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First Draft Episode #327: Benjamin Dreyer
October 14, 2021
Benjamin Dreyer, vice president, executive managing editor and copy chief of Random House, and New York Times bestselling author of Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style and Dreyer’s English (Adapted for Young Readers): Good Advice for Good Writing.
Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week I'm talking to Benjamin Dreyer, vice-president, executive managing editor and copy chief of Random House and New York Times bestselling author of Dreyers, English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style and Dreyer's English (Adapted for Young Readers): Good Advice for Good Writing.
I love this conversation with Benjamin. I so appreciate how he lays out the backend of the publishing production process, there's nobody better to give us an insight on that, his perspective on how authors and copy editors can work together to get the cleanest manuscript possible. And I loved hearing about his journey going from a behind-the-scenes manager to a bestselling author in his own right.
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Okay, now please sit back, relax and enjoy my conversation with Benjamin Dreyer.
Sarah Enni: So hi, Benjamin, how are you today?
Benjamin Dreyer: I'm very well, thank you. How are you?
Sarah Enni: I'm so excited to talk today. I have a lot of questions and I'm really interested in hearing opinions on many things that you have to say about writing and grammar and how people can express themselves. I want to start though with what you say in Dreyers English (Adapted for Young Readers) was your copy editor origin story.
I think a sign at a local deli that said, "Try our Rugelach it's the quote, unquote, best."
Benjamin Dreyer: "The best." We're both making air quotes here for people who aren't watching us. This is a true fact that there was a bakery near where I grew up in Long Island, and one of my chores was to get on my bike and go up to the bakery to get what needed to be gotten, to bring home. And there was this sign that said, "Try our rugelach they're 'the best'." And the word best was in quotation marks.
And so there I am, all of 10 or 11 years old, staring at these quotation marks thinking, "What are they trying to tell me about this rugelach? That it's NOT the best?" Even though it would be a number of decades before I officially got into the proofreading and copy editing business, clearly I was demonstrating to my brain to tuck away for use in the future the idea that there are weird and interesting things that words do, and punctuation does, to signal meaning.
And basically that is the germ of what copy editing is. It's how words convey meaning, how words can be used by a writer to tell stories. The key thing is the best part of copy editing, the best part of what I do, is to help writers convey things to readers as clearly and eloquently as the writers want to convey those things.
And I add that little caveat at the end only because there are writers who do prefer that the writing is dense and maybe even a little confounding, that's the point of it. But most writers, push comes to shove, are really trying to engage with readers for the sake of clarity. And a copy editor's job is to help them do that.
Sarah Enni: I would love to hear how you got into the game. I understand that you started as a freelance proofreader at St. Martins. Can you just tell me how you stumbled into that? And what it's been like climbing the ladder of copy editing.
Benjamin Dreyer: Yes well, let's start back in 1922... no, let's start back to my graduating from college and deciding that it was time for me to have a bit of a sort of vagabonding useless life, just enjoying myself and amusing myself, which I did for a very long time. It was amusing and it was delightful, but what it wasn't was a career.
At a certain point, I did move back to New York from Chicago, I had gone to school at Northwestern, and began to realize that I was not going to make a career doing what I had been doing for years, which was bartending and waiting on tables and managing restaurants. That was a job that was not a career.
And I, knowing absolutely nothing about the publishing industry, zero. I had a friend who was a published writer and I remember talking to him and saying, "Surely there has to be something in publishing I might do."
And he said, because he had shared with me his work and we had discussed his work for the duration of our friendship, and he had, at a certain point, started giving me the bound galleys, the advanced copies of his books, because it was a treat. It's always a treat to see something that's not public. It's a treat to see something you're not necessarily supposed to see.
But in reading his bound galleys, every now and then I would point out to him that something wasn't quite what it was supposed to be. And apparently I was able to do that in a way that he didn't get offended, because I was right. Anyway... he said, "You might be a really good proofreader." And he very nicely introduced me to the person who was his production editor, the person who supervises the copy editing and the proofreading who works in a publishing company.
He introduced me to his production editor at St. Martin's Press, which was in those days for people who can visualize it, was in the gorgeous, wonderful landmark Flatiron Building at Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street, that wonderful triangular building. Saint Martin has since moved very much downtown with a number of other publishing companies.
So this production editor, this wonderful production editor, hired me sight unseen. No test, no nothing just, "Here's your first job." And I did pretty well at it cause I had a knack. And she gave me wonderful advice and wonderful feedback, job after job. So I was really learning and reading every style book I could get my hands on, at that point.
Because though I had a great instinctual knowledge for how sentences were supposed to work and how they're not supposed to work, I didn't really have a particularly grand formal education in so far as that was concerned. So I really needed to learn this stuff. So I'm learning from reading style books, I'm learning because she's giving me great feedback, and I'm learning as a proofreader because a proofreader is also looking at the copy edited manuscript.
So I'm seeing the conversation that has already gone on between the copy editor and the writer. I've seen what the copy editor has suggested for improvement of text. And I've seen what writers like and what writers don't like. So I'm learning how copy editing works, and I'm becoming a better proofreader, and I'm building my client base to include not only St. Martins, but I've also found my way into Random House. And maybe I'm doing a little work for Penguin as well.
