This week, I’m joined by literary writer Hilary Zaid. Hilary explores the mindset she brings to self-editing, shares how working with professional editors has differed from the critiques she received in writing conferences and workshops, and provides guidance for writers who need to make big, big cuts. Plus we talk about what makes our lawyer besties are so dang sweet.
Music: Harlequin by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3858-harlequin
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Show Notes:
@hilaryzaid
paperiswhite.com
tabula rasa=clean slate
Dennis Schmitz, Poet Laureate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Schmitz
Raymond Carver: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Carver
Anna Lena Phillips Bell at Ecotone: https://annalenaphillipsbell.net/
Alexander Chee: https://www.alexanderchee.net/bio
Jess Walter: https://www.jesswalter.com/
Steve Yarbrough: https://www.steveyarbrough.net/
Jill McCorkle: https://www.jillmccorkle.com/
Tin House
Sewanee
Utne Reader
Yona Zeldis McDonough: http://yonazeldismcdonough.ipage.com/
“Even in Dreams, She Leaves Me Every Time”: https://lilith.org/articles/even-in-dreams-she-leaves-me-every-time/
Morgan Parker: http://www.morgan-parker.com/
Day One
New York Times Article about the Bad Art Friend: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/magazine/dorland-v-larson.html
Squaw Valley
Rob Spillman, Tin House editor: https://tinhouse.com/author/rob-spillman/
YZ Chin, Edge Case: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/55782263
AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs): https://www.awpwriter.org/
Pat Dobie, Fiction Editing: A Writer’s Roadmap: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/49318090
Sarah Cypher, freelance editor and writer of the forthcoming The Skin and Its Girl: https://www.sarahcypher.com/
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.
I'm Ariel Anderson, and today I'm joined by Hilary Zaid. Hillary has been—oh my gosh, okay: a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers' Conference, a James D. Houston Fellow at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and two-time attendee of Tin House Writers' Workshop, with short fiction in Ecotone, Day One, The Southwest Review, The Utne Reader, and other publications, and has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. My goodness!
Hilary’s debut novel PAPER IS WHITE (out from Bywater in 2018) was a Foreword Indies silver medalist and the winner of the Independent Publishers' Book Awards (IPPY) in LGBT+ Fiction.
Thank you so much for making time to talk with me, Hilary.
Hilary: Thank you so much for inviting me. It's a real pleasure.
Ariel: Let's start off with your self-editing process. How do you take an objective look at your own words on the page and decide where to make changes, because, like, isn’t your first draft just kind of always perfect?
Hilary: Sure, just like everyone's is. It's so difficult. This is the most difficult thing, to see something very familiar with fresh eyes, and I heard a story once that really resonates with me and that is of a Russian explorer slash doctor who went on a trip to the Antarctic in the 1960s and found that he was having some terrible pain in his abdomen. And in fact, he diagnosed himself with appendicitis. But because he was in the Antarctic and there was no way to get planes or ships in or out, he ended up having to operate on himself. He coached a couple other of his expedition mates in holding his tools and things, but he essentially had to slice open his abdomen, take out his own guts, stay conscious, and repair it himself. And honestly, sometimes that's what this process feels like, if you're intent on doing it yourself, which as a kind of stubborn person, I have been.
Ariel: You know, no big deal. Anybody could do that and stay conscious.
Hilary: And he lived! That's the amazing thing. He survived, as hopefully we all do. With my first novel, it was extremely long, it was 379,000 words.
Ariel: Ooh! Oohoo!
Hilary: And needed to become closer to 90,000 words.
Ariel: Yeah.
Hilary: And you know, when you're in the editing, writing and editing process, you get to these moments where you just can't bear to look at it and you know something's wrong. And I think that's nature telling us “you should step away from this project right now.”
But you know, I had all kinds of notions like, I would just sort of take out the unnecessary little words. And of course, that's not a way to cut out the majority of a novel. I think always when you're editing you have to have one objective each time you go through instead of trying to fix everything. So it might be focusing on reducing the number of characters, either by cutting characters or combining characters, and then each time something new. But it's the hardest thing there is to see your own work with fresh eyes.
