On behalf of the membership: Thank you, Phyllis, for sharing your experience, wisdom, and humor with us!

About Phyllis

Guild member (and co-founder) Phyllis Hatfield has been editing fiction and nonfiction since 1983, usually working for authors rather than publishers. In 1987 she had the proverbial lucky break: Robert Fulghum asked her to help him with what soon became All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. After its phenomenal success, she edited all of Fulghum’s other manuscripts, work that led to a steady stream of referrals from agents, editors, and other writers.

Phyllis's path to becoming an editor began in 1980, after 12 years of clerical, administrative, and activist work at a social service agency in Seattle’s public housing projects, when she started a one-woman secretarial service. Along with writing resumes and ad copy, and typing letters and reports, she began soliciting writers for work typing their manuscripts on a computer at a time when very few writers had word processing capabilities.

In 1982 Phyllis took a life-changing class at the UW Extension, with veteran editor Dorothy Bestor. She learned how to describe, in terms that a writer could understand, how a piece of writing worked or did not work, and she had a repertoire of fix-it techniques to offer them when they sought her help.

Through her own experience as a published author (Pencil Me In:  A Memoir of Stanley Olson, 1994), and from the tales of glory and grief told by her many published writer-clients and friends, she is acquainted with the process of getting a finished manuscript to the attention of agents and publishers and then, finally, into the hands of readers. Sometimes she can help her writers connect with people who will take their manuscripts farther along the path to publication.

How Phyllis works

For an initial consultation with Phyllis, an author agrees to pay for 3 hours of her time. She reads the work for 2½ hours and spends the last half hour talking on the phone to the client about what she feels are the strengths and weaknesses of the work.

She tries to read as much as possible in the 2½ hours and avoid copyediting (which takes time away from reading) as much as possible. She makes her notes about substantive issues right on the manuscript. She finds that getting their manuscript back with notes on it helps authors to understand what they have paid for—to see what she did in those 2½ hours before she talked to them on the phone.

She has also developed a “manuscript mechanics” sheet that applies to many of the manuscripts she gets—such basics as indent paragraphs, double-space (not triple-space) between paragraphs, put a running head on every page, and so on. This way she doesn’t have to spend time writing them out for each client.

From there, she and the client decide whether they would like to continue working with each other. She bills by the hour, not by the page or at a flat fee.

If she is editing a book, she will check in with the author periodically. She also often has questions about the work that she will need to consult with him about.

Questions from Guild members:

Do you line-edit a book once you’ve accepted it?

She does, but only because that is how she works her way into a book. The purpose of this line editing, for her, is to help her identify the big issues (for instance, a point-of-view problem). She tries to take as little time as possible to get the manuscript back to the author with the “big issues” identified; then the author may send it to her again for more editing after those issues have been resolved. Before those big issues are resolved, though, the book isn’t ready to be line-edited.

Are authors specific about what they want?

Sometimes, although Phyllis tries to stop them from telling her what they think the problems with the manuscript might be. She wants to be able to be totally objective about the work. If they have a rejection letter with specific criticisms of the work, she takes that as an encouraging sign (most rejections are cursory and nonspecific; the fact that someone spent time to make specific criticisms means s/he thought the work had merit), but she doesn’t want to see it before she reads the work. If it’s a novel or memoir, she doesn’t want to meet or know anything about the author before reading the work the first time.

Do you help an author write synopses and/or query letters?

Yes, this can be part of the manuscript editing process. Having invested the time and money in having an editor edit her manuscript, an author would be foolish to send off an unedited query letter or an ill-prepared synopsis. It can be helpful to have someone else (not the author) write these, as that person can likely be more objective (and perhaps more concise) about the work.

Phyllis recommended looking at the sample proposals in The Writer’s Guide to Book Editors, Publishers, and Literary Agents 1999–2000, published by Prima. For query letters, she relayed advice given her by New York editors: Just speak to us as ordinary, bookish folks—1–1½ pages, in a conversational tone, telling us who you are, what your book is, and how it fits into the gazillions of other books out there.

You don’t have to handle this yourself; you can learn just enough to know what people or books to refer an author to. Phyllis mentioned Patricia Weenolson as an experienced local writer of book proposals.

Do you work on just one book at a time?

Usually. If more than one, they need to be at different levels of editing or different types of books—she couldn’t do a first edit on two novels at once, for instance, because “I live with those people,” she said of the characters in the books she edits.

How do clients find you?

Basically, word of mouth through agents, local folks, clients, other editors, writers, and Elliott Bay Book Co. and other bookstores.

What are you reading for pleasure now?

The Way I Found Her, by Rose Tremain.

Fix-its

Phyllis discussed in more detail some of the “fix-it techniques” she alluded to in her statement about herself. She said that all editors likely have a repertoire of such fix-its, whether or not they have identified them as such.

Tips for aspiring developmental editors

Final tidbits

During the informal part of the meeting, Phyllis regaled us with tales of the difficulties involved with getting St. Martin’s Press to reprint her longtime friend Stanley Olson’s biography of painter John Singer Sargent (originally published in 1986) to coincide with the upcoming Sargent exhibition that will be traveling throughout the country. Both book and exhibition will be at the Seattle Art Museum in the winter of 2000.

To help us keep things in perspective, Phyllis offers this quotation from a letter from Hannah Arendt to Mary McCarthy regarding a dispute with the copyeditors at Harcourt Brace:

“This whole nonsense comes from their zeal to show how necessary they are, how well they worked and how much, etc.; plus, of course, sheer undiluted stupidity with more than a bit of méchanceté. The outrage is that they make us work to undo what they did, and each time they put one of their idiotic queries in the margin one rushes back to reference and God knows what. If we were compensated by the hour by the publisher for unnecessary work they would begin to be a bit more careful. . . . These people are not ‘professionals,’ they are actually unemployable people who have succeeded in landing a job which hardly exists to begin with.”.

—Sherri Schultz, notetaker

See more meeting notes