This post, I’d like to draw back the curtain a little and introduce you to someone wonderful, who has been, since Day One, vital to everything that Story Club is: my editor, Samantha Storey.
Anything you’ve ever read here has been seen first, and vastly improved, by Samantha.
The way we work is like this: I try to get Samantha a draft (in Word) three days or so before I plan to post (so, by Monday for the Thursday (free) posts, and by Thursday for the Sunday (paid) posts). (I rarely succeed in meeting this schedule.)
Then, Samantha gets me her edit back (in a timelier way than I’ve gotten the draft to her), and I put the post up, i.e., transfer it into the Substack software. Occasionally, when I’m really running behind, I just drop the draft directly into Substack and Samantha will edit it there.
Samantha’s ability to roll with this process has made it all a lot of fun. It sometimes feels as if we’re one of those newsroom duos you see in old-time movies. (“I need copy!”” “Here it comes!” “Got it – heading back your way!” “Post it, post it!” “How’d we do?”)
This kind of writing was a huge leap for me – it has to happen fast (too fast, for my taste) and has to be done frequently (twice a week). I’m basically always in the middle of writing a post.
The Comments feature was especially scary to me at first. I’d come to feel over the years that a certain amount of privacy was vital to my work – I love the sense that I can write away, for months and years, with no feedback at all, just dancing around the vineyard of creativity. So, when Story Club started, I was worried about the possible effects of hearing back from people so often (and on something written more quickly than usual).
But, right from the beginning, I felt that, in Samantha, I had a creative partner who 1) understood all of this innately, and 2) knew how to help me navigate it, and 3) could be counted on for constant wisdom and commiseration, most of it conveyed in that best way of all: via alert, precise line-to-line editing.
It was incredibly comforting, those first few weeks, to feel that someone as talented and experienced as Samantha had my back and was guiding me toward the hot spots and away from the, uh, rocky shoals.
And it still is comforting, every post.
An editor is, above all things, a guide.
Samantha has a wonderful gift for finding the essence of a draft and then shaping and trimming the text so that that essence of the idea gets honored and foregrounded, and the result is faster and tauter and more urgent than the (baggy) draft.
Now, as you all know, I’m a big believer in fast, taut texts. (That’s kind of my whole deal). But we can believe in something and still not be able to reliably do it. In the spirit of “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter,” I often find myself writing long meandering first drafts, that drift around a bit before settling down into a state of baffling indecision.
The difference, here, of course, is the required turnaround time.
For example, in 2016 I wrote a long essay on the Trump campaign. It ran at around 12,000 words, in The New Yorker. It took me, as I recall, about four excruciating months to get it done.
That comes out to an average of about 100 words a day.
A typical post here will run between 1,000-2,000 words and be written in a day or two – a rate ten times faster than for that New Yorker piece (and my short stories take even longer).
So, it is, by definition, a different sort of writing, but what Samantha does, through some almost supernatural sense of shape and pace, is help me honor my own principles of efficiency, even within this compressed timeframe.
She does this by quickly identifying the kind of loose, digressive text that is symptomatic of one of my early drafts. It sometimes feels like she’s seeing, in the overstuffed, rambling text, the full range of my possible intentions, and then guiding me toward my own higher intention. It’s actually sort of uncanny – after she’s edited one of my pieces, and when I look at the stuff on the cutting room floor – I can instantly see that they were extraneous all along.
So, that’s pretty darn good editing.
And a great gift for any writer.
I think we screen-read differently than we read a book and, at least when I’m reading on a screen, there’s a quality of impatience, a tendency to slightly scan ahead. So these things have to be reflected in the style and pace of the piece.
Samantha really helped me understand, early on, that the writing I do here for Story Club can, and should, be almost a different genre from the writing I might publish in book form or in a magazine – more casual, intended to spark a conversation; the goal was to make interest among the group; without that, there was nothing.
And it was interesting; after the first few weeks of being edited by Samantha, I suddenly knew the part of myself I should be trying to access here, and that was the same part I’d always tried to access just before I walked into my Syracuse classroom: the teaching part.
But it wasn’t exactly that part; it was a subset of it, adapted to work within this specific medium.
We might say that what Samantha’s doing there is the essence of editing: the editor is attuned to a zone of power in the work that the writer might not be fully aware of himself. The editor makes a new and more powerful thing out of the offered dross, and this is a form of vision, a form of seeing the best in someone, seeing a streak of something good within them of which they aren’t yet fully aware.
This is, of course, what we are trying to do when we read and edit our own work: trying to discover a new and more vital thread within ourselves, a more interesting manifestation among the many manifestations of ourselves we are capable of producing.
But I have to say: it’s a great thrill, having this experience with someone else. I’m always moved by the process. Samantha and I have never met in person, but, every week, twice a week, she finds ways to urge me toward a slightly better (more lucid, clear) version of myself.
We have a wonderful thing going here at Story Club, and I am so happy and grateful to have such an insightful and generous partner on this trip.
So….thank you, Samantha.
Samantha works as a managing editor at The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom that covers gun violence. She’s been a journalist for 20 years, editing and writing for Bloomberg, HuffPost, The New York Times, and the Seattle Weekly.
Now here’s the good part – she also does freelance editing, in the areas of nonfiction, essays, and journalism. So, if your work falls into one of those categories, and you’re in need of a seasoned, pragmatic, professional, brilliant eye, she’s given me permission to say that you can connect with her on LinkedIn or by email at (samanthastoreywrites@gmail.com).
So this is first post, of the hundreds of Story Club post, that Samantha hasn’t edited.
I hop you hav injoined reeding it.
P.S. And, of course, I’m joking. She did, in fact, edit this one too. I’m no dummy.
Hello everyone! Here to say thank you for all the kind words. I am very lucky I get to work with George, and be part of the Story Club community. It's the best gig. ☺️
I adore Samantha! She was a student of mine, and I was elated to discover your connection. You deserve the best, George Saunders.