Edit, Revise, Pitch, Publish with James Yeh

This writing workshop is now sold out. Please email [email protected] to join the waitlist—and become a member for early access to future programming.

What does an editor do? How do writers revise? How do writers pitch and place pieces? Drawing on his experience editing pieces for McSweeney’s Quarterly, The Believer, VICE, and Gigantic, writer and editor James Yeh aims to demystify the art of editing and to empower students to edit their own work and that of others with sensitivity, imagination, and skill.

Through the close analysis of case studies, interviews with writers and editors, and essays on craft—as well as the examination of correspondence and annotated manuscripts and typescripts—we will learn about the decision-making processes of writers and editors such as Lydia Davis, Raymond Carver, Gordon Lish, Sheila Heti, Alejandro Zambra, Robert Gottlieb, and Solvej Balle (including a guest visit from New Directions associate editor Maya Solovej, who coedited Balle’s Booker Prize finalist On the Calculation of Volume). Students will also work to revise a piece of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry for submission by the end of the course.

Course Outline:

• Week One will focus on exploring models of art of revision and editing oneself, with the goal of encouraging good editing habits. Drawing on Lydia Davis’s deeply practical craft essay “Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits” and Robert Gottlieb’s interview for The Paris Review’s “Art of Editing” series. Students will bring in a notebook entry or passage from a longer work as a testing ground for new approaches to revision. Students will also, drawing from Davis’s example, take a self-inventory of their interests.
• Week Two will focus on radical editing tactics drawn from the famed/infamous editor Gordon Lish’s controversial edit of Raymond Carver’s classic short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” (originally titled “Beginners”). Using Lish’s edits as a model, students will apply the Lishian method to their own work, the results of which they will have the opportunity to share with the group and reflect on.
• Week Three will focus on an “under the hood” peek at the process of editing works in translation. By looking at an unpublished, marked-up manuscript—in this case, an excerpt from Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, Book I—we will investigate the fascinating back and forth between author, translator, and editor, and how the fine art of line-editing—judicious yet, at times, unexpectedly monumental—can be applied to our own creative works. Then, Balle’s coeditor at New Directions, Maya Solovej, will join the class for a conversation that will include time for questions from the class.
• Week Four will deepen our investigation of editorial practices alongside plotting our own forays into publishing. First, we will read and discuss Alejandro Zambra’s humorous short story, “A Christmas Story,” forthcoming in McSweeney’s Quarterly, that fictionalizes a writer’s process of working with an editor, and a series of brief excerpts from Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries that reveal how the work progressed over the course of ten years. Students will practice editing and revising using prompts drawn from Heti’s method, as well as those of professors at Columbia’s MFA Writing Program. Students will also be encouraged to begin selecting publications for potential pitching or submission and to prepare query letters.
• Week Five will focus on the art of pitching and publishing. The instructor will share (anonymized) query letters from his time as an editor alongside his own query letters for both accepted and declined pitches to venues such as the New York Times, The Believer, and elsewhere. Students will then be invited to compose and/or bring their own query letters for immediate feedback from the group. The instructor will also share edits received on fiction and nonfiction pieces accepted for publication to offer a sense of the range of edits—from light to severe—that may be suggested.
• Week Six will return to self-editing and revision as a way of moving forward, even if at times nonlinearly. Returning to Lydia Davis’s work, students will compare drafts from her only novel, variously titled “March Story,” “Stefan Debtor,” and “My Novel (as I’m Writing It),” with the final published version: The End of the Story. By working on prompts drawn from Davis’s approach, students will have time in class to consider—and discuss—their own models for future writing projects, and to document new approaches toward completing their writing projects.

Level: Intended for Intermediate to Advanced, but all levels welcome.

This course is held in person at The Center for Fiction. Please note there will be no meeting on March 12th.