And I'm sorry, this is a very long story that was supposed to be quick.
Sarah Enni: No, I love it.
Benjamin Dreyer: But at a certain point, the woman who was the copy chief at Random House said, "I have a staff position opening up. Would you be interested in having it?" And I liked the freelance life a lot, it was fun. It's very self-determining, but it also has no boundaries. The day begins when you get it to begin. And if you've bitten off more than you can chew, it could go on until two or three o'clock in the morning because you have too much work to do.
To have an office job with parameters, to say nothing of an office, was a really sort of lovely thing. So anyway, so I took a job as a production editor at Random House, that was back in 1993. So I'm getting increasingly close to being there for a very long time. In due course of time, I just should assure people I didn't shove my boss out a window, at a certain point she decided she'd had enough of working in publishing, she wanted to just go have her family and do her stuff. Anyway, I became copy chief and managing editor, which I've been for quite some time now. And that's how I got to be where I am.
Sarah Enni: I love it. Well, thank you. That's really helpful. I wonder if, again, thinking of my listeners being mostly people who are on the writing side of this, something I've learned over doing this podcast is that writers really do not totally understand how a publisher works. There's not a lot of clarity into behind-the-scenes stuff there.
So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what it is that your job entails now? I think people can understand what being a copy editor is, you're looking through things and making notes. But what does it mean to be a production manager? What's going on under your purview?
Benjamin Dreyer: Well, one thing I would love to do, is to give a plug. There is a book called Before and After the Book Deal: A Writer's Guide to Finishing, Publishing, Promoting and Surviving Your First Book (by Courtney Maum (hear Courtney weigh in on the traditional publishing process in Track Changes: Publishing 101). It's really wonderful. And I highly recommend it to anybody who is pursuing writing, who wants to know what happens when you're actually about to be published. I read it shortly before it was published and was really enchanted by it. And, in fact, learned things that I didn't quite know which might've been valuable to me.
All right, so to talk about what goes on, for the sake of writers. A house is going to contract with a writer to publish a book. Often that means that the book is more or less written from beginning to end. Of course, as we all know, some book deals are made on the basis of a couple of sentences written on the back of an envelope. And it's like, "Oh, now you have to write this book."
But let's say that the book has been written, and an agent has shown it to an editor, and an editor loves it. And an editor has decided that, "It must be published by my house." So once that process of acquisition and whatever it is that's gonna go on between the editor/editors, I always call those people, and the author. It can be a couple of drafts. It can go on for quite some time. It can be a lot of back-and-forth.
It's a lot of big picture stuff about narrative arcs and pace and all those things. It's really a very special talent. When I have spoken to the editors that I work with about what they do, and they open that door for me and I listened to them talk about what goes on between them and their writers, it's really a kind of magic. And it makes me understand that there's a thing that they do, and there's a thing that I do. And those are very different things.
So let's say the author and the editor decide that the book is in good shape. So then the book is really handed over for the process of taking it to the finish line. The normal gestation period for a book, once they've decided it's ready for copy editing until the day that it goes on sale, is like a human gestation. It's about nine months. It can go a little longer. It can go a little shorter, depending upon what the needs are, but there are a number of things that need to occur. And I won't give the entire picture cause we would be talking for the next five hours.
But what needs to happen is a book needs to have its text design. That's a very key thing. There's a wonderful person who needs to come in and say, "This is what the chapter titles are gonna look like. This is what the epigraphs are going to look like. This is a good font that goes with what this book is about."
The text designers that I work with are very smart, very good visual artists who also read, they're not just, "Oh, I'll plug this into this Baskerville text cause I haven't used Baskerville in a while." They want the design to match the book, to support the book. So that little old process is going on. The place where my people are getting their work done is, in fact, in initially hiring the copy editor. And as is, I think, pretty common in publishing these days all of our copy editing is done by freelancers.
There are in-house production editors who do the squiring, but the actual sit down with the manuscript for the next 40 hours, spread out over however many days it takes, is done by a freelancer. And what a freelancer is going to do, as a writer who receives a copy edited manuscript is certainly going to see, ranges from regularizing and clarifying punctuation, making sure that everything is spelled correctly, making sure that the writer hasn't confused two words that have the same sound but have two different spellings.
To more complicated stuff like in a novel, for instance, being aware of timeline, making sure that time is passing in a logical and sensible fashion. For instance, if a writer begins the book by saying on Sunday afternoon, September 27th, 1897, running to the perpetual dictionary to make sure that that day was a Sunday. Making sure that people's eyes stay the same color, if they're supposed to stay the same color. Making sure that all the characters age at the same rate.
And I remember doing this when I would be working on novels set in fictional towns, particularly if there was a lot of movement, is sketching out a map to make sure that the descriptions were logical and made sense. The other things that our copy editor's going to do is taking note of an author's pet adjectives, cause all authors have pet adjectives.
