What can the culture of fanfiction and beta reading teach editors of pro fiction? Host Grace Gordon of the Art Life podcast talks to Lorrie Kim about mirroring writers back to themselves, word by word.

Grace Gordon: This is The Art Life. Hello, I’m Grace Gordon, actress and activist, and I am so happy to be here today with Lorrie Kim, my cherished friend and the author of Snape: The Definitive Analysis. I am happy to have Lorrie on the show today to talk about something she is so good at that I continue to be intimidated by: we’re here today to talk about the art of editing. Hi, Lorrie. 

Lorrie Kim: Hi, Grace. 

Grace: Nice to hear your voice! 

Lorrie: I miss you already, even though I just saw you.

Grace: We just got to see each other in Philadelphia for a few days and it was so special. I was thinking back, too, when I was writing a little preparation for this episode about how we met, and you were one of the first people I met in Philadelphia when I was 12 years old. We moved to Philly. I was so nervous about leaving my friends, and one of the first things I did was join– I think THE first thing I did actually, before we even moved, was I joined Potterdelphia, the Harry Potter meet-up group in Philly, and that’s where I met you. I was just always so astounded by your insight about the books and these deep conversations we would have and over the years, I’ve seen you speak at conferences, I’ve read your book, and so much of your writing. We’ve done podcasts together, and I’m just excited that we get to talk about editing today.

Lorrie: If I recall, at the time, I thought you were maybe 22 and that you had graduated from college and that you were working.

Grace: That’s usually the impression I gave at that age.

Lorrie: The other thing I recall from the first time I visited was that unlike everybody else there, you disagreed with me, you gave evidence, and I immediately changed my mind. 

Grace: Well, that is… I’m very moved to hear that. I can’t say that I knew that, to be honest. I don’t know that I remember the last part of that. I do have a very distinct memory of talking about Freud with you, and the golden trio being split up into id/ego/superego. It’s just one of my favorite first memories of our friendship. But before we get into talking about editing and all the writing projects that we’ve been involved in together, I wanted to ask you, as we always do at the beginning of the show: how is your art life?

Lorrie: My art life is available and waiting. I am busy with moving house and a lot of other logistical things, so I’m not getting a lot of time to myself to do the writing that I want. But unlike other times in my life, I know that when I’m ready and I have time and I sit down to do it, it’ll be just there waiting for me.

Grace: Moving is the worst thing in the world, but having just seen your beautiful home, I’m so excited for you and I’m so excited about the fact that you intentionally found a space where you could have more room for art making.

Lorrie: Yeah. So, Grace: how’s your art life?

Grace: Oh, goodness. I wasn’t prepared to answer that because usually when I interview people, they don’t ask. 

Lorrie: But I really want to know.

Grace: My God, how is my art life? Let’s see. I have to take a second to think because I wasn’t prepared to answer. My art life is in a flow state, or keeping things in a flow state more specifically. I just had a clothing swap that was so much fun and the best one I’ve ever had. I traded a bunch of clothes with friends who are also all like performers or models, and so everyone had such cool and unique things that they brought. Then I’m donating a bunch of the leftover stuff and sending certain things to friends that were left over and made me think of them. I texted a picture of something to a friend in New York and said, “Oh, this reminds me of you. Do you want this?” It frees me up, it frees up my energy when I actually move objects around like that. I don’t just leave things sitting in my closet for years that I never wear, so it’s getting me creatively more awakened and more in flow as well to just move so many pieces of clothing around and give them to people who’ll actually wear them. 

Lorrie: And then they have new life.

Grace: Alright, let’s get down to it, Lorrie.

Lorrie: Okay.

Grace: We mentioned a few minutes ago that we saw each other recently. I came home to Philly for the first time in 3 years and we were talking about doing an Art Life episode together, and somewhere in that conversation you told me about how beta reading fanfiction is done in a different and potentially more beneficial way than traditional editing feedback for novels. So to start the conversation for people listening who don’t know: what is beta reading?

Lorrie: Beta reading is part of the fanfic economy. It’s editing, but it’s editing from the point of view of someone who’s part of your target audience. Not as somebody who’s a professional, not as someone who’s going to give you advice or help you sell your book, but just a part of the community that you’re writing for. As a member, when you read what someone has written, does it work? How do you receive it as part of that community? Is the author’s intention coming through? Then you give your answers and your feedback based on that.

Grace: And how is the process of beta reading fanfiction different than traditional editing?

