but I've had a whole critique group say that to me.
Ariel: That sounds like a bad critique group.
Alle: It was a bad critique group, I left, yeah. I mean it wasn't critique; it was mean. There's just no point in being mean. I'm big on saying that, you know. You can always say something in a kind way, even if you're criticizing somebody.
Ariel: Most of your published works are short stories, but you also have that novel on submission and you're looking forward to that traditional publishing journey. So, how does editing look different when you approach it with stories of different lengths? So working with 400 words versus 400 pages?
Alle: There is no difference in my process. It’s simply a matter of... I would say, bulk. So you know, the whole time, whether you're working on a flash fiction or a novel, you've got to keep the whole thing in your head and all the details so you can change like the factual details and the plot details, but if you change an inference, that might change a detail somewhere else. You just have to keep that in your head, but hopefully by the time you've gotten to that level or that length of time with the manuscript, I mean you have to trust that you wrote it and you know it.
Ariel: You keep it all in your head? You don't have, like, post it notes all over your house or five notebooks...?
Alle: No, I do not. I'm the kind of writer where if I write it down, it takes the punch out of it. I have been known to get up during dinner and say, “I've got to go write this down.” It doesn't happen very often because I've been at this for 30 years, 35 years if you count the journalism. And so, I have good boundaries around this is work time and this is not work time, but I find out when I leave myself cryptic notes on a napkin, you know, in the class way, I have no idea what that means when I go back to it, and all the oomph has gone out of it.
Ariel: I do have a little journal sitting inside my nightstand where if I wake up in the middle of the night with a particularly interesting dream I can jot it down, but those notes are jibberish.
Alle: Yeah and read can’t half of them because there's a coffee stain on them, because it's a napkin.
Ariel: They are delightful in the moment to write them. But when you come back to them later they're only good for laughs.
Alle: Sometimes writing them down secures them in your head. For me, that doesn't work so much, but for some people, that's great. All they have to think is “fingernail polish” and they've got the whole scene.
Ariel: Gosh, I wish I could build an entire scene just off of fingernail polish. That takes a huge leap of imagination.
Alle: Well, I haven't, but maybe I'll put that in the to-do list.
Ariel: You talk about six elements that each of your sentences or scenes have to convey. What are those?
Alle: So I learned this technique from Tom Jenks, who's the editor of Narrative Magazine. I took his workshop. They are dialogue, imagery, theme, point of view, characterization, and plot.
Ariel: That’s so much to ask from a single sentence.
Alle: Well, you’re not going to get all of them going at every sentence at a time, that's just not possible, but two, three, four. If you've got a sentence with one of them, that sentence isn't doing everything it could. If you're getting into the 3-4-4 range, you're doing really well. Five and six, you’re Joyce Carol Oates.
Ariel: Do you have like a check sheet that you're looking at each of your sentences and your dialogue and such and checking off: This one has diction This one has imagery.
Alle: People do that in different ways. I literally go through each line, and I've come up with a color coding system, and I'll make a chart for myself. and I'll say diction is orange. I want them to be very separate colors so they stand out against each other. I use orange, I use red. I use lime green—that's a good one. And I just go through and I say this time I'm looking for diction, and diction isn't necessarily dialogue. It's like the sound of a sentence. It's how a sentence flows and where the sentence is and the words that are emphasized, and how am I going to point out which words are emphasized without italics, you know? How do I set that up, that is diction. And then, when I've done all six elements, I just look at the pages and it's like, Whoa, this one is red heavy. That's narration. Let's get some dialogue in there. Let's get some imagery in there, you know? I can see what's going on very simply. And I really only do that, I did that with a first few drafts, really intently. But then after that it becomes a little more instinctual. And so now I do it when a section is having a hard time.
Ariel: And how do you know when a section is having a hard time?
Alle: Your editor tells you, or you read it and you can't get through it because you're literally stumbling over the words. Read it out loud, and the words. Don't. Come Out! And you're like, this is terrible. The section is not working.
Ariel: Yeah. And when you say editor, is that the editor of the magazine that you've submitted to? Is that the developmental editor that you're working with? What do you mean?