They don't all have the same pet adjective, but every author has pet words. And you want to make sure that if they are using a particularly noteworthy word, like noteworthy, that they're not using it three times on a page. So there's all these little things, and there's all these little tricks, and really that's what copy editing is. It's a collection of tricks and you acquire them and you keep them handy.
But what you are ultimately trying to do is help a writer make the writer's book into the best possible version of itself that it can be. And I stress that because the important thing for a copy editor to do, besides all those things that I just narrated to you, is to listen to what the writer is trying to do.
I always suggest, I do this myself on the increasingly rare occasions when I copy edit, but I certainly suggest this to people who are doing copy editorial work which is, "You would do well to read the first 30 or 35 pages of a manuscript, keeping your hands to yourself before you start trying to figure out how to fix what's in front of you, try to figure out what's in front of you first."
And an author receiving a copy edited manuscript should feel taken care of, looked after, supported, and read as carefully as anybody is ever gonna read your work. So when it all works properly, and happily nearly always it does cause we're all very good at what we do, it keeps everybody happy.
A copy editor cannot turn a bad manuscript into a great book. Even a great editor can't necessarily turn a bad manuscript into a great book, but you can always make something a little better, a little clearer, a little more eloquent than it was.
Sarah Enni: Thank you for laying all that out. So now as a production manager, you oversee a crew of freelance editors. So you are now in the position of mentoring. I see your role as kind of the keeper of the holy grail, kind of the style guide of Random House and applying it where it needed.
Benjamin Dreyer: Well, I mean, to some extent. So I'm the managing editor of the Random House division of the mighty Penguin Random House corporation. So our division includes a number of imprints. So if you are reading a book that says Random House on the spine, that's one of mine. But also Ballantine, and Bantam, and Del Rey if you're a science fiction aficionados, and One World and Hogarth and Crown.
And The Modern Library, which is still a core of our division. It is in fact, the oldest part of our division and precedes Random House by a good decade. So those are all, for lack of a better word, mine. And I have a great big crew of some 15 production editors and five managing editors. All of them are making sure that those proverbial trains run proverbially on time.
And the production editors who work for me, again, the people who are really in charge of helping squire that text through, they are hiring the best copy editors they can. They are hiring the best proofreaders that they can. But we are all talking among ourselves constantly about how to do things better.
The ultimate goal being to put out a perfect book, which is arguably a possible thing to do. You know what I mean? Everybody's human. There are apt to be a handful of typos in a book. You wish there were zero, but things happen. But it is possible to put out a book that doesn't have any typos. And we do that most of the time. And I'm really quite proud of that. We set really high standards for ourselves and then make ourselves crazy living up to them.
Sarah Enni: It's remarkable how often books don't have glaring typos, and it's kind of one of those cruel ironies that you don't notice it when it's not there. So you don't appreciate the smooth reading process.
As you're saying that, it's coming to mind that you have presided over this process while the internet has come into our lives and accelerated a massive change in colloquialisms, and methods of speaking. What's that been like for you?
Benjamin Dreyer: I find it fascinating and I am endlessly observing it and endlessly participating with my relentless online presence. But I like it which is why I want to be in the middle of it. There are many people eager to say that the internet and the rise of online publishing has done damage to writing, has done damage to the English language itself. I don't see it that way. I really don't.
I have seen that the vigorous online life has made the exchange of ideas about language much more playful, much more fun. People do decry, sometimes justifiably sometimes not, that journals, newspapers, things like that are not as keen on maintaining the copy editing, proofreading process, as we, for instance, are at Random House. And yeah, that's a flaw in the process.
I mean, writing, I think should always be supported by good editing by good copy editing, by good proofreading. But to me, at least from everything that I read, the level of writing these days is perilously high. I just read tons of great stuff all the time.
Sarah Enni: I want to talk about your Twitter in a second, but I do have just a couple more questions about the process of working with the copy editor that I know my audience will be interested in. I forget if it was in this version, or if the original version of Dreyer's English, but you mentioned that ideally an author would accept a copy editor's suggestions about 85% of the time. Does that sound like you?
Benjamin Dreyer: Yeah, that sounds like me. When I copy edit, and as I said, I don't copy edit like I used to, and it's not exactly a state secret, I have one writer I continue now to copy edit book after book, we've done five or six books together. I have the wonderful honor of being Elizabeth Strout's copy editor. Most people think of her as the author of Olive Kittredge (aslo Olive Again, and the recent release Oh William!).
And even though she and I are basically, at this point, joined at the hip and share brain space, I would never expect her to accept everything I offer to her as far as copy editorial suggestions are concerned. I make good suggestions. Sometimes she likes them, sometimes she'll say, "That's a good suggestion, but I don't want to do it." And I always jokingly accuse her of playing the author card.
But the thing is, it's her book and it's her voice and ultimately whatever decisions that she makes, and of course we are talking about an ideal situation because she's a genius, but whatever decisions she makes are the right decisions. But as I have also said, if I were to copy edit somebody's book and they accepted 100% of my changes, I would think, "You don't even really care enough to push back a little now and then."