Lorrie: The fact that you’re not trying to sell something, that you’re not trying to write to market, it removes a dimension that can be really stressful. Because part of when you’re editing for market is you’re trying to predict what people spend their money on, but if you’re beta reading as a member of a community, the fanfic community, where authors write and release chapters regularly and then readers respond instantaneously, there’s so much conversation happening. You always get a lot of information about what people are looking for, what strikes them as resonant or true. It’s a lot more supportive in that sense because also with traditional publishing, you write the book and then you edit it and two years later, after you’ve written the last word, it gets published. Then maybe somebody reads it and writes you a two-note review that says, “Oh, I love this! It made me cry.” 

Grace: Right.

Lorrie: “Okay. What parts?” That’s nice, that’s great. That’s so much better than people saying nothing. But with fanfic, you get, “This is the exact word you used,” and, “This is where I thought it was going and this is where you took it.” It’s very minute. It’s line-by-line. 

Grace: That was something I was thinking about, when you brought it up, was how people release chapter by chapter, and I actually… I don’t really know anything about the editing process of a novel or a traditional book to be published. Is it usually sending like a first draft and then you receive edits on the whole thing? Because I was thinking about how fanfiction is just more as you write, you are getting feedback continuously for each part.

Lorrie: Yeah. The fanfiction model is like serial fiction that you read about from the 19th century where there would be a new installment every week or every month, and people can change it in response to current events or feedback. That can be also not a great thing, but it’s just a different dynamic from a novel that arrives between covers completely finished in one big thunk. For novel editing, the traditionally published sort, as the writer you’re going to be getting feedback probably from quite a few different people in addition to your actual editor or publisher, so you might very well be workshopping with your friends and doing bit by bit. But when it comes to dealing with your publisher, there’s a couple rounds of “here’s the finished draft” and then you get back comments. I don’t know anyone for whom getting back the comments is an easy feeling. It’s stressful.

Grace: I have one friend who is a screenwriter, and his way of dealing with things is when he gets notes back from the studio executives he just tells them they’re right, and then he doesn’t change anything. That’s what he has. That’s been his system for the past decade, because their ideas are often very bad. Really, really bad. So he just tells them, “Yes, good job! You’re right, studio executive!” and he does not change his work. So far, it’s actually worked for him instead of arguing with them, but he’s in a different position and screenwriting, making TV, is also a different process.

Lorrie: Oh, life is hard.

Grace: Life is hard. (laughs) Yeah, I wasn’t even thinking… on the Hollywood side of things, I’m used to considerations when reading a script about ‘will this sell?’ ‘Is there a market for this?’ Even things like product placement, those are all unfortunately things that are major factors in something getting made. But I really don’t know the traditional publishing side of it. I hadn’t considered how much selling the book and marketing the book was a consideration when you’re receiving feedback from an editor.

Lorrie: Yeah. I mean, there are trends. In previous decades, there was a vampire trend…

Grace: Right.

Lorrie: Dystopia trends or whatever, so it can very easily be that you have a great novel that’s not in fashion right now and they know that it can’t sell.

Grace: Wow. I was interested when you talked about workshopping a novel with friends, sharing your writing as you go along. I’ve been very amused the past few years here in LA by the surprise my screenwriter friends express when they send me their screenplays and I read them and I send feedback. Multiple times, I have friends… some of the most talented writers I know are shocked when they send me their script. I will read it. I’m wondering your thoughts on that. Is that normal? Do you have this experience, too? Are most writers just expecting their friends to not read their work? I don’t know why it’s so surprising!

Lorrie: I think it partly depends on how much responsibility you’re willing to take for the process and gift of reflecting a person back to themselves. That is a hard thing to do if you’re not ready to be big enough to do that, because people being what we are, everyone gets a little bit crazy when we hear feedback about how we come across to the world. Okay, so you’ve put your true self into this screenplay. No matter how cynical or polished or expert you are, there’s some of your true vulnerable self in there. And then you wait to hear how much your self-image is in accord with what people got from it, how much you can trust that, and if you think, “Okay, that’s what artists do, that’s what friends do is we open space and hold space open for each other so that we carefully pay attention to each other and then reflect each other back”? It’s a lot of work and it’s loving. It’s a hard thing to do if there isn’t trust between the two people. It can also be hard when you’re the artist receiving feedback that even if it’s right, you’re not ready to hear it.

Grace: Yes, that’s true.

