Fellow Maggie Hill on our October 2021 BookEnds alumni group author event. 

It’s a known secret that novelist Stephanie Gangi (whose second novel Carry the Dog is just out with Algonquin) is also a “manuscript whisperer.” She works with both well-published authors and debut writers, to help develop what’s already germinating in the narrative. Although she’s written a massively entertaining first novel (I devoured The Next in two nights of everyone-leave-me-alone-I’m-reading obsession), it was her business as an editor over the course of the past twenty-five-plus years that was the focus of our Visiting Writer series guest discussion. 

Stephanie broke down how she approaches her editorial work, and outlined how she uses skills such as deep listening, translating with care, and approaching the work with kindness, consideration, and respect. Honesty, charity, patience are also high on her list of how to engage with an author. To use her expression, it sounded a bit “woo-woo” but I believed every word she said. “Every writer is different,” she said. “You have to tune in to where the person is at.” 

Stephanie prefaced her talk with how she is “not a lecturer, but a learner.” She was emphatic about how writers sometimes get to a point where “they are not able to see their own work” and reassured us that this was actually part of the process. What a good editor offers, she said, is “a cold eye that’s helpful.” But there was nothing cold about her, as she tried to articulate a process which is intuitive and subjective, coupled with a lifetime of practical engagement with good writing.  

What she said rang so true for me, as I’ve been on the merry-go-round of submission and rejection for a couple of years now, and even just that day had gotten a head-scratcher of a rejection from a wonderful agent. There are days when I just put my head down and work, and try to forget that this is a business, too. Listening to Stephanie helped me pick my head up and try to blink my way forward again. I’m also about to sit down with a bunch of post-it notes and try Stephanie’s manuscript evaluation technique as a revision exercise. One of the ways she approaches a piece of writing is to “flag, flag, flag” where her attention lags. She will then go back, and do the same for when she is fully engaged and actively reading in the manuscript. Examining every single moment, good and bad, allows her to “look behind the curtain to see how the book works.” 

A question she posed to us was, why do we grant permission for a voice, a narration, to get inside our heads? What is the moment when we grant access to this voice? I thought back to recent books I’ve read to find where and when I was fully on board and gave the author permission to enter my head. One novel that comes to mind right away is Toni Morrison’s SULA. The opening lines had my permission immediately:

In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood….It is called the suburbs now, but when black people lived there it was called the Bottom. One road, shaded by beeches, oaks, maples and chestnuts, connected it to the valley. The beeches are gone now, and so are the pear trees where children sat and yelled down through the blossoms to passersby. 

The tremendous, sonorous, elegiac voice of Morrison makes a town a character. All of the senses are being engaged right from the start. The narrative is particular, yet the poetry is universal — the full sensual engagement of experiencing this town, and the loss of it, begins in these first few lines. By the time the single paragraph is done, some seven sentences later, I am in church having my soul saved. Ah, I see what Stephanie Gangi is talking about with this permission business…

Stephanie was also adamant about how at some point in the process, we are unable to see our own work anymore—and how that is actually part of the process. “Editing a manuscript is an enormous undertaking,” she said. As such, she will work on (perhaps) two manuscripts in any given month. 

In answer to a question about how this freelance business of editing works, she explained the process of generating either an editorial letter (a one-shot, five-to-seven page editorial breakdown), or an extended period of working with an author on a developmental basis (months-long process of going through the work). “Seventy percent are process problems,” she said, so along with developmental work, she may also offer coaching. 

Summing up her process, she said she sees her work as an editor in part as an active meditation of deeply listening, loving words, and also, recognizing that she’s “a little judge-y.” She is also deeply grateful for how she’s been given chances to publish her novels at a later stage than ‘normal’ so she wants to pay it forward. For her, editing is a way to give back. 

This year, BookEnds welcomes Stephanie Gangi as a mentor for the 2021-2022 fellowship. Learn more about her at www.sgangi.com.

Maggie Hill came from a journalism background, writing about educational technology for Scholastic Professional Magazines, among other freelance clients. Her book reviews, essays, stories have been published in The New York Times, The Daily News, Persimmon Tree, and Flatbush Review. A 2018-2019 BookEnds fellow, she worked with Amy Hempel on completing her first novel, Hoops.