Once, while I was working on writing the first version of the book, I had the opportunity to write an article. And my editor said, even though it was not particularly his concern, he said, "I would like to see it since you're my guy and your words are going out into the world." And so I gave him the article and about a couple of hours later, he sends it back to me and he had cut a few things that I knew I should have cut, but I wasn't gonna do it because they were my precious words. And if I wrote them they were gonna stay there.
He untangled a couple of particularly naughty sentences. He did some really wonderful things. And I said, begrudgingly, "I have accepted all of your changes." And he said, "I'm gonna give you a really important piece of advice that you will remember when you finish writing your manuscript, do not ever accept all the changes."
Sarah Enni: That's wonderful. I do like hearing you say that because I do think what you're getting at is that the copywriter/author relationship is a relationship. It is a working communion between two people trying to achieve the greatest good for all. So I think that some, especially newer authors, might be tempted to say, "Accept all, you know what you're doing." And it's like, "No, no, you have to assert your agency and really take control of being the author and being responsible for these words." It's an important step.
Benjamin Dreyer: And copy editors are great, but they're not any more infallible than anybody else. Sometimes a copy editor just misses a joke. And so the copy editor is trying to fix the sentence because the copy editor doesn't realize it's a joke. These things do happen. Sometimes you just can't quite hear, in the moment, what an author is doing.
But I have found over time, and this is recounted to me by the people that I work with, by authors that I talk to, excuse me, I need some adjectives here. Good writers, and then I need an adverb, good writers love to be well copy edited. They don't take it as an affront. They don't take it as a challenge. They take it as a wonderful moment of support and they revel in it.
And I certainly found, when it was my turn to be copy edited, it was great. It was great. I mean, to have somebody support your writing, to have somebody who's like onto your worst habits and is willing to call you out on them, that's a great thing.
Sarah Enni: It's like a good therapist, "I'm being seen."
Benjamin Dreyer: Exactly. Boy, are you being seen.
Sarah Enni: I will say from my perspective, when I was copy edited for my debut book, the copy editor made a note that one of the jokes made her laugh. And that was the highlight. The laugh I was most excited to get. So it goes both ways.
Benjamin Dreyer: I don't mean to turn this into a mechanical trick, cause it's not, but it's a nice thing for a copy editor every now and then to drop into the margin to say, "I love that sentence." Or, "That really made me laugh." It just reminds the author in between being shaken about, and pushed around, and tweaked with, that there is somebody there who's having a good time reading your writing.
Sarah Enni: Yes, absolutely. So the last question about this from this perspective is what, if anything, do you wish authors knew going into this process? Or what, if anything, can an author do to make the copy editing process easier on everybody?
Benjamin Dreyer: I think the best thing simply that an author can do, I mean, authors are gonna off, that's their job. The writer's job is to write the book. The writer's job is not necessarily to try to preempt the copy editor by figuring out what the copy editor is going to query, that's why we have copy editors.
So you do what you're doing, do it as best you can. And then I guess the only thing, really, that a writer can do in interacting with the copy editor, and it's a funny kind of interaction because they're not meeting, it's a file going back and forth. Even in the old days when it was paper, it's paper going back and forth. You're meeting on the page, which is kind of cool.
The best thing that a writer can do really is simply pay attention to what the copy editor is doing. To not necessarily only look for the queries, but to look for the stuff that the copy editor has done. Copy editors don't ask permission to fix a misspelled word. They don't even ask permission to fix your punctuation. It's kind of understood that any change that's made has inherent in it, "Is this okay with you?" You just don't say, "Is this okay with you?" A hundred thousand times. You just do it.
But an author should take the time that the author has possession of the copy edited manuscript, and really just thoroughly go through it, change by change. Listen to what the copy editor is doing in the same way that the copy editor was trying to listen to what you're doing. And if that works out, right, it's only going to lead to a set of pages, your first set of page proofs, the pre-proofreading, the ones that are theoretically still full of little glitches, but it's going to lead to a very clean set of pages.
It's one of the things that I like, and it's as much a testament to her as it is me and the strength of her personality, is that once I have finished copy editing one of Elizabeth Strout's manuscripts and she's finished reviewing it, when we go to pages, she doesn't do anything. I don't have that level of confidence. But she, in reading her typeset pages, it's basically, "Yes, this is what I meant to do, whatever it was that you, Benjamin, were fooling around with, we've agreed to it." And the book's done.
She reads it very carefully. And she'll find a typo as well as anybody else will, but she's finished fussing around with it. I don't urge that kind of restraint universally for writers because for one thing, most of them don't possess it. But also because I didn't possess it either. I was very well copy edited. But once we got to page proofs? Yeah, I had little things I wanted to fix here and there.
There's a shock about seeing something typeset. It's almost as if you've never seen it before and it makes you see things you never saw before. The balancing act of that is that you just have to make sure that you haven't reached the point where you're so tired of looking at it that you're not paying attention. It's a very important thing once you get the page proofs, really, pay attention! This is your last chance. So get in there and just make sure it's the way it's supposed to be. Don't rewrite the thing, but just make sure it's all A-Okay.