Alle: So I have found that most literary magazines, I've gotten zero editing and some have come back, literally like on a flash piece one kind editor asked, “Can we change this to a period here and start the new sentence and take out the end?” because that was a flash piece in a very literary magazine, and they really valued the writer.
Most literary magazines, they get so many applicants that they don't have to take ones that they need editing. They might, but the ones they take are the ones that are basically good to go. That's been my experience. I'm trying to remember... in Evergreen Review I did get a copy back with more copy edits and a couple of questions like “What does this exactly mean?” but I think if they see too many problems, why would they bother? It's not only that they're not paid to work at that level—they're not paid.
Ariel: Right, that is one of the big issues with literary fiction is that, you know, maybe they're working off grants, but maybe they're working out of their own pockets.
Alle: They are. Yeah, nine times out of ten, they are. At the university level, often they teach and then they get to do the literary magazine on the side. Again when you get to a very high level magazine, for example Ploughshares, which is through a university or Prairie Schooner, they have dedicated funds to that. And then a private magazines such as Narrative, they have to have funds, you know, but yeah they apply for grants and they raise money or they were born lucky, I don't know how that works.
Ariel: So how do you know that your story is ready to be submitted so that it has the best chance of being accepted.
Alle: I rely on my editors, both my, you know, “we’ll swap manuscripts” editors and the one that for my novel I paid. But with a story you know that it's working when you send it out and it gets in, or you send it out and you get good comments on it. You can get like “I like this,” you know, “this didn't work for me because...” What was one? The narrator seemed to be more presenting a documentary and wasn't emotionally invested, then you go back and work. But basically if you start getting it back nine times, ten times, it's not working. And so you sit down again and you go, what's not working here?
One way I address that in my own editing is to go to the very opening paragraph. Look at the first line and ask, “Does it set, immediately, the time, the place, and who?” A really clear, you know, subject verb object sentence is always a great way to open, and do not open until your heart starts beating when you read it. So you'll read, read through and then at one point you go, boo-boom. That's your opening.
Ariel: That's fantastic feedback. I'm thinking about I studied creative writing in college, and I actually got to intern for my school's literary journal which was the Toad Suck Review.
Alle: It sounds excellent!
Ariel: It was fun. I helped the editor-in-chief. He taught me how to use InDesign to lay out the pages, and then he would give them to me for proofing. And I tried not to play with too many commas, but I'm sure that, you know, senior in college, felt really entitled to go ahead and mess with the author's work. Have you ever gone back to that journal and said, “No, I don't want to change that”? And how did you handle that situation?
Alle: Once I remember again with evergreen review which is about... a let’s see, so at the Tai Chi school, they start the form which is the thing you do with their hands—their arms hanging loosely but was shape at their sides. And the copy editor just wrote a note “arms hanging at their sides” and I thought, No, you know what Tai Chi, you're not hanging your arms on your body. Your chi, your energy, is engaged there. And so I just said back in Tai Chi, you actually do hold your arms loosely but with shape at your side, and so he went with that.
Ariel: Yeah, that's such a subtle distinction in meaning.
Alle: Very much so.
Ariel: Can we talk about your experience with sensitivity readers and having your own sensitive work edited? Without going into too much detail because I am one of the humans who really appreciates those trigger warnings. You've written about surviving sexual abuse, which is just such a hard thing to do without retraumatizing yourself. And I'm sure it was even harder to do when you find the notes or markup on those paragraphs that you poured your experiences onto the page. How do you handle getting feedback on such hard topics, without wanting to crawl under a blanket and never come out?
Alle: Well in terms of getting the feedback. I don't know that trying to publish work that comes out of the direct healing process is a good idea. It's too vulnerable, is generally just too emotional, and there's no sense on the part of the reader that there's a narrator in control, there's a writer in control, and you know it feels like running out of the hospital with your butt showing out of the backside of the tie robe. So I didn’t even try to start publishing about my own history of sexual abuse, until I was very, very well into recovery about it. You know I could say the word “incest survivor,” just like that. That's just the data. And at that point, it becomes a story.
