EDITING, REVISING, PITCHING, PUBLISHING

What does an editor do? How do writers revise? How do writers pitch and place pieces? This cross-genre seminar 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, essays on craft and American literary history, long-form interviews, letters, and corrected manuscripts and typescripts, we will learn about the decision-making processes of writers and editors such as Lydia Davis, Toni Morrison, Raymond Carver, Gordon Lish, Samuel R. Delany, Jane Bowles, Paul Bowles, Elizabeth Bishop, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Max Perkins, Ursula K. Le Guin, Diane Williams, George Saunders, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as editors at publishers like Random House and Scribner’s, major literary publications like the New Yorker and the Paris Review, and small magazines like NOON and Gigantic. Regularly we will apply what we’ve learned to edits and revisions on our own texts as well as assigned texts drawn from the instructor’s experience as an editor at McSweeney’s Quarterly, the Believer, VICE, and Gigantic. Students will also work to revise a piece of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, and develop a nonfiction story idea, so that they will have a revised work to submit—and a polished story idea to pitch—by the end of the semester.