Sarah Enni: I think we've all had that experience of, you change a font and all of a sudden it's brand new and terrifying. Okay, I want to shift to talking about yourself and your creative writing. From reading interviews with you, I understand that you were sort of creatively writing in the background anyway, but I want to know how, or if, that also intersects with starting your Twitter account?
Benjamin Dreyer: In my very early twenties, I had done some local freelance writing for a newspaper in Chicago. And I kind of liked that. I was pretty good at it. But I'd wanted to try my hand at fiction. And it was just the wrong time for me. I just wasn't able to connect with that. It was too tense. It was too anxious. And I remember a friend saying to me, "There's nothing worse than being in a constant state of 'I'm not writing.'"
So finding my way into publishing, and I would also like to underline that I never saw myself as a copy editor. And I don't think that other copy editors see themselves as frustrated writers. You know, it's like, "Well, if I can't write my own writing, I'm gonna mess around with somebody else’s." That's not really it. They are different skill sets.
But many years pass. I'm having a wonderful and entirely fulfilling career as a production editor, still doing occasional copy editing. But I have a lot of jobs, so there's less copy editing going on. But I get it into my head that I want to try my hand at it again, writing. And it becomes a literal New Year's resolution of mine.
We were having dinner and I said, "My New Year's resolution is I'm going to start writing a little bit every day." And I did. Except being, of course, a person who works in publishing the idea of writing for no particular purpose other than self-amusement, was sort of anathema. It was like, "Well, if you're gonna write then maybe you want to think about writing for publication."
And even though I do not urge universally the whole, "write what you know," thing cause, I don't know, you should write what you don't know too. But the one thing that I did know was copy editing. And I thought, "I would like to write a book about the copy editor's experience. I would like to write, basically, a style manual of sorts." Not something that's gonna supplant the Chicago Manual of Style, but something that is about what I do that writers can learn from and enjoy.
That's the book that I wrote. I will say it was not easy. I will say that it took a lot longer than I, or anybody else, thought it was going to take. I remember when I was getting started a number of writers that I knew offered me variations on the same idea which is, "You will go through every existential crisis that you thought you already went through, and all the ones that you didn't even know about." And it happened.
I had my, "I have no talent" moment. I had my, "Why does anybody want to read anything that I want to write?" It's a wonderful thing about having editors who, on the one hand, know that their job is to push you to get it done because that's what you were contracted to do. But also to just basically say in the most parental loving, soothing, and I am going to gender it even though both of my editors are men, in the most maternal possible way, "Baby, you can do this. You can! I have faith in you."
It just took a while. But the key thing is for all the tens of thousands of words that I wrote and deleted and wrote and deleted, because I was boring myself to tears, was when I finally realized that the voice that I had been cultivating at Twitter as, "Hi, I'm your friendly neighborhood copy editor." The idea of being succinct, the idea of being funny, the idea of remembering that people like to be encouraged at least as much as they like to be scolded, that if I could get all of that in one place and get it down on the page, I might have a book.
And truly that eureka moment for me was, "Oh, that's your voice. So get that down on the page." And I will say that one wonderful landmark moment is that when I gave the bound galley of Dreyers English to my mother to read, she was of course eager, she'd been waiting a very long time for it, she read it and she said, "It sounds just like you." And I thought, "Well, okay, then I did it right."
Sarah Enni: I have a few questions about Dreyer's English. And we're talking about the first version, which is Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style. You've done a good job of kind of saying basically what it is, but can you just pitch the book for us?
Benjamin Dreyer: Sure, I can start off by saying what it's not. It's not an exhaustive style manual. It is not the Chicago Manual of Style. It is not a primer on grammar. It is a collection of tips, tricks, anecdotes. My recounting of my experiences. My recounting of the things that I try to do as a copy editor that I hope are instructive to [pauses] well, I'm gonna make narrow fingers here and say, to copy editors. And then slightly broader fingers to encompass writers. And then to make very broad hands to encompass people who just find this sort of thing interesting.
People who want to know what yet one more person thinks about commas. And I do truly think that it is a book that, I hope, is enjoyable simply for people who like to geek out with this sort of thing. But also I do firmly believe, or I wouldn't have endeavored to do it, that it is practically useful for people who want to write. It is practically useful for people who want to do editorial work. It has lessons. It has tips. It has ways of showing you things you might not have thought about because you're not me.
So yeah, it's intended to be useful. It's intended to be informative. And the one thing that I really liked, because as I was working on it, I'm just very comfortable with lots of little bite-size chunks of things, which is why it's a book full of lists and entries. Whenever people tell me that they keep it handy so that they can just pick it up for fun and look at it for 10 or 15 minutes cause it's easy to navigate, I love that! That's exactly what I wanted to do. It's a book that you just want to keep handy.
Sarah Enni: I'm perennially worried about inside or outside of punctuation marks so I'm always like, "Let's just refer back and see if we're doing this right". It's very useful for that. The initial version comes out. It's kind of reminding me of you telling authors that there is a human person on the other side of the copy editing. That's how it felt. It felt like hearing from the copy editor who has opinions and is funny and has a personality all their own and is not just a nit-picky red pen, basically.
