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Episode 46—Editor Hattie Fletcher on Seeing Rhythms and the Power of Reading Slush
144 Plays8 years ago
Creative Nonfiction's managing editor Hattie Fletcher sat down to talk about the art of editing.
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Transcript
Introduction to HackdackCNF
00:00:00
Speaker
Attention, CNFers. Riff.
Meet Hattie Fletcher
00:00:23
Speaker
So for this episode of HackdackCNF, the podcast where I speak with artists about creating works of nonfiction, I invited Hattie Fletcher on the show. She's the managing editor for Creative Nonfiction, the quarterly literary magazine based out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
00:00:46
Speaker
It's the flagship journal of the genre, if you want my opinion, and it always lights up my mailbox every three months or so.
From Classics to Nonfiction
00:00:54
Speaker
Hattie grew up in Cleveland and was drawn to the classics, especially Latin, so much so that she majored in Latin in college and went on to become a middle school Latin teacher.
00:01:06
Speaker
After several years, she entered a Creative Nonfiction MFA program in Pittsburgh, where she eventually took up shop in the offices of Creative Nonfiction as its managing editor. So, without further ado, let's just, um, let's go listen to Hattie talk shop.
00:01:23
Speaker
At what point did you want to make that transition from being the middle school Latin teacher to something else and to sort of like to go to grad school and then pursue a more broad brush creative non-fiction type pursuit? Yeah, that's a great question. So I was teaching in Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh has
00:01:46
Speaker
You know, the Creative Nonfiction Program at the University of Pittsburgh was one of the first MFA programs, maybe the first full, you know, full, I don't know what you would call that one. So it's the opposite of like a low res program. Is there a word for that even? Yeah. It's the MFA program here at Pitt, which we founded
00:02:10
Speaker
a long time ago now, had, I was sort of aware of and I had started, I was doing a lot of reading and kind of reading more broadly and became aware of this kind of non-fiction that had stories and everything. And so it was a little bit of a whim, I guess, that I applied. I've always enjoyed writing. I've always liked words.
00:02:33
Speaker
And actually my husband was sort of like, you know, there's this program you could you could apply to that He was an English major and thought about being a writer and so I did that and I really enjoyed, you know being out of the middle school classroom and sort of having an opportunity after a while out of school to read and talk about words and Writing and that was great. I think I enjoyed it a lot more than I would have if I had gone to grad school right after undergrad and
00:03:03
Speaker
But I never really, I technically didn't finish my MFA, so I wasn't so interested in the actual writing the book part. I didn't do that, so.
Influences in Nonfiction
00:03:15
Speaker
What was the draw, or maybe some influential essayists and authors in the creative non-fiction genre that you found very magnetic and exciting to study and learn from?
00:03:30
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I love Annie Dillard and John McPhee, you know, so sort of the I think creative nonfiction, the magazine skews takes a slightly more journalistic view of creative nonfiction than some other people would define it these days. And that's definitely sort of the angle I came at it from. So I suppose it's it's lucky that that's the program that was here. But I started from that point, I think of
00:03:58
Speaker
more research oriented, you know, when I was doing grad school, it was sort of around the time that all those books, you know, the like little thing, big thing books, so it was like the color mauve salt, all those books were sort of starting to come out. And I've always thought those were super interesting ways to
00:04:17
Speaker
you know, ways to learn about the world. So, collecting stories about something that gives you an opportunity to talk about history and current events and all those things. And then the memoir side of things too is obviously really compelling. So, you know, Annie Dillard's An American Childhood was written about the neighborhoods kind of right around where I live. So that was, I remember that being a big find and really enjoying that a lot. That was, I suppose,
00:04:48
Speaker
was kind of one of those books early on that I read, and I was like, oh, this, this is great. And how do you know, as a reader, when a writer is struck that a really good balance between the reportage and the personal stuff, how does that feel like to you when you're reading that stuff?
Balancing Reportage and Personal Storytelling
00:05:06
Speaker
And how would you characterize that balance? Oh, that balance. That balance is such the challenge, isn't it? That's the hard part.
00:05:18
Speaker
For me, I think when I look at a lot of writing in a lot of different ways, I think about it. I'm kind of attuned to the larger rhythms in writing. And by that, I don't necessarily mean kind of like poetic rhythms, but almost
00:05:37
Speaker
almost like mathematical kind of rhythms. So actually I just posted on the Creative Nonfiction Facebook wall, there was a story about someone who was plotting the rhythms of, it was fiction actually, but it was sort of graphing out word lengths in sentences and sort of the flows of things. And so there are all these charts and graphs kind of looking at
00:06:00
Speaker
plots and emotions and how stories get built over time and i suppose you could look at that and say you know i suppose there's a generator who would look at that and say that's really depressing that there's kind of a formula.
00:06:13
Speaker
Um, I don't necessarily feel that way. I think, uh, I think it's fascinating that there's that formula that it's sort of almost an intuitive thing, you know, sort of in the same way that if you look at music theory, right, there are sort of certain, certain things that music most of the time does, um, you know, and almost.