Also in fiction, it's not you, it's somebody else and it might be somebody else's story. For example, my novel is first person. And I know people assume that the whole thing is my story and I just changed everybody's hair color. And it's not. It is most definitely not. It's a story.
The other thing is, if you're gonna cringe at editing, you're not going to get very far. You just have to build a tough skin, you know, you just have to say this is the work, and they're here to make it better.
Ariel: Yeah, I do think that you have to have that positivity side on it too, because you can cringe. You can be really hurt by editing, but unless you have those positive experiences with it too, then you won't get far because you won't feel supported and you won't have that reassurance that even though you have some improvements to make you are still writing something good and worthwhile.
Alle: Yeah, your vision for the piece is going to inspire you, and if the vision is murky or you're just not that passionate about it, that will, I think, confirm your ideas about what the editor might be saying. You mentioned crawling into a blanket and not coming out. I've crawled under a couple blankets, and I've stayed under there. You know, I'm not saying I came out of the womb this tough and this ready for editing. It took a while, especially around the novel, but like I said that first critique group hated it. Hated it! Hated the introspection, hated everything about it. And I just figured that was the wrong group for me.
Ariel: Yeah! b
Alle: But it toughened me up. Everybody after that has been a breeze.
Ariel: Yeah. How did you find the new critique group?
Alle: There's a literary nonprofit here in Seattle, called Richard Hugo House.
Ariel: Oh, yes!
Alle: And it's similar to the Loft or Grubstreet which is in Philadelphia.I took some classes there. And there was a board, you know, a notice board, and somebody had put it up, and I just started that one. And they said they were poets, mostly poets. Nice poets are nice, right? They would never say something like this stupid because that's so inarticulate.
Ariel: And then, did you get sensitivity reading for any of the other material, like portraying Asian culture?
Alle: Oh yes, it wasn't a formal sensitivity reading. I was in a different writers group, and I started with my novel that I'm writing now... was writing now, because I got the very clear response to that now is not the time for a perceived white woman (I'm a Jew, but you know we have a lot of advantages of white privilege). But for someone, not from that culture to be writing Asian characters in a world that is drug dealing, this novel is set in the drug dealing worlds of Thailand and Cambodia. These are not nice people, these people that I was portraying. The Asian characters aren't nice, the western characters are not nice. Nobody is nice. Side note: I don't think characters need to be nice; they need to be interesting. And at some level relatable.
But so I've round filed that whole project, a year of work. I got that clear message that this is not a book you should be writing right now.
Ariel: Well I applaud you for hearing that feedback and really taking it to heart. Because you know the the issue of cultural appropriation is so, it's so easy to get it wrong, you know?
Alle: Oh yeah.
Ariel: And it sounds like you're doing the right thing, even though it's super painful to trunk that story.
Alle: Well you know it's always there, and I have faith that we'll figure out a way to make it work. Now in my novel that I'm trying to sell, As Far as You Can Go Before You Have to Come Back, I settled it by having Asian American characters. I was just not comfortable writing Asian characters. I couldn't do it, it just seemed to be so intrusive, and I was terrified, terrified to get it wrong. But some of the characters just came out Asian American, they just walked into this story that way, and they seem to make sense and I felt more comfortable writing that then. I know Asian American people, I've heard them talk, so I hear a certain cadence in a person's voice that relates, I just choose to use that for character. And in the end, people are people.
Ariel: Yes.
Alle: Humans are humans. it's just trying to capture, you know, language and as I said diction because that's critical to how someone expresses themselves, that shows how they think. And that's what you want to convey.
Ariel: So let's move on to the questions that I ask every author I talk to. First, what do you hate about the editing process?
Alle: Nothing. First of all, we're talking about my work! And I am truly one of those writers who either is or has learned to say, like I said, this is making my work better. That's why I asked for their opinion, that's actually why I paid them for their opinion, if you're hiring an editor, so I'm not going to waste my time by the hour arguing with them. I'm going to ask questions: Why do you think that? How do you think I can improve that? Is there a part of the novel that I could pull and use right here that would explain that? Get them editing, you know, that's what you're paid for.
Ariel: Yeah. How have you improved that experience for yourself over the years?