I'm interested in hearing from you because it's not a grammar guide. A style guide is a very particular way of saying it because it's also about the types of things that authors bring in there. At some point you talk about, I think this is a quote right from the book, "Peppering your writing will show off the illusions to underappreciated novels, obscure foreign films, or cherished indie bands. A novel is not a blog post about your favorite things." [Chuckles] Which I love.
So it's not just punctuation. It really is sort of like, "How can you express yourself, in your experience, is best for the reader?"
Benjamin Dreyer: Yes. And of course it is a book that has a lot practical trivia about spellings and misspellings, or about words that are easily confused with one another. And in part it's simply, "Oh, these are the things that people get wrong most often. So maybe I can help you not get them wrong most often."
But also, it's constantly trying to simply get people to be not excessively self-conscious, but simply more conscious of what they're doing. There's also stuff in it in the sections about the writing of fiction, about authors and their pet words, and perpetual calendars, and how people characterize speech.
And how writers often, I think sometimes excessively, think that they are conveying characterization by people carrying coffee cups from one place to another. And simply say, "That's not as interesting as you might think." There are ways to express character, but they are not necessarily in the conveyance of coffee cups.
It's about making people who are taking their shot at writing to give them a little information, a little support, a little boost, so that maybe they can feel more confident before they are looking down the barrel of a copy editor. And particularly for people who are not formally entering the publishing process. People who are, in fact, blogging about their favorite indie band, which is a perfectly noble cause.
But not everybody gets a copy editor. Not everybody gets an editor at all. So that is one of the other things that I'm hoping the book is doing is, ultimately, you cannot entirely be your own editor. And I urge anybody who is writing with an idea of making their work public on a regular basis, or any basis, to find a partner, to find a buddy, to find a friend. Somebody who will read your work while they're reading your work, because an extra set of eyes is an invaluable thing.
So what I'm trying to be in the book, preemptively, is already an extra set of eyes. I'm trying to give you your own extra set of eyes. If that doesn't sound too terrible.
Sarah Enni: I like it. That's perfect. The book was really a big hit. It came right out of the gate. It was a New York Times bestseller and went to many printings instantly. I mean, all my friends and I were buying it and talking about it and excited about it. What was that experience like?
Benjamin Dreyer: It was amazing. I mean, when we were getting done with the process, when the book was ready to go to the printer and I had seen it as many times as it was ever going to be seen before it was bound, and I'd seen the jacket and I was very happy with it. So I finally got my hands on an actual copy of it, you know, the thing. And that was maybe three weeks or so before it went on sale. I was pretty happy to have the thing in my hands.
And I did truly say to myself, and I meant it, "Whatever it does, whatever performance it performs out in the world, I did this thing and I am satisfied with it." And then everything happened that happened. And it was pretty extraordinary.
And, again, it's a lovely thing about being published by a company as wonderful as the company that I work for, which also happens, of course, to be the company that publishes me, to have the wonderful support of marketing people and publicity people, and sales people who are out there.
I mean, to make public, to publish, you can't just walk out into a street and hold a copy of a book and hope that somebody takes it out of your hand. Their job is to get it out there and to get people interested in it. And so I was fortunate enough to be able to be interviewed a couple of times, and to talk to podcasters, and to talk to journalists, and to people who were interested in my book and who liked it. And so the word got out.
And suddenly, yes, this book for which I had, I mean, of course you fantasize about great success, but you try to rein yourself in to have practical expectations. But all of a sudden the book was kind of a hit. It has been two years since the book went on sale and as I do always like to say, "There may come a time when I will decide that it's time to be jaded about the whole process."
I have not reached that point yet. I am still super happy at the idea that people are reading the book. I am still very happy when I will get an occasional message where somebody says, "I really love your book and it means something to me." I'm like, "Wow." And that's just extraordinary.
The one side effect of it is, or a side effect of it is, that I had never seen beyond the idea of getting that first book finished. And I got it done and then I thought, "Huh, I wonder what else I might have to say?" I am now, beyond the book and beyond the young person's version of the book, and beyond, as you may know, the card game and the calendar, I think that's enough. I think that's enough product and swag for one book. I am now at work on another book.
Sarah Enni: That's exciting.
Benjamin Dreyer: It is exciting.
Sarah Enni: Another non-fiction?
Benjamin Dreyer: Another non-fiction book. Of course, my publishers attitude was, "We didn't just do this so that you could write one book and walk away from it." I'm like, "Yes, but what am I going to do? I can't write another book if I don't have an idea for another book." And they were encouraging me not to cannibalize the book that I had written and to just do it again, cause who would want to do that, but to find an angle.
What I can tell you is that I had written this little piece for online publication, took me all 45 minutes to do it, it was just the easiest thing on earth. I took the opening paragraph of one of my favorite novels, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, and I broke it down... copy editorially speaking. Semi-colon by semi-colon, adverb by adverb, "What is she doing? Why is she doing it? How is she doing it? How does it work?" An editor friend of mine said, "I would read a whole book of that." And I thought, "There's an idea." And so that is indeed what I'm doing.