Lorrie: And there’s so many ways in which we humans are intimidated by each other, especially if it’s somebody who’s a very experienced screenwriter. I can really imagine a lot of people thinking, “Well, I don’t have anything to say to them. My feedback isn’t that important. It looks good to me. I don’t even know what I’m looking for.” But all of these things are so personal and vulnerable and can verge easily into the neurotic. It’s really hard to explain to somebody, first of all, to find out — what did the person want from you when they passed you their screenplay?

Grace: Good point.

Lorrie: What were they hoping for? What is it that they want but they don’t know they wanted because they’ve never gotten it? What if your take on it is so vivid and so far from their take on it that it would have been better to not even start? It’s really people’s very raw selves meeting and possibly colliding or making trouble for each other or for yourself. Screenplays, by definition, have to be about something that’s harrowing emotionally, so that’s already one of the dangers going in, which is what makes it thrilling and vital. But you already have to be super careful, so it’s a medium that you’re comfortable with and that level of intensity is something that you understand and you know to expect — then that’s a gift already that not everyone has. If you take just someone who doesn’t live in that world, who thinks of writing as something that is about the everyday and not about large things that are so emotional that you can make a whole movie around, it’s a different scale. Also, people have a hard time knowing if they can express things properly, what they’re feeling, in a way that can translate and land in a helpful manner to the original artist. That’s so many steps all at once and all of them are pretty volatile; this is one of those, like, talking and chewing gum and riding a bike things. If you can do it, then you have mastered a whole bunch of skills at once, which when after you know how to do it might seem okay but learning each of them one at a time is hard. Some of these things, the only way to learn is by making mistakes that hurt, which is… well, that’s how it is.

Grace: Yeah, on both sides. Asking the wrong person to view an early draft, or on the friend side not understanding what someone needed when they sent you their work and therefore sending back the wrong kind of feedback. You bring up a really good point and now I’m wondering: Do you usually ask people, “What are you looking for in feedback from me?”

Lorrie: That’s a whole process; that’s half of it. There’s a lot of different kinds of editing. Definitely if the person just wants, “Could you just read it and tell me I’m fine?” That is completely legitimate and there are different ways that you can do that. “Do you mean you’re fine like your parents aren’t going to come kill you? Do you mean you’re fine like given the requirements, this is good enough? What do you need?” Getting the writer to talk about it is a big part of it, and that’s not just to find out what they want from me. Just to get them to talk about it, that’s a large part of what people want when they come to an editor for feedback anyway, is “Okay, well, I put all of my effort into making this thing, so of course I could not be thinking about it at the same time. so now that I’ve got it to a stopping place, can you help me think about it?” Sometimes I thought, “Well, maybe it’s a piece of writing that’s a thousand words long that’s due in a week or it’s due tomorrow. Maybe it’s getting paid, maybe it’s not getting paid. Maybe it’s completely nothing, but it actually is going to impress some people if you do it right. Or on the other hand, I’ve also edited people’s college, grad school, and med school application essays. There was one time when I asked somebody, “How much do you want to hear from me?” Because I knew that if I said everything I was thinking, every single thing that I thought they should go back and change, it was a lot. And this person just looked at me and said, “I want to get in,” and I said, “Okay!” 

Grace: Good for them. 

Lorrie: Yeah, and I was really rough on them, but that’s what they wanted. Finding out what they want, that conversation is so valuable in itself and that’s a big part of it. Then my goal after that is that I want to get everything closer together: what the person wants, what the writing assignment requires, and if it seems to me as the reader that the effect they’re having is the one that they hoped for. Does it sound like them? Yeah, basically what I want is, “Let’s see if we can make this sound like you.” What they’re looking for, what they’re trying to write for, how much work they want to put in, how much time they have, that all goes into creating the end goal. The image of the end goal that I have in mind is so I can say, “Okay, this is done. This is you.” Even if I help them with every single word, it should be that at the end, if somebody reads it and then asks them any question about it, the person should be able to answer completely, like obviously this was written by them.

Grace: I love that. And you mean this about all writing? Not just like applications with college essays?

Lorrie: If you’re writing ad copy, then your originality or your selfhood or your authentic voice doesn’t matter as much, but there’s a whole different set of requirements — oh! I spent some years working as an editor for English translation captions of Korean TV shows and movies.

Grace: Amazing! I didn’t even know that. Wow.

Lorrie: Including K-pop variety shows. Now, I wasn’t actually seeing the variety shows. I was getting the already-translated English captions and I was editing them to be native English and also to fit into the character and screen limits.

Grace: Wow, what an interest– so you weren’t watching the actual video? That’s interesting.