00:06:32
Speaker
not necessarily rules, but sort of those rules about how if something starts in a certain key, it's supposed to classically end in that same key. And I think a lot of those same rhythms, we don't necessarily always break them down into charts in writing, but I think they're there. And I think something sort of deep in us as readers is a little bit attuned to that the same way that we are as listeners, even if we're not kind of formally sitting down and charting it out. So I think that balances
00:07:00
Speaker
You know, it's really hard to say exactly what it is. I think it's easier to see it when it's not there, but that could just be my critical editor side speaking, because I get to be critical that way. Isn't it kind of liberating in a sense that there are these sort of boundaries or rules, but how you color within those boundaries is where the real creativity comes from. Do you find that there
Editing Techniques and Rhythm
00:07:27
Speaker
is some sort of formula
00:07:30
Speaker
Actually kind of kind of helps things because there's an internal Rhythm it's like a song or something that you just kind of it has its own natural frequency But you can kind of play within that boundary and then therein lies like something that can really resonate with a reader I don't know does that strike does that make any sense to you?
00:07:51
Speaker
I think it does. And that's actually a sort of thing I do as an editor a lot. So I'll leave kind of comments and pieces where sometimes in some pieces I'll even just make things up. Like something's missing. You know, it's kind of there's a spot where there's a transition and I'll write kind of in my editorial notes in the margins.
00:08:10
Speaker
I'll write something like you know it seems like here you need to skip to some bigger picture thing and sometimes I'll make up facts or and I'll say I'm making this up obviously you know and I'll make up some facts or I'll make up some backstory because it's always the actual what goes there I don't know what goes there that's the part the writer does
00:08:32
Speaker
But as an editor I can say you need something that is going to be this sort of thing goes here and maybe it's a flashback in time or maybe it's some research element or maybe it's something else. And then I think one of the great things, one of the things that I think is really fun about editing is seeing what comes back then because I really don't know what goes there because it's always a part of the story that hasn't made it to the page.
00:08:58
Speaker
And i would say probably ninety percent of the time what comes back is amazing and delightful and a wonderful surprise but usually kind of.
00:09:11
Speaker
add something to the story, but I wouldn't have known what it was before it came back. But I think seeing those rhythms is kind of one of the things that an editor can do. And I think it's partly just from reading a lot. It's partly from sort of working with stories a lot, but that's always fun for me to ask that question and then see what comes back.
00:09:32
Speaker
How did you cultivate that I to see the negative space like the dark matter of an essay like you know that there's something there's something that like you said there's something there. I don't think it's anything I cultivated consciously really I think it's just.
00:09:54
Speaker
I mean, it's partly a process of working with stories and working with writers. You know, at this point, I've been doing this for 12 years. I do most, not all, I do less of it now than I did at the beginning, but I do a lot of the editorial work with the essays. So, you know, if we have four issues a year and there are, say, 10 pieces in an issue, that adds up pretty quickly over the years.
00:10:19
Speaker
Yeah, it's funny. It's like how astronomers or something, they know where a black hole is based. They can't see the black hole, but they see how everything is behaving around the black hole. So it's like you're able
The Art of Editing Over Writing
00:10:32
Speaker
to identify that negative space. Everything's orbiting around something that we can't see, but make us see that thing.
00:10:41
Speaker
I think it's just pattern recognition, too, probably over time. Right, right. Again, not to be reductive. That sounds kind of lame, but I don't think it is, really. Yeah. And what appeals to you about, say, that
00:10:56
Speaker
the overarching, the editing eye versus the writer eye. Why do you feel, where's your comfort on the editing side? Where's the appeal for that and why were you drawn to that? I think looking back actually, I spent a lot of time in grad school in workshops sort of trying to
00:11:26
Speaker
You know, workshops can be really frustrating, right? Because you, as a writer, you kind of slave over this piece, and you think you know what you're doing, or you're not sure exactly what you're doing, but you think you're headed in a direction, and you throw this piece on the table.
00:11:45
Speaker
And in my experience, at least with with nonfiction, you know, there's a sizable part of the comments that you get and questions that you get where or I don't know, maybe it was just my MFA program. I don't think it was, though, where where people are sort of like, well, this is great. This thing you wrote here is great, but.
00:12:04
Speaker
there's this character Bob on page four who there's three sentences about him but he seems like a quirky guy and I'm wondering if really you don't need five pages about Bob you know I don't know is that typical I think that's probably typical people people want to hear the story that isn't there and I think my comments and workshops ended up
00:12:30
Speaker
uh tended to be a lot more well but that isn't the story that the writer is trying to tell like bob i don't think bob is the main character because bob is just this guy with these three sentences you know here at the here in the bottom of page five um and so i think in grad school i actually spent a lot of time trying to kind of
00:12:52
Speaker
get at what it was writers were trying to do with their stories and then trying to make the stories be the best form of that as opposed to kind of I think there's a different kind of editing probably that's a little bit more developmental that is more more involves kind of saying no no no that's not actually your story at all but I think because of the nature of the kind of work we do at Creative Nonfiction which is much more
00:13:22
Speaker
you know generally it follows the model of people send a piece and you kind of more or less like that piece generally and then you kind of make it work you know I mean we published you recently right and so you know it's kind of like you say here's the story the story is great and then you know in your case I think there were some paragraphs at the beginning and it was sort of like well that's maybe not the beginning of your story but it wasn't sort of like
00:13:46
Speaker
Well here's your whole story that's about middle school but what if it was actually a story about college you know like that's a whole different kind of editing. And so in retrospect I spent a lot of time in grad school trying to kind of deal with what was on the page and see what was the best form of
00:14:06
Speaker
what was there as opposed to a lot more of that foundational stuff which maybe is actually more appropriate to grad school but where you're kind of helping people try to figure out where their story actually is. I don't know, does that make sense at all?