So the next book is going to be called, because it's the right title for it, it's to be called Dreyer's Fiction. And I am taking any number of passages of works of fiction that I love, and I just wanted to focus on fiction because... because I wanted to. And I am looking at these chunks of text and discussing what they do, and how they do it, and why they work on a very practical level.
I'm not a literary critic and it is not a work of literary criticism. It is intended to be, as the original book was intended to be, amusing and useful in more or less equal parts.
Sarah Enni: That's excellent.
Benjamin Dreyer: I'm having a very good time doing it and it's giving me the opportunity... it's really tough work. You know what I do? I read books I've already read.
Sarah Enni: [Laughs] The dream!
Benjamin Dreyer: And I take notes and I look for stuff to talk about. And I'm having a very good time doing it.
Sarah Enni: Excellent. I want to talk quickly about adapting it for young readers. It's such a great idea. I write YA and I talk to a lot of people who write for young adults. So I think about it all the time, what a young audience is thinking? And how they are interpreting what you're writing. What made you decide that this was a good next step for the book to adapt it for young readers?
Benjamin Dreyer: The thing is, it wasn't my idea. It was the idea of the people who publish books for young readers that this book would do well to be adapted for younger readers. And this is the thing that I know happens from time to time. Michelle Obama's book becoming adapted for younger readers, Brian Stevenson's Just Mercy adapted for younger readers.
So they came to me and they said, "We would like to do this." And I thought, "Oh! Well, that's a really cool idea." I said, "But I wouldn't necessarily know how to go about doing it." It's like, "You want to aim this book at a market of readers who are 10 to 15 years old. I don't know a lot of 10 to 15 year old young people." And so it became a particularly collaborative process.
I was very well edited. I was very well guided. Some of it is simply abridgement, some of it is, "Yeah, well, this is a little salty for ten-year-old’s, so let's tone that down a little bit." And when I was growing up, the buzzword was relevant. "Is this relevant? Is this relevant to the young people?" But the idea is not relevant, but it should be relatable.
And so one of the things that happened, and it was sort of a bonus for me, is that in trying to introduce into the young person's version of the book some examples of writing that were more geared toward the people who were reading the book, I then got the opportunity to read books I might not otherwise have read, you know, YA stuff.
I've loved YA stuff my whole life, well since the point when I ceased to be Y. So I got to read, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, by Erica Sanchez. And I got to read a book by a writer named Jennifer Longo called What I Carry, because these books were put in front of me. There's some good stuff here. And I was like, "Well, then let me look at this good stuff." So now we have some excerpts from those books in my book, which I think is great.
One of the things that was the case was, it's still me. It's still my book. It's still my voice. It's still my writing. It still sounds like me. And as I've said, and particularly now that I've been through the whole, all over again, the editorial and copy editorial process, and I look at it and it's like, "Oh, yeah, it's still pretty sophisticated."
But I'm also realizing that young readers are also pretty sophisticated. And the thing is, I hope that it finds a readership of people who are interested in this sort of thing. You know, God bless English teachers. Well... God bless all teachers, but God bless English teachers who I know work very hard to engage students who are not naturally inclined to be interested. And I think that's a big task. That's a big effort. But for potential readers who like this sort of thing, I hope it's the sort of thing they're gonna like.
Sarah Enni: One thing that came to mind, and we're kind of looping back to something we talked about at the top of the interview is, the amount of writing that people do now with the internet, with text messaging. In my opinion, I think that young people now are writing more than almost any generation ever.
And that has always stood out to me when people, not you or not I certainly, but when people malign how young people talk, or meme speak. I'm like, "But the point is that they know why it's funny."
Young people have been writing so much their whole lives, that they know what rules they're breaking, a lot of the time, which is very sophisticated. So it struck me that this is a very pertinent book for a generation who writes constantly.
Benjamin Dreyer: And I would like to think that the readers for this new version of the book are smart enough. As I say up front it's like, "A text message is not an essay. A text message is a text message." I mean, Twitter is almost its own language. It's not quite like learning French, but it's learning how to Twitter. And writing for publication is a different thing than sending a message to your friends.
I would not necessarily want to publish the way I text. I am no more formal in my texting than anybody else's. But there's a difference between texting and writing. But the thing is there's overlap and there's good stuff that you can borrow from the vigor and the vivacity of how you communicate online and get it into your writing.
And the same thing applies to everybody. You'll learn the rules so that you cannot ignore them, but so that you can let go of having learned them. As I said to you before, I had a knack for this kind of thing, but I didn't know what I was doing. So, I learned it.
Okay, I learned what a subjunctive was. I didn't know what a subjunctive was. Well, now I do. Now I know how semi-colons work. Now I know, "Oh yes, this is called subject verb agreement." Now that I've learned all that stuff, I can go back to forgetting it and go back to being an instinctual writer.
Sarah Enni: Is there anything else about this version for young readers that you wanted to talk about or make sure we got to?
Benjamin Dreyer: When we did the first version of the book, I 100% knew what I was doing. I, 100% knew who my audience was. And I figured if I did it right, I would hit that audience right now. I have to say in the run-up to the publication of this book, I think I've done it right. But we're going to find out.