Lorrie: The challenges here partly were: how much information can you fit? How can you rephrase things? They might not be literally a translation, but they get the right mood across in the shortest amount of time. I got really good at knowing how many letters were on a line, and there are things that you can translate literally that are correct but they don’t have the mood at all, so you have to be really confident. Yeah, and in that sense you do still want the authentic voice to come through and you have to know when it’s better to completely change the translation but keep the original meaning so that the voice comes through, versus when you should be telling the audience this is the exact word that they use, only translated so you can translate it back if you want to.

Grace: This is making me think of last year, when there was a lot of debate about Squid Game and the dub for Squid Game, which was interesting for me to observe because I had a lot of actor friends who were the voice actors for the English dub. I know a lot of the Korean actors, Americans, who were voicing the English dub, and some people were really critical of the writing, about the meaning changing and certain lines because of whoever did the translation at Netflix. Now, that’s nothing to do with the actors; they’re just reading the translation. 

Lorrie: But it does have to do with them, too, because they have to get the original meaning across, even if the words contradict them.

Grace: And they have to deal with getting a lot of internet flak when people don’t like the dub, and the actual script isn’t something they were in control of. 

Lorrie: Yeah, that’s exactly the kind of thing I did.

Grace: Wow. Well, that’s a whole other episode now that I wanna do. That is very exciting. I can’t believe I didn’t know you did that. That is so cool.

Lorrie: It was in the 20th century, so you wouldn’t have been around to ask me about it. 

Grace: Well, I’m glad I know now so that I can ask you in this century. Just starting the feedback process with questions is clearly so important. It’s so important to know what your role is as the editor, what to ask for as the friend, and I’m sure it also just differs based on medium and what the project is for, if it’s paid, who it’s going out to next, all of that. But I myself, at least when reading friends’ screenplays, I have a system for how I send feedback, and I’m wondering if you do. Do you have a system for sending feedback? Do you have rules or boundaries you keep in mind when sending feedback on others’ writing? How do you usually break it down?

Lorrie: I have so many, and it differs according to each case. Maybe you could tell me a couple of yours and then… 

Grace: Sure. If a friend sends me a draft of something, usually a second or third draft at that point, something that’s close and they’re asking for notes, I send my feedback in the form of questions because for me, when I receive feedback that way, that’s really helpful and affirming. It’s not saying “change this part.” It’s someone engaging with my work in detail and pointing out the areas that can be expanded. That’s usually how I do it with friends, is I say, “I love this part, but I want to learn more about this character’s past. Why did they mention this thing?” I’m trying to think of a better example, but “Why is this person’s job this way?” I basically break down anything that needs to be gone into further in the form of a question, so that they have the opportunity to at least… even it doesn’t make it into the script. Flesh out the character more, then put that in, the shades of that, the colors of that, in the next draft. I start with a couple sentences of what I liked about it, and then I just send a long list of questions about specific moments, characters, maybe a character history that I would like expanded, all so that they can think about that as they go through the next draft. Just deep in the character work for the most part.

Lorrie: Oh, that’s nice. So you’re seeing underneath the surface of everything.

Grace: Yeah. I think, especially as an actor, that’s what I can contribute. Whether you’re sending me a horror script or a comedy, that’s what I can be helpful with: the psychology of characters and their motivations, getting a little bit more history on each of them, even if it doesn’t make it into the final draft. It’s important that the writer really knows the characters well enough to make them come across as authentic.

Lorrie: Okay. So I’m realizing that I do have… the standard approach that I have for everybody is a first read and I liveblog it. It’s email or text or whatever, but it’s liveblogging. It’s not that they get it all at once with all of my comments along the way; it’s more I will send them in real time. If it’s fiction, then I’ll say, “Oh, I don’t know where you’re going with this, but I’m really intrigued.” Then two minutes later, I’ll say, “Wow, this is really suspenseful,” and then a minute later, “Oh, I can’t believe you did that cliffhanger to me! I hate you!” To which the author will then write back, “Hee hee,” or something. Then I’ll say, “Okay, I don’t know if this is where you’re going with this, but this, plus that, plus this, plus that makes me wonder and hope if in chapter five we’re going to see this!” Then if there’s a little inside joke that’s like a little Easter egg for the reader to pick up, I’ll notice that, and I’m like, “Oh, this was really clever.” Then there’ll be times where I’ll say, “Okay, what did you try… what did you want to get across with this character moment? If you meant that the reader should think this about the character, then you didn’t write it enough. You should go back and make that clearer. But if you meant this other thing and I’m getting completely the wrong impression, then these are the four words that made me think that, so you should go back and change them because this is where it led me to think you’re going. If you want to leave it up to the reader, then these words are too definite; you should make them more ambiguous. Or is there somewhere else you were going with this that I didn’t catch?” Usually when I do something like that, authors will say this was super useful. Most of the things that I throw out there as possibilities that came to me as a reader were not even relevant to what they were doing, but it gives them a sense of where they’re coming across very strongly and where they have to go back and clarify what they’re trying to do. If they’re trying to do that thing where you put in a little hint here and a little hint there so that it’s going to pay off later, I try to tell them how well that’s working and how fast that’s happening. What’s super, super important is that no matter how successful an artist is, they always want to hear what part of their art worked well. In a 400-page novel, if you say at the end, “Okay, that was really good,” that’s not going to feed the artist as much as saying, “Chapter 3, paragraph 1: this turn of phrase was amazing and make me think of the whole novel differently. I thought you were going to say this word, but you said that word and then suddenly I understood everything. That’s really good.” And even if somebody has been doing this for decades and is a prize-winning author: if you assume that they’ve already heard all the praise and they don’t need it from you, then what you unintentionally do is create a document of nothing but criticisms, and that feels like crap.

