Free Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do by Gerald Gross Page B

book, a strongly drawn account of an auto worker’s family that is torn apart by the conflicts of the 1960s, had been successful—glowing reviews, a $50,000 paperback sale, a National Book Award nomination, an immediate place in the sun. His next two were shorter, more experimental novels, one about a surreal commune in northern California, the other a metafictional treatment of people trapped inside a detective novel, and there was a sharp tailing off in review interest and sales. He wrote short stories for several years, trying unsuccessfully to find a way to score again.
    David had taken all of this hard. He’d wanted to explore the different ways of telling a story, of imagining the world. But coming from a working-class background, he was particularly motivated to get ahead, to make his writing pay, and his attempts to develop his powers had made him lose ground; his career seemed to be going backwards, from modest riches to rags. He was also very conscious of the new generation of novelists, the so-called Brat Pack, who were getting so much attention and astonishing advances for what he dismissed as “go-go writing” but by whom he felt eclipsed. Stuck in a teaching job at a small university in Ohio, where he ran the writing program, burdened by family responsibilities, and bored spitless by the small-time community where he had been living for twelve years—the sort of town that novelists of previous generations had fled from—David felt himself sinking into the excuses and cynicism that he had seen mark the end of the line for a number of writers.
    But then an NEA grant came through, and soon after he hit upon a story idea that was rich in possibilities, maybe even commercial ones. Spurred on by his returning powers, he wrote a three-hundred-page novel in eighteen months. Thinking it both the best book he had written and the riskiest, he sent it off to New York, and in the weeks that followed felt like a man awaiting a jury verdict.
    Martha G., a veteran editor, was anticipating David’s manuscript with mixed feelings. She loved most of his work, was glad that he had come out of his malaise, but was apprehensive about how a new novel by him would fly at Concord Press, where the success of his first book had worn thin. From what he had indicated to her, the new one was much more “mainstream” than his last two, but novelists usually tended to believe that, particularly the more experimental ones. She admired his desire to keepexploring, but she found herself hoping that he had come back to a broadly interesting subject and the common touch that had launched him. Also, she could use a success herself.
    For the bottom line at Concord Press these days was the bottom line. A house that had been small and venturesome in the arts, political and social thought, and children’s literature, Concord was now trying to find a new, broader identity as the hardcover house in a publishing group owned by INCOM, an international communications empire. Having acquired Concord, one of the last of the independent houses, for several times its value, the new management had dealt with it as a real-estate developer deals with a venerable town house he has bought mainly for its location and then carves up into condos. Under the mandate to spend what was necessary to increase profits by 10 percent each year, Concord had acquired a number of “brand name” authors, doubled its marketing operations, and pruned and diversified its editorial staff to provide more product for the shopping mall market: i.e., books that “meet a need or a trend,” as Dot B.—the chic, hard-driving marketing whiz whom INCOM had recently brought in as publisher—put it. The weekend after David’s book arrived Martha pushed aside a manuscript called
The Adult Parent
that she was editing and a hot project for a Romanian cookbook, and settled into her reading chair with
Remembering Angie
.
    David had found his subject: she could tell that after two pages