00:14:22
Speaker
Yeah, it definitely does and I think the best editors, as are the best coaches or something, they see the unique talent and what the person is trying to accomplish, like you were saying, and not try to make it
00:14:42
Speaker
the editors peace through the writer's voice like they're actually trying to like you said instead of learning more about bob even though the writer doesn't want to talk about bob you're like well what it what you're trying to get into the writer's headspace and help them achieve the best possible peace and you just kind of step back and i think that's uh... that's like one of the more noble and the hard things that the great editors do is that they're able to
00:15:10
Speaker
and just kind of work off in the background a little bit and make the best possible piece for that writer and ultimately for the publication and writ large. So yeah, it makes perfect sense. Yeah, that was actually one of the nicest, maybe one of the nicest compliments I've ever gotten from a writer. She said she had worked with a lot of editors, but no one had made her sound as much like herself as I had. And I was like, okay, I'll take that. I think that's what I'm going for.
00:15:40
Speaker
And when did you start it? You said 12, 13 years ago you started Creative Nonfiction? Yeah. Was that roughly? Yeah, somewhere in there. She has some five? 2004? I don't even remember. That's awful, isn't it? So what were the circumstances that brought you to the magazine?
00:15:59
Speaker
So Creative Nonfiction, in the time I've been there, we've kind of grown a lot as an organization, but we're still pretty tiny. We're pretty small. We're an independent nonprofit, so we don't have, unlike a lot of literary magazines of our size, I think we don't really have an institutional affiliation, so we don't have
00:16:19
Speaker
We have now a lot of readers, but we don't have kind of a huge, you know, it's not like there's, we have a graduate school full of students reading for the magazine or anything like that. And so I had done some volunteer reading when I was in grad school and I did grad school while I was still teaching. And then I kind of took some time off to try to finish up my MFA. And around that time, the managing editor before me just
00:16:48
Speaker
Messman, now her last name's Griffith, who's a great writer and is teaching for our online classes, moved away and Lee kind of called one day and he was throwing a festival in Pittsburgh on top of the publications and said, I thought you might be able to help. I was like, that's a really vague job description. But that's kind of as specific as it ever got, actually. And that was, you know, 13 years ago, 12
Evolution of Creative Nonfiction Magazine
00:17:16
Speaker
years ago, whatever. So here we are.
00:17:18
Speaker
And in the meantime, it's kind of grown. You know, the magazine's changed. We've redesigned it over the years. We just added this new monthly magazine. We've got these online classes. We do an annual conference. And so it's all kind of just gradually piled up over the years.
00:17:35
Speaker
What has the experience been like, seeing it go from where it was when you started at the journal? I think you would probably call it more a literary journal at the start. Now it seems to have graduated more to your classic magazine. So what has it been like to be working there over the course of that transition and seeing that kind of growth?
00:17:58
Speaker
Yeah, it's been good. I mean, it's scary sometimes because change is scary sometimes, right? So, you know, there have been times when it's been a little unclear whether a given change would work or not. They feel kind of like leaps of faith. I think some of the changes we've made really have been in reaction to other changes in the world. So certainly in the time I've been at Creative Nonfiction,
00:18:24
Speaker
It's gotten easier in a lot of ways to publish a magazine. It's gotten harder to publish a magazine in the sense that because it is now easier, on a design front, it's easier. Or at least it's more, I don't know if it's easier. It's more user-friendly. The technology is certainly easier. To lay something out in design is a lot easier than in Quark or whatever.
00:18:55
Speaker
So the bar to entry that way is lower. But I think the flip side of that is that that raises the bar somewhat. So when we redesigned the magazine, part of it was in reaction to understanding challenges facing print. And so if you're familiar with the older creative nonfiction, it was a lot more of a traditional journal. It was really not a very
00:19:22
Speaker
physically attractive publication, which I think, you know, we would still say the substance is more important than the style. But I think in this day and age, if you want to make a print object, there's sort of an obligation to make a nice print object. And so when we redesigned, we really tried to kind of make the magazine something that people would want to keep on their shelf and would sort of value and it would be nice to hold and touch and, you know, sort of all those
00:19:51
Speaker
tactile things having to do with reading because it's not just the substance of it, it's the experience of reading in print. And that I think was a response to a certain moment in time when e-readers were sort of on the rise and everyone was talking about how print was dead and at the same time the economy crashed and sort of print publishing crashed and so we happened to lock in a little bit
00:20:19
Speaker
To being stable enough to be able to carry that off at a certain time and and after we redesigned the magazine actually Which I guess was 2010 But our subscriber numbers doubled
00:20:33
Speaker
in the first six months after that. So that was kind of at a time when publishing as a whole was not doing really well, but I don't know that that was the result of a plan necessarily that just happened to be on our timetable where we ended up at that time. But yeah, it's gone through kind of a lot of changes and now we're trying to figure out how much can we keep growing and what new direction do we have to keep going into to sort of keep it all afloat.