Ariel: Yeah, and then what did you do with those other 300,000 words?
Hilary: Well, I know that some feel that with a reduction of that size, you might want to keep the cut-outs for some future project. And honestly, I just dumped them.
Of course, I was always starting with new documents, new digital documents, so that I felt like I wasn't losing anything. But really—especially with the first novel where you're, I think, typically kind of closer to the material—I just let it all go.
Ariel: Oh, like, deleted, deleted, it's gone forever?
Hilary: The files still exist, but I don't anticipate using those characters or those scenes or anything else in any future project. I feel like that's the past.
Ariel: It's also, when you're writing that profusely, it's all practice. It all goes into the final project, even if it's not those exact words.
Hilary: Right. I ultimately felt like I had a much rounder sense of my characters, even smaller characters, because I knew so much about them, even if those things didn't wind up in the novel.
Ariel: And then how did you keep it distinct in your mind so that you weren't assuming that readers knew something that actually got deleted?
Hilary: I'm not sure if that was a big preoccupation, I think because I just kept reading it and working through it. I had a friend who, in the early stages of editing actually literally sat next to me as we read through things slowly. This was one the taking out incidental words was the strategy. And she had just this uncanny ability to remember every single version of the manuscript in a way that I didn't. It was sort of tabula rasa in a way every time. Maybe that's the effect of all the trauma of revision. Feel like you're, you know, the past is over, you're moving forward and not making assumptions.
Ariel: Everybody needs a friend like this one. How did you find them?
Hilary: You know, it's funny. We're good friends from a non-writing context, but her father was—my friend's name is Anne—and her father, Dennis Schmitz, was at one time the Poet Laureate of California and was a mentor to Raymond Carver. So when Anne was growing up, sometimes a knock at the door in the night meant that Raymond Carver had just showed up and was in need of counsel and support.
So she kind of felt like she was born into that role. She's actually a lawyer, but she was a very patient companion and a person who understood that writers just sometimes need special handling.
Ariel: Yeah, my best friend is a lawyer and I do recommend that all of us word-ish people get lawyer best friends because they are—for one, they're super smart. And for two, they know words. They have to do words.
Hilary: Yeah, absolutely.
Ariel: You went to these prestigious writers conferences and workshops, and I'm curious how the critique you received there compared to the notes that you've gotten from, say, your agent or professional editors. Which process do you prefer, and which one has been more transformative for you?
Hilary: I think it's a really different situation. And I've had some really good edits, like Anna Lena Phillips Bell at Ecotone and her team are fabulous. And the kind of edits that you get on a story when somebody is really paying attention to it and paying attention to it with an eye to publication can be so insightful and elevating and specific, you know, like a true collaboration.
I think in a workshop setting, it's very different because one, ideally, you're workshopping something that's very much in progress. Otherwise, you know, why take it with you to the workshop? And also, it's like a chorus, right?
I think when I've gone to workshops, I kind of listened for big-picture comments, just because individuals comments can be so subjective. But also I really listen for whose version of events do I like? And, you know, I think I go to a writers workshop trying to make new writer friends. And so the people whose vision resonates with me, I might then maintain a friendship with them over a long period of time in which we exchange work.
And I think, for the specifics of workshopping a manuscript, that's more valuable. Of course, in a workshop you also get the feedback of the instructor and I've worked with Alexander Chee and Jess Walter, Steve Yarbrough, Jill McCorkle, and that's fabulous too.
I think a group gives a good sense of the way the wind is blowing, and then all the very specific comments on a manuscript that's not finished, I don't worry about them too terribly much. And in fact, when I came back from Sewanee, I kept this really thick stack of all the marked pages for a long time and then one day I was sheet mulching my backyard and I threw ‘em in! And so they're kind of incorporated into the earth, and it felt like it's as good a metaphor as any for what that process is about.
Ariel: Mmm, something can grow there.
Hilary: Yeah, exactly. And also it kills stuff. I mean, that's what sheet mulching is, right? You're killing the weeds and hopefully making room for something else.
Ariel: Yeah. Did any critiques stand out in your mind as particularly poignant or maybe particularly awful?
