Developmental/substantive editor Phyllis Hatfield

For more than 15 years, Guild co-founder Phyllis Hatfield of Seattle has been working directly with writers as a substantive editor. She told us about her career path and some of her experiences, and offered advice to those interested in doing this kind of work. 

She began her talk by saying that although she and others occasionally referred to her as a “book doctor,” New York colleagues recently told her they considered the term pejorative and did not recommend using it to describe what they do. When asked, she’ll say she does “developmental” or “substantive” editing. Another term for what she does is “publishing coach.”

Phyllis said she couldn’t tell us how we could do what she does, which is work as an editor almost exclusively with authors, but she could tell us about how she thinks she does it. She took an unconventional path. She began as the operator of a word processing service in the early 1980s (when few writers had computers), typing manuscripts for authors, whereas 90 percent of the editors she knows started in the business by working on the staff of a publishing house.

Phyllis knew she wanted to move into working with authors as an editor in addition to typing for them, and one of her first steps was an excellent University of Washington class on editing. It taught her about such things as style manuals (after she was already making style decisions on the job) and gave her many other practical tools to help her move toward doing editing, which is the work she feels she was “born to do.”

She advocates that anyone wanting to work with writers go where they go and read what they read, as she had been doing for a year or two: attending writers’ conferences and workshops, reading magazines such as Writer’s Market, and so on. She had long been doing what they do—writing (which she doesn’t think we must do, although it would really help). She noted that the last time she was at Hugo House was for a workshop with author Amy Bloom. She brought a client of hers, and also brought some snippets of her own writing that she’d done years ago. Bloom “just shredded it, in ways I would have shredded it had it not been mine,” Phyllis said. She found that she’d made the same errors she corrected in others. It was “the most humbling experience,” she said. She appreciated being reminded of how difficult it is to write and to present your writing to others for their judgment.

Phyllis recommended that we read Editors on Editing: An Inside View of What Editors Really Do, particularly the first edition (there are three, all different). When she read it, she concentrated on the pieces by editors of genres she was relatively uninterested in (and thus knew little about), such as romance novels, so she could advise clients writing in those genres about the business side of publishing. She feels that being able to advise clients about the business of publishing is very important. She has sought out and met agents, which helped her learn about the business and which enables her to make connections with them for the writers she works with.

To give us an idea of the variety of her work—the books she edits are on widely varied topics, and the work she does on each also varies widely—Phyllis described a few projects she has worked on recently:

Phyllis said that after she has seen several drafts of a manuscript, if it still needs more work, she often doesn’t feel she is the best person to look at it again. That’s when she’ll refer the client to another editor who can look at the work with a fresh eye. “All of you in the room are on my list,” she said.

She then read aloud some comments that writers have given her about editors she referred them to:

1. When the writer got the edited manuscript back, it reeked of cigarette smoke. Phyllis also cited a client whose manuscript perfumed her office with his compelling but distracting cologne. Try to avoid perfuming manuscripts with strong scents, and pay attention to other such niceties!

2. Another editor did a good job but “seemed personally cold and rather indifferent.” Phyllis said this could have been just bad chemistry (although Phyllis felt the writer was an easy person to work with), or it could have been that working with authors was not be the right kind of work for this editor to be doing.

To work directly with authors, Phyllis said, you have to first enjoy working with people, and then, because writers are often insecure or prima donnas, you must enjoy working with temperamental people. It’s important to assess yourself and ask whether you have these qualities. If you enjoy keeping to yourself, not dealing with a lot of people, and not confronting people directly, as many editors do, this work is probably not for you.

You must be “incredibly tactful,” Phyllis said, yet sincere and confidence-inspiring (even when you may not feel confident). People have to feel that you are leading them on a right track (one of many, because there is no one right track). You must be able to win their trust and immerse yourself in their lives enough to get their story out of them. For example, Phyllis said, often people writing memoirs leave out crucial things about their lives, and it’s up to the editor to pull that out.

Phyllis shared with us a few things that haven’t worked for her. At times she has attempted to teach her clients to copyedit their own writing so they wouldn’t have to pay her to do it, but has concluded that this doesn’t work. And she told us of a disastrous project she worked on—a novel by a very famous American film actress who now lives in London in her older years. The initial consultation process involved trans-Atlantic phone calls, righteous outrage from the potential client, and even a suicide threat via e-mail. The story underscores that you need to be relatively centered, confident, and unflappable to do this work, Phyllis said.

3. An editor told the writer that she usually worked on projects that were far less developed, and she didn’t know what to do with such a polished manuscript. Phyllis called this “honesty, but excessive and misdirected,” and that, rather than turning down the writer, a better approach would have been for the editor to call Phyllis and express those concerns, so Phyllis could explain why she thought this editor was right for the job and what needed to be done with the manuscript.