00:21:01
Speaker
How important- But it's still a tiny organization and everyone still has a part-time job, so we act bigger than we are, I think, sometimes.
Print Magazines in the Digital Age
00:21:11
Speaker
Well, how important was it for you to remain in print and not to have this online division or be strictly online, even though you do share some of the essays online? Most in the bulk of the issue is strictly in print, so how important was it to maintain that legacy?
00:21:33
Speaker
I think it's pretty important to us for a number of reasons. I think one, we are lucky enough to have a fair percentage of readers who do value that tactile experience. I think in publishing generally, I think people are paying more attention to that. So there are kind of studies about the importance that we read differently in print than online.
00:22:02
Speaker
I think they've done kind of studies about kids and textbooks and it's a different kind of reading that we do online. And so the things that we share broadly are either shorter pieces or are kind of the more informational craft pieces that we know will be useful to find an audience online. The longer pieces that we publish, I think
00:22:22
Speaker
Our site is not a great place necessarily to read long form. I'm not sure that any site is actually a great place to read long form. I just I don't think there's the same
00:22:34
Speaker
I think except for probably rare readers. I don't think mostly people pay the same attention. I know I'm guilty of, you know, every once in a while, have you ever had that experience where you start to read like a New York Times Magazine cover story online and you're reading and they're great, right? Because they're always great. They're these great narratives and then you become kind of aware as you're scrolling. You're like, wait a minute, how much scrolling is involved in the story? You know, and you look over at that sidebar and you're like, oh man, this,
00:23:04
Speaker
This is one of those really long stories and I it's not I don't enjoy that experience of reading that way and I think a lot of people don't I think people abandon stories and so I think kind of deliberately you know a lot of our stories which also tend to be kind of more nuanced they're not very clickbaity they're not
00:23:26
Speaker
A lot of them sound more than one note. And I'm just not sure that that experience even, I think the kinds of stories that spread online also don't tend to be kind of 6,000 word long nuanced personal stories that involve an element of research.
00:23:45
Speaker
So I think print is a good vehicle for us still. And I think that's where kind of the impetus for our new magazine, True Story, came from, too, is that there aren't a lot of places for kind of these mid-length pieces. So we publish things that are between broadly five and 10,000 words. There's not a lot of places where you can publish a really good, thoughtful 10,000-word essay. So we were trying to kind of fill a gap for that. But that's also print, mostly.
00:24:14
Speaker
So what are some maybe wrong impressions that writers have of editors? Oh, wrong impressions? Hmm. I mean, I think generally, well, I think sometimes, you know, it's easy on the submissions game, especially, to get kind of caught up in this notion that
00:24:45
Speaker
You know, editors, I guess, kind of wield power. Most editors I know aren't really on power trips necessarily. You know, I think sometimes writers are like, oh, editors just love saying no. I don't know anyone who loves saying no.
00:25:04
Speaker
I mean, the best part of my job is the day, you know, and it comes mostly like four times a year when I get to say yes to a bunch of people. It's great. I love it. I wish I could do that every day. It's really fun and gratifying.
Editors as Writers Too
00:25:16
Speaker
Saying no is much harder.
00:25:20
Speaker
And I think a lot of times people take it really personally. And it's not a personal thing. And so I think, I guess one misperception, I guess you could boil that all down to people forget that editors are people too. A lot of editors are also writers who are out there submitting their own work and going through that same process. And so I think that's kind of a common misconception.
00:25:46
Speaker
Yeah, maybe writers could probably get a better sense of what editors are going through if they in fact do some of this kind of editing and calling and reading through slush piles, if you will, and then realize that there's a lot of stuff here that's decent, but maybe it's just doesn't quite, it's just a little flat or sharp or whatever you wanna call it. And there'll probably be a greater degree of understanding if you can just get on the other side of the fence once in a while.
00:26:18
Speaker
Yeah, and I think reading Slash is such a great exercise for a writer. It's such a good thing to do for so many reasons. I think it gives you a better view of your own work and it
00:26:28
Speaker
It does, it gives you that view on the process and it makes you kind of think about pieces differently. I think reading something and trying to decide whether you're going to publish it is a little different than reading something that's already in print. It's just a different experience. And the process of trying to make the case for why something is or isn't a fit for a magazine I think is also a really good experience for a writer. And I think it gives you a sense too of
00:26:57
Speaker
You know, especially in nonfiction, and this is probably as true in fiction, I just don't read a lot of fiction slush or any really. But there are kind of a lot of stories, especially personal stories that people try to tell again and again. And that's not to say that you can't have a fresh, interesting story about any subject, no matter how many
00:27:21
Speaker
you know, how many people have tackled it before. But you do start to see when you read a lot of submissions, you do start to see that there are a lot of themes and stories and approaches that kind of repeat themselves. And so I think that's a useful thing too, just to sort of see, you know, after a while reading slushy, you can sort of say like, Oh, this is that travel story that, that unless I really miss my guess, it's like,
00:27:45
Speaker
is gonna end up here. And that I think as a writer is good to be aware of because then when you sit down to write that travel story at least you know which kind of pattern you don't want to follow exactly because it's been done so many times. What percentage of the slush pile would you say just straight up isn't ready? It needs more time.
