Jack Heffron was my editor at Writer’s Digest Books for almost a decade, and we have been teaching colleagues for going on six years now.I still have the editorial letter he wrote to me after he’d read Writing Personal Essays:How to Shape Your Life Experiences for the Page, my second book on writing and the one he acquired for Writer’s Digest Books. His notes and observations and suggestions for making the book shine are still inspiring to me.Having the opportunity to produce three more books for Writer’s Digest Books while Jack was there and now learning from him every summer remain career highlights for me.I thought Writing It Real Subscribers would like to know more about Jack’s career and catch a glimpse of a busy editor/writer’s life, so I corresponded with Jack for an email interview.

Sheila
When did you decide to become a writer or that you were a writer?

Jack
I can’t remember not wanting to be a writer. I used to write stories even as a little kid, using my toy soldiers as the characters, then writing them out on paper. I used characters from my favorite TV shows in stories I created myself. I read a lot of history back then, and I would write stories involving historical figures. None of that was a particularly conscious vocational choice. It’s just what I liked to do. In high school I wrote for the school newspaper. In college I was an English major and took as many creative writing courses as possible. After college, I did have to choose between writing and music. (I performed in dance bands throughout high school and college.) So that was a conscious decision. Otherwise, it just seemed inevitable that I would be a writer.

Sheila
Where did you study writing?How did you decide to study there?

Jack
I studied writing as an undergraduate the University of Cincinnati, primarily working with Dallas Wiebe and Austin Wright. I received an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Alabama, working with Don Hendrie, Alan Wier, Valerie Martin, and Chase Twichell. At Alabama I also was able to work with Andre Dubus. Dallas Wiebe recommended the program at Alabama. There were far fewer MFA programs at that time — the early 80s — than exist today. The program at Alabama was young and energetic, trying to establish itself as a leading program in the country, so it was an exciting time to be there.

Sheila
What were some of the most memorable and valuable lessons you learned in graduate school?

 Jack
In school I learned a lot of discipline. I learned that you have to have talent, but talent will take you only so far. The rest of it is just working very hard, reading a lot, keeping your eyes open, and being patient. I was fortunate to have a lot of great teachers, and part of what made them great was that they were demanding, which was what I needed. Some were nurturing but mostly they figured that if you’re serious about writing, then you have to dedicate yourself to it. There were no shortcuts. All my teachers in grad school — Hendrie, Wier, Martin, Dubus, Twichell — taught me quite a bit. I feel very lucky to have had the chance to work with them.

Sheila
When did you go into publishing?What was your route to where you are today in the publishing world?

Jack
The standard vocational route after grad school is teaching, and I did teach for a year as a lecturer, but I found myself applying for jobs that I didn’t really want — and not even getting an interview. I didn’t want to spend the next ten years fighting to get two-year contracts at tiny schools in uninteresting places. My plan was to move back home to Cincinnati for a year, save some money, and then head to New York, where a few friends from grad school already had landed jobs.

Publishing seemed a viable alternative to teaching. Teaching offers many rewards and plenty of time to write. There’s also something wonderful about a life in academe, in a place that values knowledge and learning. But there’s something exciting about publishing too. I’ve always liked the energy of it, the challenge, even the competitive nature of it.

Sheila
Did you get to New York?

Jack
It just so happened that at the time, Lois and Dick Rosenthal decided to resurrect the legendary “Story” magazine. I began as a part-time reader, working with Lois, the editor, and then worked full-time in putting together the first issue. “Story” was owned by F&W Publications, which also owned a number of book lines, including Writer’s Digest. My plan at the time was to work for a short while, learn the publishing business, and then head to New York. I didn’t imagine that “Story” would last more than a year or two. But the magazine went on to spectacular success. I ended up staying at F&W for nearly 14 years, eventually becoming editorial director of 4 lines of books, 2 of which I started.

I’ve been at Emmis Books now for nearly three years, and it’s far and away the best job I’ve ever had — the most fulfilling and the most fun.

Sheila

What makes it the most fun and so fulfilling?

Jack
I enjoy the variety of projects I have now, and I still enjoy working with authors. I also enjoy learning about the marketplace — what works and what doesn’t and how to do things better than we did them the last time. And as editorial director at a start-up, I see the company’s book list becoming a reflection of my vision. No one is telling me what to publish — a scary but fun proposition. I’m also fortunate to work with a great group of people.

Sheila
How do your graduate studies come to bear on your work today?

Jack
Because my degree and much of my early training is in fiction, you’d think it would be difficult to focus mostly on editing nonfiction. But good narrative nonfiction relies heavily on story, and that’s something nonfiction writers have a hard time understanding. They do the research and put together the facts, but sometimes they don’t understand how to tell a story, how to shape those facts into a story that will compel a reader to keep turning the pages.

Sheila
How do you continue to write and publish your own work while being a busy editor?

Jack
I still do some of my own writing, but too little. Between the long hours at work and spending time with my sons, ages 15 and 13, there’s barely enough time to sleep. I’m not a person who needs much sleep, so that helps. But I hope some day to be in a position to do more of my own writing. I write an occasional piece of journalism, but that’s rare.

Sheila
Do you do as much fiction writing now as you do creative nonfiction?