Hilary: It's hard to say. I never workshopped my first novel, because I just wasn't going to workshops at that time. So I think I felt encouraged, generally. There's a project that I'm trying to agent now, and there was a lot of enthusiasm for it. Both at Tin House and Sewanee. So yeah, I think I… I just prefer to kind of take the happy bits and leave the rest as we always have to do in a certain way when we're getting critique unless we're hearing something over and over again, which hopefully we already know and are just in denial about.
Ariel: Denial is a very important part of the writing process.
Hilary: Yeah.
Ariel: So then, in addition to your book, you also have short fiction out in several publications, and you… you touched on this just a little bit. I wondered if those stories were always taken as-is, like printed exactly as you sent them in, or were there back-and-forths with the journal editors?
Hilary: I would say for the best publications there were back-and-forths. Not huge overall structural things but detailed things, and I think, always that was for the best.
I mentioned the Ecotone piece. I had a piece in Lilith that was ultimately reprinted in the Utne Reader, and I remember kind of wrangling. That piece was taken within hours of my submission. Yona Zeldis McDonough was the editor who selected it, and there was definitely a sense of a strong editorial team there. And I remember kind of wrangling over the title, and I don't even remember what my original title was. In the end it became “Even in Dreams, She Leaves Me Every Time,” and it's a piece…a reflection on a dream about a grandmother.
I just remember Yona having the conversation with me about the title, and it was clear their editorial team had had a discussion about the title. And I relented, and as I said, now, I don't even remember what my original title was. I feel like it was the right call. And, you know, it's almost like, when you're working with a good editor, it's such a gift and it's, it just lifts you up and makes you feel like, you know, you're part of a team that's all moving towards the same objective, and they're making you look good, and that's just so fabulous.
Ariel: “It’s such a gift.” I love that.
Hilary: Morgan Parker was another editor I worked with. She was the editor of Day One when she selected a story of mine.
Ariel: So, let's move to the questions that I ask every author I talk to. First, what do you hate about the editing process?
Hilary: You know, I actually really love the editing process. One of the things I do every fall is I run an equity-based volunteer effort at our local high school for the college-bound seniors to help work on their college application essays.
Ariel: Ooh!
Hilary: Of course it's not my own work, but I love that process of seeing what's not there and what could be there. I'd say with my own work, the frustration is just not being able to see it in that same way with that same objective outside vision, but I do find it really fun. It's… starting with something on the page is so much easier than starting with nothing on the page.
Ariel: Yes. That's why overwriting is such a valuable skill.
Hilary: Yeah.
Ariel: What's the most common bit of feedback you receive on your writing? Oh, gosh, I don't know what's common. I would say probably that things are too long. The overwriting is a bit of a habit. and the project that I'm trying to get out now, querying now, started out at a very modest, I thought, like 170,000 words, which I knew, you know, again, it's too long, so I've cut it down to 100,000. And it's hard to see the way to, say, 90.
But I'd say at length. At the very beginning with my very, very long first novel, Paper Is White, there were people who said, “This is really good, but you know, you have no sense of plot, right?”
Ariel: Ooh!
Hilary: And that was a bit of a stinger. And I guess, you know, I'm a writer of literary fiction, and I actually love reading novels that don't particularly have a plot, so I'm not sure that was a terrible thing to say.
But in college, I studied poetry, and in particular, I studied lyric poetry. And I realized that a lyric poem is about a moment and it resolves, you know, in the moment, and I think I had a tendency to wrap my chapters in that same way of closing a lyric poem. And I didn't really realize like, you actually don't want closure at the end of the chapter. You want to be trapezing to the next chapter or, you know, leaving something unsettled. So that was something I had to come around to, not having really studied the novel but study lyric poetry.
Ariel: Especially over the last five years, I have really grown my knowledge of what conflict and tension means in writing and how that drives the pace of a work. It's really fascinating stuff.
Hilary: Yeah, speaking of conflict and tension, I think I have a tendency to… I don't want to exactly say withhold because it's not deliberate. But I think I just naturally don't pour as much of the, you know, internal thoughts of the characters out, and maybe it's a personal thing that I'm a little reserved, and so it's a little reserved in the writing, and it prevents some of that tension from growing.