Alle: Yeah, listening and trying to breathe through my resentment. Also using your editors. Like that one group? Bless their hearts, they were not my group. It was a commercial writing group, and it was just the one I could find at that point, and the best thing I could do was find another. So if your editor’s insulting you, yeah, get another editor.
Ariel: What's the most common bit a feedback you receive on your writing?
Alle: Um, in terms of submitting it's just No. That's like, thank you for submitting, dear writer—they don't put your name—and thank you for submitting, we do not find this useful at this time. And when I’m talking with editors and sometimes readers, I get feedback from and I would say what I hear the most is evocative, taut, and affecting, effective.
Ariel: I love that the thing you hear most when you're submitting to journals is no, because that means that you're submitting.
Alle: Now I'm aiming for 150 rejections a year.
Ariel: Oh my goodness that's so many!
Alle: Well I was aiming for 100, but lucky me, I got ‘em. So I last year I hit like 160 rejections or maybe 134. And so I figured on close to closer to 150. You don't want to have your goals be too easy.
Ariel: And so, of those 150 a year of rejections, how many yeses do you expect?
Alle: I've gotten about eight publications a year for the last three years. That's, I mean like 90% literary stuff. This year I had journalism pieces. But also I have eight or ten pieces circulating. It’s not like there's just one piece I'm trying to get in, so that increases your chances. But that happens when you get older, I mean, that means I've been writing and not been publishing. I just have more pieces to publish.
Ariel: And are these all—I know this is way off topic—but are these all free submissions, or are you paying submission fees 150 times?
Alle: I don’t have a hard time paying a $2 or $3 submission fee, because that's what you'd pay to print it out, mail it, buy the envelope, the whole bit, included a self-addressed stamped envelope to get a response, and you save time going to the post office. So I don't have a problem with that. And if yeah, half of them are free, half of them are paid. When you get into the higher level magazines, they can charge, and that's how they make money.
When you get to paying $25 to enter, I definitely pause at that. What I do is, I set myself a budget $200 a year to submit. Two or $3 goes a long way when you have $200 to play with.
Ariel: Yeah, there's privilege in that but you make a really good point about how it would be, you know, the cost of printing it out and including a self-addressed stamped envelope, plus all of your time.
Alle: Your time! The secretarial time that used to take, and then you'd never hear back, even if you sent a self-addressed stamped envelope and the number of times you'd actually hear back was so small because they'd have to write out it, stick it in the envelope, they'd have to mail it, you know when they if they have hundreds or even thousands of submissions a year, it's not going to happen. This way, I hear back upwards of 99% of the time.
Ariel: Do you have any last words of advice?
Alle: Yes, never give up. You're in a hard field, it's competitive. It's privileged , there are gatekeepers that have a political perspective. And the only thing you can do, especially around the editing, is just settle in and work harder. You know, and I think also believe in your vision, even if you can't believe in yourself yet, if you believe this needs to be in the world and I have a vision for it, just pursue that. It'll make you a happier person.
Ariel: I love that. So the last portion of our program is a hot and wholesome gossip corner.
Alle: Oh my!
Ariel: I know! Are there any other writers or creators doing something you're excited about? Any shoutouts you want to give or people you want to lift up?
Alle: Yeah. Susan Shapiro, she just published a book called The Forgiveness Tour. I just read it. And I think it's, man, she can move a sentence right along. Her previous book called the Byline Bible, and it's how to get published in all the big publications, New York Times, Vogue. And it's because she has years of work teaching that. And she knows of what she speaks. So this is her memoir. Read that, it gives you... from a selfish reason, you get perspective on the industry but just, it's a good story and she tells it well.
Ariel: If you want to check out Ali's work, go to her website at allihall.wordpress.com, and follow her on Twitter as at @allechall1. Thank you again for talking with me, Alle!
Alle: Thank you so much. This was really great, and I appreciate the privilege of getting to talk about my work.
Ariel: If you loved this episode of Edit Your Darlings, why not share it with a friend? Remember to rate and review on Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast fix. For show notes go to edityourdarlings. com, follow us on Twitter and Instagram @editpodcast, or I'm @arielcopyedits. Until next week, cheers!