2023 Fellow Stefani Nellen talks about working with one of our longtime BookEnds mentors. 

My novel THE DREAM THIEF is about a Dutch scientist who falsifies data and is consumed by his fraud. When I came into BookEnds, the manuscript started too early—about five chapters too early, as program director Susie Merrell helpfully pointed out. I ended up rewriting the entire book, Lauren Groff-style. My guess is that, while this approach hurt my hands and wrists, it saved me a lot of time in the long run.  

When I began working with my mentor Christina Baker Kline in the second half of the BookEnds year, she noted things were becoming shaky in the later chapters. This is what will happen when you write a book in a hurry: fatigue takes its toll. Our first conversations focused on how to stick the landing and come up with the effortless mix of pain and exhilaration that allows a reader to make peace with the ending, no matter how open or pat, happy or sad. 

But the ending became an afterthought once Christina sent me an email about my style. The email was kind, clearly prompted by her fondness of my book and her ambition to make it better, but it was also an honest email: I tended to overwrite, some analogies were hard to follow, and metaphors meandered. In places, it was all too much, and nothing stood out anymore. “Do we need to see the fluffy yellow rag?” We would work on this, she said, making it sound like no big deal, which, to a pro writer, it presumably isn’t. 

To illustrate her comments on my writing, she’d line-edited the first chapter of my book. I read the email late at night in bed, and promptly suffered a case of panic. I’m incompetent, how awful, and to think people have looked at this with their eyes…

Rationality returned the next morning, when I processed Christina’s edits with the goal of understanding what she had done, and saw how much her small changes improved the text overall. 

At this point, I should point out that yes, I’m in the habit of revising my work. Extensively. From nixing timelines to eliminating identical paragraph beginnings, I’ve done it all. But I’d never thought of line-editing as a discrete stage in the editing process. Instead, I treated it like a necessary but boring task, to be finished as quickly as possible. 

Having worked as an editor, Christina told me she routinely edits her own work closely—and that the editors publishing her work appreciate her clean submissions. The word clean still stands out to me from this conversation. 

Imagining many happy editors in my future, I line-edited my book. Christina responded to the edits I sent her with praise, encouragement and meta-edits of her own; I picked through our layers of edits and inserted those that passed final muster into my manuscript. One by one. No shortcuts. I never trust reject/accept changes, but especially not this time. I wanted to get a feel for things, the changes under my fingertips.

My hands and wrists hurt again. It was brutal. It was a lot. And yet, when I was done, I saw my work and my task as a writer in a new way. I can’t edit my work the way an outside editor can, but I can make it clean(-er). 

We even had a little time left to work on the ending. 

Removing clunk, junk, and the evil word that wasn’t what I’d expected going into the mentorship term, but it was what I needed. I learned a new skill, gained insight and wisdom on the writing life from a seasoned novelist, and greatly improved my manuscript. 

Looking back, I’m thinking that my initial response to Christina’s editing email was related to the emphasis on brilliance and individuality of expression that is guiding both our appreciation of and our mentorship in the arts right now. And yes, both must be nurtured and respected. But the term with Christina reminded me of Teju Cole, who said: “Originality is important, but competence and expertise are more important. You can’t be an avantgarde violinist without being a violinist.” Line editing gives me the control to say exactly what I want, precisely what I mean. 

Stefani Nellen is a German psychologist who lives in the Netherlands and writes in English. Her short fiction has appeared in AGNI, Guernica, Glimmer Train, The Bellevue Literary Review, and others. She was awarded the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, the Montana Fiction Prize, and had a story in the Masters Review Anthology, Vol IX (selected by Rick Bass).