00:28:16
Speaker
Oh, gosh. I mean, there's a percentage, I think, of any slush pile that is just made up of writing and or writers who kind of aren't even close. So for example, I'll say, and this sounds mean, and I don't mean it that way, but like, you know, we get random submissions from like 14 year olds.
00:28:44
Speaker
And that's not to say that we would never publish something by a 14-year-old, just the odds are against it, given the kind of writing we publish. So there are kind of people who are just a little bit out of their league right off the bat. And then, you know, people send us poetry randomly and say, you know, there's sort of things that are just really bad bits. Or, you know, you get random religious tretices.
00:29:13
Speaker
So there's kind of a bottom layer of work that, you know, I think in the popular imagination editors also are skimming like first paragraphs and tossing things aside. And I'm not going to say I never do that or that our readers never do that because there is kind of a very small, maybe 10% percentage of work we get that is clearly, clearly, clearly not a good fit. Beyond that, you know, there's obviously there's some
00:29:44
Speaker
better crafted work than others. When we get for an issue, I would say we usually get, well, it ranges how many submissions we get, but for a theme issue, we'll get, let's say at least 300 submissions. I'll usually read like 30 or 40 of those these days. So they go through a bunch of different readers. And then we have this really wonderful coordinating editor, Matt Spindler, who looks through all the reader comments and
00:30:11
Speaker
sort of reads a lot of the pieces himself and kind of weighs in and he'll save pieces sometimes even if readers didn't like them because they, it seems to him they fit the theme or add something new to the mix. But really when I'm reading, I think again, there's this like mythic notion of kind of the perfect piece. And sometimes with an issue, there will be a couple pieces that I just know right off the bat we're going to accept. And beyond that, it's a lot of thinking.
00:30:39
Speaker
It's rarely an easy decision. I so I'll read 30 or 40 I'll give Lee maybe a pile of 10 and we come up with our final mix from there but a lot of times it comes down to
00:30:52
Speaker
It's really small things like I'm thinking about the issue I just did acceptances for. There were a couple, like there were two pieces. It was the adaptation issue. And there were two pieces. You get a lot of pieces in pairs at the end sort of where you're like, well, we'll take one of these, but we won't take both. In this case, there were two pieces that were about support group experiences. And they were about different kind of support group experiences.
00:31:22
Speaker
One was kind of funny. One was not funny. But they were both like clearly in an issue where we're going to have two, two stories that largely featured people sitting around in a circle like in a church basement, you know, talking about sort of a family challenge. But we were going to take one of them. So so then it's a different, you know, the calculation is sort of nuanced at that point in terms of how it plays with the rest of the issue, which
00:31:51
Speaker
which piece as a whole works better than the other. But it's also a little bit of a crapshoot, honestly. It could easily go the other way.
00:32:02
Speaker
Yeah, it's almost like even maybe some other piece you may have accepted. It's kind of like how musicians will track certain songs in a particular order on a CD. Maybe other ones you've already decided to accept, they just riff better together as a cohesive unit. That's really insightful what you're saying. How nuanced and instinctive it must get towards the end.
00:32:29
Speaker
It does. It's hard. But I can say that, too, because I've been doing it for a long time. At the start, I think it was probably much more like, I don't know, this one's better. But now, you know, and I think, too, we edit a little more actively than some literary magazines our size. And so I think that also gives us a little more flexibility on what to accept, too, because
00:32:59
Speaker
everything doesn't have to be specifically perfect. You know, or the very, very, very best version of what it is, because we'll work with it a little bit to kind of give it that last final nudge. So that's helpful to be able to do too, I think. For everybody, you know, for the writer, for the reader, for us.
Finding Exceptional Submissions
00:33:18
Speaker
So how does it feel when a piece of writing, like, really sticks out in that big, you know, the 300 piles, 300 submissions? Like, granted, like, you've, when it comes to your desk, you're getting to, or you're getting to some, like, triple A ball, and it's a matter of getting those to the show. So what does it feel like when you, when you, you've gone through some of the weaker ones, and then you hit upon one, you're like, oh, this one's a little bit special. What's that like for you?
00:33:47
Speaker
Oh, so it's rare, first of all. It's really sort of a rare thing. I kind of wrote about that once in the sense that I'm not, for better and for worse, I'm not one of those editors who's just sort of like in love with every piece. I usually, by the time we publish them, I'm in love with them all, but I rarely read something and I'm just like, oh my gosh.
00:34:13
Speaker
But we did a weather issue and we published this piece by Amaris Ketchum that was called Recorded Lightning, I think. And it was written, you know, it was one of those essays, it took the shape of a thing and it had three different strands and they were all zigzagged across the page like lightning strands, which I know sounds really like it shouldn't work.
00:34:36
Speaker
But it came, Matt was like, you know, the readers really like this. I know it's shaped like lightning, but I think it's really good. You know, so I headed into kind of a lot of skepticism and she did this great thing where the first.