And the day that we are speaking, whenever it is that you send these words out into the world, in any event from the conversation that we are having right now, the publication of this book is a week away. And it is going to go out. And I hope it works. I hope that it finds a readership.
But in the same way that when I finished the first version of the book, I said, "Whatever it is that happens, I've done something that I'm happy with." I am happy with this. I like it. I think it's good. I hope other people think it's good as well.
There was a good moment of clarity, as was the case with the original version of the book, I got to record the audio version of this new version of the book. So I got to sit in a studio for the better part of three days and read the whole thing out.
That is a very good way, and that's one of the things that I do suggest to the people who are reading either version of the book, one really good way to test the efficacy and eloquence of your own writing is to read it aloud. You can hear it. You can hear what works and you'll hear what doesn't work well. So I sat there for three days and I read it out. And by the time I was finished, I thought, "Yeah, this is good. I like this."
Sarah Enni: That's great. That is passing a huge test. You are right about that. I wanted to wrap up with, and I'm hoping you'll indulge me because I think that you and I share feelings about, as you are the keeper of the Random House style guide, I've heard some of your discussion about The New Yorker Style Guide.
I'm hoping you'll indulge me in some discussion of the confounding way that they decide to do some things that my friends that I can't get enough of like screen-shotting some of their decisions. They're truly bizarre.
Benjamin Dreyer: This is the thing about The New Yorker. And I know people who have written for The New Yorker. I know people who do editorial work at The New Yorker. And I can tease and poke at them with a reasonable sense of humor. Even though, yes, certain things they do absolutely make my eyes bleed.
This is the thing, The New Yorker is The New Yorker. And as a number of people I know have said, "No, I like their weird style. I like 'teen-aged' with a hyphen. I like the umlauts all over the place because I know I'm reading The New Yorker. So I am connecting with a magazine that has existed for the better part of a century. I step into The New Yorker and I become a part of history." You always know that you're reading The New Yorker.
My idea of style, my idea of Random House style is... the best thing I can say about Random House style is that you don't know that it's us. You're never gonna pick up a book and go, "Oh, that's one of Benjamin's isn't it?" Um, no. Because it's not one of mine, it's one of the writers.
But The New Yorker must be allowed to indulge itself in its New Yorker-ness. And I suppose if they stopped doing it, if they stopped spelling focused with two s's - and I think even in England they don't spell focused with two s's - if they stopped doing it, I suppose we would all be sad.
Sarah Enni: That's true. That's true. Another timeline.
Benjamin Dreyer: And whom would we make fun of?
Sarah Enni: It's true! It was fun to read about, and to be delighted with my friends, and be like, "It's confounding." But you're right, you certainly know what you're reading or where you're reading it.
Benjamin Dreyer: Exactly. And look, the one thing that they have always been famous for is the great editorial care that they take with their writers, and that persists. And I honor them for that in the same way that I hope they honor what I do as well. But they know their way around writing.
Sarah Enni: Yes, that is for sure. Well, this has been such a fun conversation Benjamin. Thank you for giving me so much time today. I really appreciate it.
Benjamin Dreyer: I have had a very nice time talking to you as well. Thank you.
Thank you so much to Benjamin. Follow him on Twitter @BCDreyer and follow me on both Twitter and Instagram @SarahEnni, and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram).
As I mentioned at the top of the show, leaving a rating and review on Apple podcasts goes a long way toward getting First Draft in front of new listeners. Ratings are amazing, but reviews are great, they're just the best, because I get to read them. And I'm gonna read a recent review right now.
This review was left by Eric Slanger Up. Eric says, "Five stars, weigle approved. Love tuning into these conversations whenever I walk my weigle Monte. With interview formats, sometimes there's an inverse relationship between polish and authenticity. But Sarah consistently strikes just the right balance to get to something fun, useful, and real. Thanks for keeping me and Monte inspired."
I'm just gonna go back and reiterate this point, "There's an inverse relationship between polish and authenticity." Truly couldn't have put it better myself, Eric. I absolutely know what you're saying. I feel that way about interview podcasts as well. So it's incredibly meaningful to me, for you to feel that we're hitting the right balance. That's absolutely what I'm obsessed with and what I'm always trying to achieve. And that's so meaningful. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Secondly, arguably much more important, I had to Google Weigles. I was not immediately, I mean tragically, I was not immediately familiar with what a Weigel is. It is a mix between a dachshund and a beagle, and it's the cutest thing I've ever seen in my whole life. That was the best rabbit hole I've ever gone down. Monte... thank you! I'm honored to be a part of Monte's daily schedule.
Eric and Monte, thank you so much. I really appreciate you weighing in and leaving that review and I'm ready to just go use a Weigel image as my desktop background cause, what cuties.
Okay… First Draft is produced by me, Sarah Enni. Today's episode was produced and sound designed by Callie Wright. The theme music is by Dan Bailey and the logo was designed by Collin Keith. Thanks to social media director, Jennifer Nkosi and transcriptionist-at-large Julie Anderson.
And as ever thanks to you, Shirley Jackson Halloween enthusiasts, for listening. It's your season guys, go get spooky.