Grace: What a wonderful point! Oh my gosh!

Lorrie: So when you look at balance… when you, as an editor, are creating a document of feedback, you want to balance it. Suppose you thought it was 99% gorgeous, and then, “Oh, there’s this 1% that you have a personal problem, and you have to deal with it or this story is not going to work,” then your feedback should reflect what percentage of it was wonderful and worth saving and worth the effort. If it comes back, “Oh, this was really good,” but like 60% of your commentary is about the problem area, that’s going to end up not conveying the correct message to the author.

Grace: Do you have an experience that you can share about when someone suggested edits for your writing in a way that felt good? (Lorrie giggles) Are you laughing because you don’t or because you do? Oh no!

Lorrie: The worst. Yes, I do. I do have a story of a time that was… I have a few stories that were great, actually.

Grace: Okay, good. 

Lorrie: Because mostly… there’s an image I have of myself when I’m getting feedback on my writing, like automatic nail guns, except what if they’re broken and they just keep shooting nails and you can’t turn them off. I’m so defensive. I don’t know how anyone can handle feedback on their own writing. Oh my gosh. Yes, this is, in fact, what I do. One time… oh, this was a long time ago. I started to understand that writing rules are different by genre. I didn’t know that. For example, people say, “show, don’t tell.” That is totally wrong for, say, critical non-fiction. I have friends who trained as novelists, who then went to grad school in some other subject and didn’t understand why this terrible way of telling and not showing was getting good grades. I remember being… it was my first class in grad school, and the professor said, “Why did you not put this important piece of information up front?” And I thought, “Oh, because you’re supposed to build to it. You’re supposed to put all the evidence, and then when you have gathered all the evidence, then you’re supposed to lead the reader to the inevitable conclusion and win the argument.” She said, “No. Front-load it.” No one had ever explained that to me before. That’s like starting a novel with the ending, and then the rest of it’s just… blah blah blah. No one had taught me that, and that changed so much of the way I thought. I had also been taught how to edit newspaper articles in the inverted triangle, inverted pyramid scheme. You just order paragraphs in order of importance. Suppose someone had in a previous life been a librarian. Does that affect the article? Well, it’s good information, but suppose they have to cut it for length. If people chop off from the bottom, then the whole rest of the article should still make sense. I thought, “Wow, that is completely different from the academic writing.” When I got told things like that and then they explained why and they explained how the order I had things in wouldn’t work for this purpose, but if you changed it to this other order, then that would convey what my readers would be looking for… I guess I love when people make explicit the unspoken rules because they’re real, but not everyone knows them in the first place and not everyone can articulate them. But when you can identify them and explain them clearly, it makes a lot of things easier. So, that I remember. And then there’s this one specific time that was like the clouds parting and the angels singing. This was somebody for whom I had betaed a million words of fanfiction. Literally a million words. She was my favorite fanfiction writer, so to me I couldn’t believe I had the privilege, but of course from her point of view she couldn’t believe I was doing all this labor. We both thought we were lucky, which is a great position to be in. But then one time I had to write an essay for an anthology and it was due the next day. I was writing up to the last second, and I was so stressed and my draft was literally double the word count that it needed to be. This friend said, “Give it to me. You go to bed.” Okay! I guess she felt like after all that I had done for her, she could do this for me, so I went to bed. I woke up, and she had magically cut it in half so it was exactly the right word length by going through all the stuff I had written, picking out the most relevant things that would relate off of each other to make a coherent article. Some of the things she cut out were just excess words; some were good points, but they didn’t play well with the others. Some were just weak and I didn’t need them. Whatever it was, I don’t remember exactly but it was something like going from 8,000 to 4,000 words. It was a big cut.