00:34:53
Speaker
Kind of the first lightning bolt you read all the way down is a is a narrative and it ends on kind of a cliffhanger And then you have to go all the way back You know and it's it's on paper So you to go back ten pages or whatever and and start over and then it was kind of a lot of information and all these fascinating things about lightning and then it picked back up in the third strand and
00:35:15
Speaker
and told the story that the cliffhanger led to in the first thing. And it was such a great experience to read that because I got to the end and I was really like, oh my god, she pulled it off. This is awesome. I think I swore. It was great. It was really awesome. You know, it was like I was sitting alone in my house at night and kind of like fist pumping. So I was like, yeah. But that's rare. That doesn't even happen with every issue. But it's great. It's so exciting to be able to kind of like
00:35:45
Speaker
you know, read something, especially something that sets out kind of in a way that seems not very promising. And then to, you know, in this day and age, if something keeps your attention sort of the whole way through, you know, that's a good sign in the first place. But but then you can kind of you're like, yeah, they pulled it off. It's awesome. Yes. So I love that. That's great. It's the best.
00:36:08
Speaker
What do you think writers can do to become better editors and editors of their own work? Of their own work? I think that's really hard. I think it's helpful.
00:36:23
Speaker
Sometimes, like some of the things that I end up doing for pieces, I think writers could do. And for me, it's I think it's kind of trying to visualize that structure more. And so I know some writers do that intuitively.
00:36:43
Speaker
Sometimes when I'm working with people I'll even if it's a sort of piece that skips around a lot or has a lot of sections, you know, it's sort of like a braided thing or something. I'll sometimes map that out on paper really. So it's like section one is this, section two is this, section three, you know, or like if there's complicated time frames and back and forth.
00:37:03
Speaker
Um, and I sometimes get the feeling that writers don't necessarily do that really deliberately or they, they kind of do the, um, you know, a structure seems a little bit intuitive to a point. And then there's that point where you have to kind of refine it. And I think sometimes people don't necessarily know how to take that extra step, um, of being more analytical about something that seemed intuitive. And I think sometimes that's a fear, you know, that that's that fear of art rate that, um,
00:37:33
Speaker
or that expectation we have of art sometimes that it just comes from this place of flow and it's like magic and you get inspired and it just all, you know, sorts itself out on the page. And I think that can happen sometimes, but I don't think that's necessarily the normal course of events. And I don't think that art that is kind of a little more deliberately mapped out is any less artful necessarily. But I think, you know, that,
00:38:03
Speaker
that desire for that sort of flow is really powerful, right? I think we all kind of want to believe in that, you know, that a deranged, like, inspired artist who just, whoa, there it is. But I don't think that necessarily works for everybody. So I think a lot of people can kind of benefit from taking that step back and being a little more deliberative or mapping things out or sort of, you know, kind of delineating the structure. Like, Lee talks a lot about
00:38:33
Speaker
the yellow test. And so he does this thing that's yellow highlighting and kind of just really looking at the narrative and sort of the flow of, you know, if you have a main narrative that goes through something, you know, is it a chunk of yellow at the beginning and the end? Because that probably isn't a really effective structure. But if you have, you know, sort of a chunk of yellow here and then some not yellow and then a little yellow that that it's a really visual way of being able to see, you know, how long are you leaving readers hanging on narrative?
00:39:03
Speaker
without sort of advancing the story. So I think those kinds of analytical tools can be really helpful. And those are probably easier for writers to sort of bring into their own work, but aren't necessarily, again, they're tools. They're not necessarily intuitive, you know?
00:39:26
Speaker
Yes, so the yellow test that when if we or anyone is looking at something, the yellow is like the story component, the narrative component and everything else would be what sort of the, I don't know, the informative research base. Is that? Yeah, broadly. Yeah, which can, you know, is
00:39:50
Speaker
I think we talk about that research element and that sometimes gets confusing. Sometimes that research element is just backstory or, you know, background information as opposed to even research. But yeah, the yellow is kind of the actual flow of the narrative. And so at the end, if you can strip out like, here's where the story starts, and then here are the things that happen in the story, and then look, the story came to an end. You know, not every story is like that, but a lot of stories are like that. It's not a bad starting point.
00:40:20
Speaker
Yeah, so so when you're starting to really get nitty-gritty on on editing something like what is what is your process like for when you when you you take out the pen and start or the scalpel if you will and start like wanting to cut like just kind of like cut through I don't know and evaluate a piece like what does that look like for you when you're ready to just get start getting your hands dirty oh I mean for me a lot of it is really
00:40:49
Speaker
Again, it's a little bit, I don't know, I wanna say it's intuitive. That sounds stupid though. But it is, it's almost just, I don't know, I start a new document, but I can tell you what I do. See, you'll see maybe what it is. I mean, I start a new document.
00:41:08
Speaker
and I just I usually just start from the beginning and I've usually read a story a couple times by that point because I've read it during the submission process and then again so I've read the piece two or three times if I have kind of big picture thoughts I've usually had those so because those are involved in in like the decision-making process so if it's very
00:41:34
Speaker
You know if it's something like we're gonna accept this, but I don't think it needs that beginning section for example. I already know that And then I just I do a lot of work in track changes I kind of work as I go I usually circle back through a piece. I probably spend I would say with a 5,000 word essay. I Don't know a couple hours probably going through a piece and then what I'll do is I would I send to a writer and
00:42:02
Speaker
I'll send that version with all my track changes. I'll also send a clean version of that document, so I'll make another version. I'll accept all my changes. I'll tell the writer in my cover letter that they don't necessarily need to accept all those changes. It's just because all the track changes things, I think, because sometimes there's formatting notes. It gets to be a lot to look through, especially if you don't spend a lot of time working in track changes.