Ariel: Yeah, and then so you address that by adding more internal thoughts?
Hilary: Well, it's interesting, you’d think with all those words on the page, that's what would be on there, but not always. And again, that's a place where you just need that checking of another reader to, you know, like, am I asking a reader to be a mind reader, which none of us I think, want to do?
Ariel: Yeah. Do you have any last words of advice?
Hilary: Oh, that's tough. Just keep going and have good—oh, this is so loaded this week after the New York Times article.
Ariel: Nnn! [Aside] We recorded this in October of 2021. The New York Times has recently published “Who Is the Bad Art Friend,” and I’ve got a link to that article in our show notes.
Hilary: Have good literary friends. By which I mean, people you trust to have a perspective, people you can root for and who root for you.
Ariel: Yeah. And you have collected yours, mostly through the conferences and through, like, you mentioned, your lawyer friend…?
Hilary: Yeah. And I'm a little unusual. Although I have a graduate degree, I did not go into teaching, so I'm not part of a writers program. I think a lot of creative writers who work in academia, it's just a natural networking setting. So for me the writer's conference, the first one, I went to was Squaw Valley, and that was revelatory, because suddenly you're with all these people who are interested in the same thing that you are and the same particular fixations. And so for me, it's been invaluable, going to writers conferences as a way to connect with other writers. Probably the most important outcome of those types of conferences, more than anything else.
Ariel: Yeah. And I noticed that you don't mention anything about the fact that some of those writers are your competition.
Hilary: Oh, I don't think about it that way at all.
Ariel: Yes!
Hilary: I mean, that's so abstract. There's so many writers. And, you know, are we writing in the same space? Probably not. I think that's a really hard way to go through this business, to see other writers as your competition. It can be self-sabotaging to see it that way.
I remember going to Tin House and Rob Spillman saying something like, you know, rise up with your friends, that you're sort of there to connect and like, boost each other up. And gosh, I mean, surely we all, as they say, compare and despair sometimes. But it's… as a long-term strategy, it’s not good. It's such a difficult business, you know, so difficult.
Ariel: Yeah. So you've really got to surround yourself by people that you can trust.
Hilary: Yes, exactly.
Ariel: Well, that is an excellent segue into the last portion of our program, which is a Hot and Wholesome Gossip Corner! Are there any other writers or creators doing something you're excited about? Any shoutouts you want to give or people who want to lift up?
Hilary: Oh, wow. So great question. And there are just so many.
I just finished YZ Chin's Edge Case, which I really enjoyed. YZ and I were on a panel together at AWP on second-generation writing, meaning like, you know, the first generation say, of queer writing was coming-out stories and what comes after that, or the first generation of immigrant stories was about, you know, how do you assimilate into a culture and what's beyond that? That was just really fun, to read her second novel, which came out recently.
I also wanted to give a shout out to my friend Pat Dobie, president of the Pat Dobie Club, which anyone named Pat Dobie can join. And Pat is the author of an editing guide. So Pat, and I met at the Tin House Writers Workshop. She's a fabulous person. She works as a freelance editor. Just a super insightful person, fun, creative, and a real supporter to the people she works with. She's read and given me feedback on my work, and she published a guide for people who are interested in looking at their own work with an editorial eye, and I highly recommend it. It's on my shelf, which is in another room. But you might have the title in front of you, Ariel.
Ariel: You mentioned Fiction Editing: A Writer's Roadmap.
Hilary: That’s it. Big shout out to Pat, and Pat, actually, before she started her editorial practice, talk to a writer I know, Sarah Cypher. And Sarah has been a tremendous friend to writers for a very long time. And her first novel is coming out, I think, in 2022. She lifted so many writers to that place of publication and I'm super excited about her book, and it’s about somebody who was born with blue skin and as a Lebanese storyteller, so big kudos to Sarah, a book to look out for.
Ariel: Well, if you want to check out Hilary's work, go to PaperIsWhite.com, order Paper Is White from your favorite indie store, or follow Hillary on Twitter is @HilaryZaid. Thank you again for talking with me, Hillary, this has been great.
Hilary: Thank you so much, Ariel. I really appreciate it, and what a fun opportunity.
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!