Grace: That’s a good friend. 

Lorrie: Oh my god! I had to remind myself, “Oh, yeah. I guess betaing a million words of fanfic over several years, I don’t have to… I can just say thank you for this gift.” I didn’t have to do a damn thing and it was all my own work; she just took what was most successful about it, which at that point I couldn’t tell.

Grace: Right. I’m saying that’s such a good friend, and yeah, you definitely earned it over a million words of betaing their fanfiction. Wow, what a relief that is. What a gift, though. Was it all done in one night?

Lorrie: Yeah. It was actually done in four hours, because I was pushing the deadline so desperately that I actually only got four hours of sleep. But during those four hours, she did that for me. 

Grace: So you’re you’re currently working on revisions for a new edition of your book, which is called Snape: The Definitive Analysis. I will definitely link in the show notes, but the new edition comes out this fall, right? In this edition, you hired sensitivity readers for a segment that explores some transgender themes in Harry Potter. For people who don’t know, can you tell us what a sensitivity reader is?

Lorrie: It’s someone who has experience with what is usually a minority perspective and can help a writer just by sharing their lived experience, sharing how they perceive something. No one can write equally, accurately, about all kinds of people, but if you want to center or not dishonor somebody, you can say, “Could you please read this and tell me if I’m unintentionally being offensive, if I’m being ignorant, if there are things I should be saying?” “How does this come across to you, and why?” Unlike when minority people have to do unpaid labor explaining and educating, a sensitivity reader is somebody who is both taking one for the team and getting paid. It’s having the labor be acknowledged, because just like every other skill, some people enjoy it, some people are good at it. Some people maybe don’t enjoy it, but it’s such a valuable thing to contribute that they like doing it, or can do it here and there when they have the energy.

Grace: Was this your first time hiring a sensitivity reader or several?

Lorrie: I think so, yeah. Instead of just having friends tell me, I think this is the first time I went out looking for people who did it, who had their fees and their policies up on their websites. Yes.

Grace: And how did feedback from sensitivity readers change your editing process?

Lorrie: Because I set out on purpose hoping to center what I heard from them… I hired one sensitivity reader who is professional and this is what they do. I also hired 10 community people, friends of friends, that responded to my call with a set fee for like an hour or less worth of work. Because obviously with sensitivity reading, it’s so based on your personal experience that if you ask somebody completely different, who knows what overlap there will be? So getting a lot of different voices is obviously going to show the common areas. Part of it showed me where it would be okay to go with my reading, even though it wasn’t resonating with some people, just because that’s the nature of writing. And part of it showed me, ‘Oh, this one thread that I thought would be important to people is even more important than I thought and has to be completely unambiguous.’ Oh, okay! The best thing I think I got out of it was support for my confidence in telling editors, “Yes, I know this is a very minority viewpoint. I’m absolutely certain that I want to center it, and I know that most people reading this won’t identify with this viewpoint, but it’s important and it’s on purpose and I’m going to do that.” I want to make it so that the one in a hundred readers who feels really affected by this feels like, “Okay, this is good, this is what I was looking for,” and the other 99 could be saying, “This is not at all what I was expecting. What?” I needed back up, and I certainly didn’t have it from my personal experience. I had suspicions. I had things that I think I wanted to say, and then talking to people, “How do you receive this? How do you perceive it?” That made it a much more rounded idea. It’s an area where I don’t have personal authority, but I do have things that I want to get across, and it helped me. Just the relief of knowing that at least for these sensitivity readers, I wasn’t offending them. That’s a big relief off my mind.

Grace: Yeah, that’s a huge relief, especially the example that we’re talking about is just such a difficult and emotionally loaded conversation right now, and it’s in the community you are writing for specifically. I don’t know if you talked about it with the new publisher, I don’t know what the conversation was with them, but it is so important to talk about. But it’s scary, of course, when getting a bunch of people on board who can ease your anxiety and help you through it. That’s hugely important.

Lorrie: The feedback from the publishers was very much one of those deals where they’ve got my draft, and they said I either had to do it a lot more or take it out. But I knew what I wanted to say and I wasn’t that authoritative in knowing how to say it. The end result was not convincing, and that’s when I realized, “Oh, hey, sensitivity readers exist! This is a great time to ask somebody who is willing to educate me to please do so.”