00:42:29
Speaker
It can look like a lot of red pen, even when it's not really a lot of critical red pen. Sometimes it's just like reformatting the paragraph margins, but it looks kind of intense. So I'll send a clean version and I'll usually write a lot of comments in the margins that are, you know, a lot of times leaving spaces for those kinds of things I talked about before where there's a question or where I know there's another part of the story, but it's not on the page.
00:42:56
Speaker
And it's just sort of a running commentary with the piece. That's very kind of like it might be helpful here to explain, you know who you are how old you are at the time this this happens or You know if it's a story about someone's first job, you know what specifically the job was people I think a lot of times one of the one of the things an editor can do is is be a really good listener and
00:43:20
Speaker
and listen for the things that seem so obvious to the writer that the writer doesn't include them. And again, maybe that's specific to nonfiction just because you kind of know that you were 24 and you were living in Pasadena and
00:43:34
Speaker
I don't know, your hair was long, whatever. And a lot of that, a surprising amount of that stuff just doesn't make it to the page because you don't think to put it there. So I do a lot of kind of asking those sorts of questions like, what's the context for this? Or, you know, how does how does this make sense?
00:43:52
Speaker
Um, in here. So I ask a ton of questions. Um, and they're usually not, sometimes they're literal questions. Like sometimes they're really questions. It's like, you need to put this piece of information here a lot more times. It's just sort of my running commentary as a reader. Like you say this thing and it makes me wonder all these different things. So.
00:44:11
Speaker
I wonder if you want me to wonder all those things right now and if you don't maybe that could be rewarded in a way that doesn't raise all those questions or you know maybe you do want to ask all those questions. So it's just sort of a whole commentary and then I send both of those versions and I wait to see kind of what comes back in response and sometimes.
00:44:31
Speaker
A lot of times with a magazine, there aren't so many of those questions. With our new magazine, True Story, we're publishing these longer pieces, and those will sometimes come back with 1,500 new words, which is always really interesting, because then it turns out there's a whole other part to the story that you didn't even know was there.
00:44:50
Speaker
So that's kind of fun. What is it about, say, the stories that typically make it into the quarterly versus the monthly? How do those differ besides just pure length?
Quarterly vs Monthly Publications
00:45:03
Speaker
And what excites you about those pieces that go from the monthly, say, to the quarterly? Is there something that appeals to you on a deeper level with what goes into which, if that makes any sense?
00:45:19
Speaker
Yeah, so one of the reasons we started the new magazine was because as the quarterly got more theme-oriented, we kind of stopped taking general submissions. And one of the reasons we stopped just reading general submissions was because of that element of the pieces having to play well with each other.
00:45:45
Speaker
So, I don't know, three or four years ago. And before that, we would do one or two issues a year that were general issues. And we would give them a theme after the fact, but it was always this horrible process in our office. Because really good pieces would come in. But if you accept one really good piece, then you're sort of stuck with that one really good piece.
00:46:14
Speaker
I don't know, playing one of those games like Cathedral or block us or something, right? Like, like you put that one big piece in the middle of the board, and then that's what you have to work around and you can't, you can't change it, which can work out really well. But then sometimes, you know, you get other great pieces, but they don't go with that piece or they don't, they lead you to random themes that are not
00:46:39
Speaker
intuitive or not easy to explain to people. So we kind of stopped doing that. But I had this pile then of these great essays where I was like, I love this essay. I don't know what I would do with it. So we kind of thought if we did a freestanding one essay magazine, that would provide a place for longer essays. But it would also give us kind of the flexibility to read something and say, this is great. We'll take it. So that's been really fun.
00:47:09
Speaker
The challenge is it turns out finding truly freestanding long-form pieces is really hard. It's a little harder than I expected, to be honest. So I think the pieces that are in the magazine, they do, a lot of them are terrific and on their own, they're wonderful. But they do, I think they function a little bit
00:47:42
Speaker
you know, they have this theme that kind of gives them a little extra weight and then they play off each other. And they usually when I'm putting an issue together and we're reading the proofs, um, I can see little, um, little ways they play together and, and it's not deliberate. Obviously the writers aren't, you know, in touch with each other, but you'll start to see it. And I think it comes from the theme and everything else, but, but even just little references or little research references or
00:47:59
Speaker
as a group in the sense that
00:48:11
Speaker
sometimes just really peculiar words will turn up and they'll kind of echo through an issue. And I'm always blown away by that because it makes me really happy. And I take it as a sign that we've kind of done something, right? You know, it's like all these things aligning and you're like, oh, look at them. All the puzzle pieces, they just all kind of lined up. Doing just one essay is great, but it really, it has to sort of,
00:48:38
Speaker
do those different things on its own. So a lot of times in the quarterly, you know, we'll take a piece that's really, really just narrative and then you can kind of have room for a piece that doesn't have a stronger narrative but that is a little more meditative. But together, all together, they kind of hit all those notes for the reader and in the
00:49:00
Speaker
The single issue thing the pieces themselves have to do that and have to kind of cohere within themselves so that's been an interesting challenge reading pieces and there are some pieces we've read more like yeah this is kind of great but it's not either it's that the story isn't really compelling enough.
