I receive my edit letter two months after the deal. My editor at Eden is Daniella Woodhouse, a deep-voiced, no-nonsense, fast-talking woman who both intimidated and intrigued me during our first phone call. I remembered she’d gotten into some kerfuffle at a conference last year when she called a fellow female panelist “pathetic” for arguing that sexism in the industry remained an obstacle, after which all sorts of online personalities labeled her an enemy of women and demanded she make a public apology, if not resign. (She did neither.) That doesn’t seem to have impacted her career. In the last year, she’s published three bestsellers: a novel about the interior lives of murderous and sexy housewives, a thriller about a classical pianist who makes a deal with the literal devil in exchange for a legendary career, and a memoir by a lesbian beekeeper.
I was hesitant about signing with Eden Press at first, especially since it was an indie publisher instead of one of the Big Five—HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan. But Brett convinced me that at a midsize house, I’d be a big fish in a small pond; that I’d get all the care and attention I never felt at my first publisher. Sure enough, compared to Garrett, Daniella practically coddles me. She responds to all my emails within the day, often within the hour, and always in depth. She makes me feel like I matter. When she tells me this book will be a hit, I know that she means it.
I like her editorial style, too. Most of her requested changes are simple clarifications. Are American audiences going to know what this phrase means? Should this flashback be placed in this early chapter when we haven’t met the character in the proper timeline yet? This dialogue exchange is artful, but how does it move the story along?
Honestly, I’m relieved. Finally someone’s calling Athena out on her bullshit, on her deliberately confusing sentence structures and cultural allusions. Athena likes to make her audience “work for it.” On the topic of cultural exposition, she’s written that she doesn’t “see the need to move the text closer to the reader, when the reader has Google, and is perfectly capable of moving closer to the text.” She drops in entire phrases in Chinese without adding any translations—her typewriter doesn’t have Chinese characters, so she left spaces and wrote them out by hand. It took me hours of fiddling with an OCR to search them online, and even then I had to strike out about half of them. She refers to family members in Chinese terms instead of English, so you’re left wondering if a given character is an uncle or a second cousin. (I’ve read dozens of guides to the Chinese kinship nomenclature system by now. It makes no goddamn sense.)
She’s done this in all her other novels. Her fans praise such tactics as brilliant and authentic—a diaspora writer’s necessary intervention against the whiteness of English. But it’s not good craft. It makes the prose frustrating and inaccessible. I am convinced it is all in service of making Athena, and her readers, feel smarter than they are.
“Quirky, aloof, and erudite” is Athena’s brand. “Commercial and compulsively readable yet still exquisitely literary,” I’ve decided, will be mine.
The hardest part is keeping track of all the characters. We change almost a dozen names to reduce confusion. Two different characters have the last name Zhang, and four have the last name Li. Athena differentiates them by giving them different first names, which she only occasionally uses, and other names that I assume are nicknames (A Geng, A Zhu; unless A is a last name and I’m missing something), or Da Liu and Xiao Liu, which throws me for a loop because I thought Liu was a last name, so what are Da and Xiao doing there? Why are so many of the female characters named Xiao as well? And if they’re family names, does that mean everyone is related? Is this a novel about incest? But the easy fix is to give them all distinct monikers, and I spend hours scrolling through pages on Chinese history and baby name sites to find names that will be culturally appropriate.
We cut out thousands of words of unnecessary backstory. Athena likes to write in a rhizomatic fashion: jumping back ten or twenty years to explore a character’s childhood; lingering in rural Chinese landscapes for long, unrelated chapters; introducing characters who have no clear relevance to the plot, and then forgetting about them for the rest of the novel. I can tell she’s trying to add texture to her characters’ lives, to show the readers where they come from and the webs in which they exist, but she’s gone way overboard. It’s distracting from the central narrative. Reading should be an enjoyable experience, not a chore.
We soften the language. We take out all references to “Chinks” and “Coolies.” Perhaps you mean this as subversive, writes Daniella in the comments, but in this day and age, there’s no need for such discriminatory language. We don’t want to trigger readers.
We also soften some of the white characters. No, it’s not as bad as you think. Athena’s original text is almost embarrassingly biased; the French and British soldiers are cartoonishly racist. I get she’s trying to make a point about discrimination within the Allied front, but these scenes are so hackneyed that they defy belief. It throws the reader out of the story. Instead we switch one of the white bullies to a Chinese character, and one of the more vocal Chinese laborers to a sympathetic white farmer. This adds the complexity, the humanistic nuance that perhaps Athena was too close to the project to see.
In the original draft, several laborers are driven to suicide by their mistreatment at the hands of the British, and one man hangs himself in the captain’s dugout. The captain, upon finding the body, tells an interpreter to order the rest of the laborers to hang themselves in their own dugouts if they must, for “We don’t like such a mess in ours.” This whole scene, apparently, was lifted straight from the historical record—Athena’s copy had handwritten notes in the margin emphasizing: COMMENT ON IN ACKNOWLEDGMENTS—CAN’T MAKE THIS SHIT UP. MY GOD.
It’s a powerful scene, and I felt a curdle of horror when I read it for the first time. But Daniella thinks it’s too over the top. I get that they’re army men, and they’re uncouth, but this feels like tragedy porn, she comments. Cut for pacing?
The largest change we make is to the last third of the book.
The pacing really flags here, reads Daniella’s comment. Do we need all this context about the Treaty of Versailles? Seems out of place—focus is not Chinese geopolitics, surely?
At the end of the book, Athena’s original draft is unbearably sanctimonious. Here she leaves the more engaging personal narratives behind to hit the reader over the head with the myriad ways in which the laborers have been forgotten and ignored. The laborers killed in action could not be buried in plots near European soldiers. They were not eligible for military awards because they were purportedly not in combat. And—the part that Athena was angriest about—the Chinese government was still fucked over in the Treaty of Versailles at the conclusion of WWI, with the territory of Shandong ceded from Germany to Japan.
But who’s going to follow all of that? It’s hard to sympathize with the stakes in the absence of a main character. The last forty pages read more like a history paper than a gripping wartime narrative. They feel out of place, like a senior term paper attached haphazardly to the end. Athena did always have such a didactic streak.
Daniella wants me to cut it altogether. Let’s end the novel with A Geng on the boat heading home, she suggests. It’s a strong final image, and it carries the momentum of the previous burial scene. The rest can go in an afterword, perhaps, or a personal essay we can put out in an outlet closer to publication. Or perhaps as additional material in the paperback, for book clubs?
I think that’s brilliant. I make the cut. And then, just to add some flair, I include a short epilogue after the A Geng scene consisting of one line from a letter one of the laborers later wrote Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918 pleading for world peace: I am convinced that it is the will of Heaven that all mankind should live as one family.
This is brilliant, Daniella writes in response to my turnaround. You are so wonderfully easy to work with. Most authors are pickier about killing their darlings.