Grace: I love that sensitivity readers exist. I just think it’s such an incredible resource for writers, especially if people are grumbly about the time we’re in. I see all the time people, writers, grumbling about maybe getting feedback that they shouldn’t write from a certain character’s perspective because they don’t know that experience, or this character seemed tokenized. I’m like, “You can just go further in. You can do that work, you can write that character, but you absolutely can also hire sensitivity readers to help you through the process and that will save you a lot of pain. It will make your writing better.” I’ve been hired as a sensitivity reader for a website, and that was so cool. I really took my time with it and I was so thorough and it felt so good to be paid for that work, but it feels so good to also just help someone’s website attract the right clients in the right way. It was an amazing experience for me, as well.

Lorrie: I did work as a sensitivity reader. This experience was the one that made me understand just how much beta reading can be better for authors than traditional novel editing. I couldn’t believe this friend asked me; the novel — it was published posthumously — it’s called Tree Of Cats and it’s by Ellis Avery, who went to school with me and died a few years ago. She was an incredible writer whose books won awards for literary fiction, and she taught creative writing at Columbia. At one point, I get this email from her saying, “Could you do a sensitivity read for my YA novel?” which was written from the point of view of a Black, young teen girl, and Ellis was white. That was one of the issues: “Am I being arrogant to think that I can write this at all? Should I not be doing it? Am I doing more harm than good by writing this? Could you look into it and tell me what you think?” I thought, “I don’t know what I have to offer.” My respect for her writing was and is enormous, but okay. I guess I’ll just do what I do. You can take it or leave it. I did the liveblogging response that I do with my fanfiction authors, and Ellis went nuts with joy. No one had ever done that for her, where I say, “Oh, is this going to happen?” Then when there was a moment of payoff, I would write in all caps, “I CAN’T BELIEVE THAT! I DIDN’T SEE THAT COMING AT ALL!” and it just made her so happy. It was real-time, engaging with the words more like how a writer experiences them, instead of just all at once in a sealed-off, set time. It turned out that my feedback was worth more than I was afraid, and the sensitivity read aspect of it really was… It’s not a question of, “How dare you appropriate a different kind of voice. You should never even dare to do it.” No. That’s, in my opinion, going in the wrong direction that’s more afraid. Less toward understanding and having empathy. It’s more like… Books are written word by word. If you get an impression of tentative race uncertainty, or ignorance, those impressions are created word by word and you can address them word by word. You can say, “This word shows that you were nervous. Try using these words instead.” “Why don’t you cut out this line entirely?” “Here, instead of saying this, why don’t you focus on what that person was feeling or what it reminded them of?” Word by word. This is a different and much more micro level of hand-holding than the same author will need for areas in which they’re confident. That’s fine; that’s what a sensitivity reader does. It also gives implicit permission for that person to be ignorant or offensive and mess up, which you have to do on your way to being a good writer. The other thing that I learned from that experience was, “Wow, she paid me what felt to me like a fortune! I’ve been doing this for free!”  For the beta writing. 

Grace: Right, right. I love that. And it felt so good for her to to receive it in that style, too, so it’s just a win-win all around. You’re introducing her, as well, to this, it sounds like, much more enjoyable process of receiving feedback, while also being paid well for something you have been doing millions of words of for free. 

Lorrie: I had done paid editing before, but during the interim when I did all the free beta reading, I realized I didn’t… she told me her budget and I knew it was going to take me longer than that, so I told her, “Well, I’m just not going to charge you for my first read. I’m just going to take my time as much as I want, and then I’ll charge you for when I start writing comments.” Then I realized, ‘Okay, this is the fanfiction economy, or anything you do for love. You don’t have to compromise on quality because of the budget.” There are times when sure, it’d be lovely to rewrite that four times, but come on. Client’s waiting, deadline’s happening, can’t pay you for that anyway. Fanfiction or any fandom or love project is like, “No, you get to geek out until you’re happy. It’s for joy only, and so you can.” I have put much higher quality of work into it.

Grace: Wow. What a great point. 

Lorrie: It kind of hurts to say, doesn’t it? 

Grace: Well, it does, but it’s also why every long-term collaborator I have is someone I met through fandom. Any long-term project.

Lorrie: You can just do it until it feels good.

Grace: Exactly. It’s funny because I’ve never thought about it that way, but yeah, that’s the unspoken understanding. As artists, we’re coming from that same experience of doing great work for the love of it as a fan, and so we’re willing to put that time in, then, as artists.