00:49:18
Speaker
to make it feel like its own things so that you know it has to be good enough that if that's what you get in the mail and that's the only thing you get to read you know what I mean like in the quarterly you can kind of like oh there's room for readers to be like oh
00:49:31
Speaker
if they're this kind of reader, to sort of be like, oh, that's like a lyric essay. I'm not into that one. Or, oh, that one's sort of about this subject that I'm not so interested in. I think the test for True Story is that the pieces really do have to exemplify that thing we believe in, which is that a really good story can make any subject
00:49:53
Speaker
you know, relevant for a reader. But because you have to not lose people right away if they're just like, oh, this is that kind of story. Yeah.
00:50:06
Speaker
So what surprises you and what still excites you about putting out this kind of work every three months and what you've been doing for a dozen years and so what excites you and still surprises you to this day as you put out an issue?
00:50:27
Speaker
Hmm. That's a good question.
Challenges in Thematic Publishing
00:50:31
Speaker
Right now we're a little behind with our spring issue and I hate the whole thing. We're done with this. Why do we do this? I mean, I think for me, you know, a lot of the, um,
00:50:46
Speaker
I think the magazine has gotten better as we've gotten more experienced at doing it. So that's fun. I think it's one element that's really fun is seeing how the art comes together. That's always sort of a challenge, but then it makes it more real when you see the whole thing and it's all laid out and it comes together. And then I think there are those
00:51:11
Speaker
Um, you know, the, the bigger level thing, I think one of the, the interesting things about the way we make the magazine is we pick these themes and we know they're interesting themes and we know they're good writing prompts. Um, but you get to the end and, and you have to do the cover art and kind of, you know, you sort of, for, for us, um, editorially, it's that chance to step back and say, okay, well, you know, we pick this theme, we pick these essays now, how, what do they all make together?
00:51:41
Speaker
Um, and I think most of the time it's, it's kind of a nice surprise how well they work out, but it's always interesting to see what they add up to. Like, for example, we did this joy issue recently, um, which really couldn't have been worse timed. I mean, you know, it was sort of like the end of 2016 and we were like rushing to finish up our joy issue. It's like, this is horrible. Like what I am.
00:52:08
Speaker
I don't know what I'm feeling. I'm feeling all the things. But one of the things I am not feeling right now, you know, in like November and December of last year, like joy was in really short supply. Right. You know, and I think that issue, though, turned out really beautifully. I mean, the art was kind of beautiful, but but the pieces themselves, it was actually it was really it was it was
00:52:34
Speaker
It was helpful to be working on that issue. But at the same time, we're really like, wow, look at us with the timing. We're really nailing this again. Like, there we are. But I think it all worked out. But that was kind of a wonderful surprise that, again, we couldn't really have planned and didn't see coming. So it's interesting because you do spend this sort of intense period of time thinking about these themes.
00:53:02
Speaker
a lot of them I don't really go into having sort of preconceptions. We did a marriage issue and it turned out to be so much about paperwork. We spent so much time in the office talking about, I mean fact checking things about paperwork, but also just discussing the extent to which the stories we picked, and we didn't even really think this when we picked them, but they ended up really being about kind of the
00:53:28
Speaker
the formal what it means to be married and who can be married and kind of what it gives you to be married. And you know, I think we expected sort of different things to come out of those stories and that's where we ended
Explore More at Creative Nonfiction Website
00:53:43
Speaker
up instead. And so that's always interesting because I think if you went into issues knowing what you were trying to do with them, that would be a lot less interesting.
00:53:53
Speaker
Where can people find any work by you or would you care to direct people to creativenonfiction.org? Where would you want people to go to find more about you or the magazine? Yeah, I mean we're at creativenonfiction.org. Everything's there.
00:54:14
Speaker
We're about due for web redesign. There's a lot of stuff there, but persevere and you'll find what you're looking for. You know, websites, they're a huge challenge for small nonprofits. So we keep adding all these things and we're like, oh, where are we going to put that new magazine on this site? But yeah, creativenotfiction.org, the magazine is
00:54:35
Speaker
The quarterly is for sale in a lot of bookstores and newsstands. There's a digital version that's available through Zinnio, which is especially useful for overseas subscribers. I think the postage is really expensive. And then True Story is available
00:54:52
Speaker
Either directly from us. It's not really available on newsstands, but you can get a monthly subscription It shows up in a little envelope. There's also a Kindle version of that You can get it through the Kindle newsstand and it'll download directly to your reader. So But yeah, and me I don't write so So don't look for me
00:55:20
Speaker
Alright, so that's another episode of Hashtag CNF in the books. Thanks to Hattie Fletcher for coming on the show. She was great. Very insightful, especially if you're a writer looking to break into the magazine. Listening to her just made me a more
00:55:43
Speaker
detailed reader of work and in my own work so I hope you got some value out of that if you did by all means share the episode with somebody you think will get something out of it subscribe to the podcast
00:55:58
Speaker
I also have a cool monthly newsletter where I send out book recommendations that I'm reading. That's about it. If you want to reach out, you can find me on Twitter. That's just about it. You can find me on Twitter. Anyway, thanks for listening. Stay tuned. More to come. Thank you.