Some advice on handling referrals:

A question-and-answer period followed Phyllis’s talk:

1. How do you pick a trustworthy agent? Phyllis thinks very few agents are untrustworthy (in 20 years she’s heard of only one dishonest agent—one in Kirkland, who she believes is no longer in the business).
   One popular tip is to look in the acknowledgments of books similar to yours, to see if the author has thanked his/her agent. (If there is such a connection, mention it in your query letter.)
   Membership in the AAR (www.aar-online.org), the national agents’ association, is another thing to look for. Although Phyllis doesn’t consider it essential, if an agent is not an AAR member, she’d ask why.
   Writers are always advised to get a contract with their agent, but in her experience she’s seen and had (with her own agents) purely oral agreements only.
   
2. What do you like to read? She still reads enthusiastically for pleasure. She doesn’t read much contemporary fiction—she’s still reading classics such as Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and James Joyce. She’s currently reading Emergence by Steven Johnson, as well as books on neuroscience, as part of her background for the complexity science book. She also loves short fiction.
   She recommended that if you really love a piece of writing, analyze why it works; and vice versa, that if you hate a piece, try to develop a coherent statement of why.
   
3. How many projects do you work on simultaneously? Phyllis said this work is very intense—“dealing in the unknown—what is this book, and how do we shape it?” Four hours of this kind of work per day is about her limit, plus about two unpaid hours each day of “phone calls and thinking.” She has three projects going at the moment, but not all are on the front burner and not all have deadlines. Often her projects have no firm deadline.
   
4. How do you deal with the fact that it costs an individual so much money to have a book edited, and many people don’t have that kind of money? Phyllis said her work always occurs in stages. In her initial consultation with a new client, she spends two and half hours reading the manuscript and taking notes, followed by half an hour on the phone giving the author her evaluation. From there, if the client’s budget is limited, she might suggest that she do 10 hours of work and then come back to the client to decide if they would go further together. She also invites clients to resubmit their writing to her after they’ve worked on it further on their own—she doesn’t read the ending, so it won’t be spoiled.
   With writers of nonfiction, she said, money is less of a problem because these clients are usually professionals and experts in the field they are writing about, so they have a good income; they just need help because they aren’t writers.
   She noted that most of her work doesn’t end with the satisfaction of a finished product—it results in huge progress and goes on to somewhere/someone else, or it’s dead. So if you need a sense of satisfaction or completion in your work, working with authors may not be for you.
   
5. How do you know when you’re done with a book? The writer may not ever think it’s done, but after doing this work for many years, Phyllis feels she has a good sense of when a manuscript is ready for an agent or publisher. If a writer is using Phyllis’s name in the query/proposal, she reviews what the writer is going to send, to make sure it represents them both well.
   
6. Regarding saying no to a job because one fears one can’t do it, are women more likely to do this than men, because they tend to be more insecure? Yes, Phyllis said, and she doesn’t know what to do about that. She said that still, whenever she gets a manuscript she’s agreed to edit and is first looking over it, she always thinks, “Oh my god, what have I done—I can’t do this.” She stressed that it’s important to ride out that fear.

A final thought from the audience:

Something to ask yourself when you have this sort of performance anxiety, or fear of not being able to do the job: Who could do it better?
And tell yourself: I can.

Here's a P.S. Phyllis forwarded to us several weeks after her talk:

I got a phone call from a writer who’d seen my name in our website.  She wanted “a copyeditor,” she said, for a how-to book.  I told her that I’d like to refer her to other members of our group who might be more appropriate (I didn’t tell her that I don’t much like how-to books, have done too many of them over the years.)  I spent a little while with her as I looked over the Guild roster, seeking members whose blurb sounded right for this writer.  She told me that she’d talked with 3 other of our members before she’d called me.  Two of the editors set off “minor alarm bells,” she said, “because they were ready to start work right away, and I wondered why their plates were so empty.”  I thanked her for sharing this with me and said I’d bring it up to the membership. 

Clearly there are times when we freelancers have no work.  Oh, how I dreaded those times!  And then when the work comes, it comes in bushels—the old feast-or-famine situation.  But when famine is upon us, we need to resist our tendency to pounce on the first morsel of food that comes our way.  I think I’d say something like, “Well, I’ve just finished working on [whatever I last did, whenever that was] and your how-to project sounds like just the thing to follow [that last MS] with.  I need a break of a day or so, but you’re welcome to send [or bring] it now or at your convenience.”  This lets the writer know that you’ve been working—the fact that you say what sort of MS you’ve just finished convinces by its detail and gives you credibility and a personality (of sorts) that’s more vivid than the few lines on the Guild list.

—Beth Chapple, notetaker, 
with additions from Sherri Schultz and Phyllis Hatfield

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