Jack

For a number of years now I’ve been drawn much more to creative nonfiction than to fiction. In some ways, that’s always been true, though I didn’t realize it. As a fiction writer I saw journalism as a dull collecting of facts, with little use of imagination, little emphasis on language. At the same time, I loved the New Journalists — Tom Wolff, Joan Didion, George Plimpton. Their pieces had wonderful stories and wonderful language, they showed the readers how the world works, and they were insightful and funny and moving. In the 90s there was a renaissance of that type of journalism, and I was instinctively drawn to it. The boundaries between fiction and nonfiction were less pronounced. Fiction, for me, had gotten a bit soft, a bit too internalized, too separate from the world. Not completely, of course, but it seemed to lack the energy and immediacy of what was being called creative nonfiction.

Sheila
How do you use the craft of fiction that you studied in your nonfiction writing?

Jack
In creative nonfiction, the skills of fiction writing are essential — telling a good story, putting characters on the page in a vivid way, relying on a perceptive ear for language — the way people speak. It required the ability to choose the right details, to suggest nuance. In the past, for me, fiction held greater power because it relied heavily on subtext and inference while nonfiction seemed to be mostly just delivering the information. But with creative nonfiction, subtext, inference, and indirection can be very important. And those skills really aren’t new. Joseph Mitchell was using them way back in the 1940s. I just didn’t realize it, didn’t know how to write that way yet.

Sheila
What advice do you have for those writing creative nonfiction?

Jack
For people who want to write creative nonfiction — whether it’s a memoir, a travel book, a book of investigative journalism — the key is understanding the nature of story. And sometimes that story needs to evolve slowly; our awareness of its depth and complexity will grow and we need to be open to the change, to allow them to happen. Writers seem better able to do that in fiction. They’ll allow a story to, at least in part, dictate its own focus and shape. But in nonfiction, for some reason, they tend to force those things. They sit down to write “a book about my mother’s illness” or “a book about what it’s like to live on a ranch in Utah” or “a book about my observations of Hong Kong” and the stories often end up limited. They don’t grow. My advice, if I might presume, is to allow the story to find its own shape, through staying open to new ideas as you write.

Sheila
Can you describe how that works?

Jack
Here’s an example. I edited a book by the toy designer who created the He-Man action figure. In the draft that he sent to me, his primary focus was proving that he, indeed, was the creator. But his draft sounded defensive and self-indulgent. It was a polemic proving he was the creator. That’s an article, not a book, and I doubt that he’d have been able to sell that book. Most He-Man fans don’t care much about who actually invented it. They want to know about the creative process involved, the influences that led to the creation, the behind-the scenes world of the toy business. And so we had to recast the entire project, weaving through it the history of action figures and toy soldiers, giving it a much more engaging and informative tone, broadening the scope of the book. The book turned out very well — a fascinating look at a world few of us know about while revealing parallels between the creator and the figure that even the author had never seen before. It became a book that’s about much more than a toy and who invented it. In another case, a woman came to me with a biography of her grandfather, who was a Hall of Fame baseball player back in the teens and twenties. Only a serious fan would know of him today. We couldn’t publish such a book. But she is a good writer and I noticed in one chapter of her draft she focused on the 1919 World Series (the famous Black Sox scandal), in which her grandfather played for the Reds, and she presented some striking new information about the fix on the Series, details she gleaned from long interviews with her grandfather, details that had never been written about before. We recast the book to place the dramatic focus on the Series, which gave the book an engaging arc of story that many readers will enjoy. The particulars of her grandfather’s life before and after the Series are woven throughout. And so instead of a sweet but somewhat dull biography of a long-dead player that the author probably would have to publish herself, we have a book that already is already getting a buzz among baseball fans and writers and will receive national attention when it’s published in February of next year. It’s my job as an editor to see the real story in a project and to tease that story to the foreground. I coach the authors throughout the process, helping them to make their books far better than they thought possible. In that way, an editor’s job is very gratifying and requires a firm grasp of an idea’s possibilities. Writers who are willing to explore the possibilities of an idea have a much greater chance of success.

In my own work, I try to stay open to various approaches and possibilities. In the “Rabbit Hash” piece, I definitely wanted to focus on the woman who left the town the money, rather than on the town itself. But by opening up to the town’s story, the woman’s story became that much richer. And I’m still developing ideas all the time for projects I want to pursue myself. Books are out of the question at the moment, simply for time reasons, but I still can do articles.

Sheila
What advice do you have for those who write creative nonfiction and want to see it published?

Jack
As for having an editor work closely with you through the process, that’s much more true at small houses than the larger ones. When submitting your manuscript, you need to have it in as good a shape as possible. Don’t assume someone will pluck your project from the pile, take the time to see its possibilities, and then work with you to fix it. That happens, but work on those possibilities yourself before submitting the book. I do work on those projects, but I reject ten times that many every week. A publisher will have to believe strongly in a work to commit a lot of time and resources to developing it.

Sheila
Well, some of the authors you have worked with seem to have had that luck!Meanwhile, when you are not editing and rewriting for those very few, very lucky people, and I imagine reading manuscripts to consider publishing, what are your reading?

Jack
As for personal reading, I do read quite a bit. I just finished Mark Kurlansky’s 1968. Before that I read Eric Larsen’s Devil in the White City. I usually have a few books going at the same time, and I also tend to reread favorites. I’m anxious to read Joan Didion’s new one, which won’t be released for a few months yet. I’m also reading a Beatles biography and a book on women’s figure skating (to help me edit an upcoming book).

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I definitely understand more after reading Jack’s responses to my questions about how being educated by writers and having experience writing has made Jack a very special editor.Emmis is lucky to have him as are all the authors with whom he works.

Jack will be teaching with Meg Files and me at the Writing It Real in Port Townsend conference this June 23-27.I hope many of you will be able to come and to learn, as I have done, from this extraordinary teacher and editor.