Lorrie: And you don’t have to feel bad if you’re slow. I saw this change happening in the fan creator community a couple decades ago. It was considered very shameful and embarrassing to do fan writing, that it wasn’t paid, it’s not real. If you’re a real writer, you’d be getting contracts and getting paid.

Grace: You can’t see my eye roll, but it’s there.

Lorrie: It’s real, and as it turns out the exact same people write pro and fan. There came some push-back when fan creators, tired of being shamed, started timidly saying, “You know what? Not only should I not be shamed, but actually the fan stuff I read is better than the pro-published stuff.” I thought, It’s not all sour grapes. The pro-published stuff has a deadline; whether you’re done or not, you turn it in.

Grace: So true. Well, now we have the examples of Oscar-winning directors and huge artists openly saying, “Oh, I wrote fanfiction. I write fanfiction,” which is really exciting because the culture around it has changed so much.

Lorrie: Yeah. It’s been fun watching the reality of that seep in to people.

Grace: Do you have a special process or routine for editing your own work, or do you have rewards you give yourself upon completion?

Lorrie: I have a process for when it’s not working, which is: if you just go through it several times, in the end it’ll be better than it was. If you’re not feeling it, if the magic isn’t happening but you signed up for this, then just go through it more times. At a time when my brain is really just blah, I’ll say, “Okay, I’m going to edit this thing eight times beginning to end, and by the time it’s done, it’ll be great. It’ll be good enough. Done. Finished. Maybe not my greatest or most inspired work, but nothing to be ashamed of.” If it’s happening properly and I’m inspired, it might be two or three times. When I learned that that trick actually works, where you don’t have to catch everything on every editing pass, but if you just make yourself do it, no matter how much in rote manner, you will catch something.

Grace: It’s always nice to hear stories as well where an author or writer of any kind — not admits, but shares how many times the thing was rewritten. One of my all-time favorite movies is this movie Mid ’90s that was written and directed by Jonah Hill, who is known for being an actor. This was his directorial debut, and I when I saw the movie I saw it at a screening that he was at where he did a talk back Q&A after, and he said, “Oh, I’ve been writing this movie for 10 years. This has been through more rewrites, more drafts than you can even imagine; it was 10 years that I wrote this.” I was like, “Oh, I love this so much! You took your damn time with it.”

Lorrie: Yeah. It’s reassuring.

Grace: Exactly, reassuring. That’s what I’d call it, too. Well, Lorrie, there’s so much more we can talk about. Even editing podcasts and editing film; there’s just so many perspectives we can come to with this. But in the interest of keeping on a schedule, of editing this down, I’ll close out the conversation for now and just ask you… well, it’s been so good having you here. I’ve learned so much, by the way. I’ve been writing notes down because I’m learning so much, but until next time I have you back, I’ll just ask you: what is the Art Life?

Lorrie: The Art Life is the reason why we exist at all. It’s the thing we get to do. Grace, what is the Art Life?

Grace: The Art Life is going in the direction of empathy. I loved when you said that, and I’m going to be thinking about that one a lot. I will link to your Twitter and your book. Is there anywhere else you would like me to link? Where can people support your art?

Lorrie: Oh, I just had this brilliant web designer re-do my website. It’s LorrieKim.com, and she made it look so good! I’m so pleased. She’s a brilliant novelist herself. I felt cool working with her. Mira T. Lee.

Grace: Oh, that’s so exciting! I can’t wait to check it out. Well, I’ll be looking at your website today! Awesome.

Lorrie: Well, this cures my missing you. It’s nice to talk to you.

Grace: Well, it doesn’t cure mine because I miss you even more now, but I’m glad that you’re feeling better. This was such a good conversation. I’ve written so many things down myself, I feel like I just learned so much. I’m so excited to have you back to talk about your new edition of your book when it comes out; maybe even an episode on The Art of Translation. But until then, thank you so much for being on the show. I can’t wait to hear what people think. I know so many of our listeners also come from fandom, and I think they’ll be really excited to hear about your perspective on fanfiction and all of it, really. Thank you so much.

Lorrie: Thank you for having me. And yeah, it’s just great to talk to you. 

Grace: You, too. It was just the best. So until next time, from my side of the world, a good afternoon.

Lorrie: And from my side of the world… Ooh, it’s time for afternoon tea.

Grace: I like it. Cheers.

Lorrie: Cheers. Bye.

Grace: Bye.

Transcript by Deannah M. Robinson, deannahm03@gmail.com