Even in “normal times,” the writing community is an ethereal collection of shy, lonely people gossiping together online between major conferences and writing retreats. Every few months, writers left their houses dressed in their least-stained clothing to crowd into bookstores drinking wine from plastic cups as a novelist read aloud from their most scandalous chapter or a poet serenaded the moon. I lived for these readings and conferences and retreats. As fun as it was to gossip online, to share secrets in the DMs, to boost the work of writers I loved, one of the great joys of being a writer, for me, was hanging out with writers in person to brief escape the isolation of the blank page. It was vital to see that I wasn’t alone. Writers were—though awards season might have us believe otherwise—all in this together.
The last 18 months have all but rendered those those in-person meetings impossible. Sure, there were readings online, online panels, Zoom hangouts and phone calls. But we all know it wasn’t the same. The writers we met online remained online. We existed as two-dimensional faces inside the limits of profile pictures. Over the last few months, though, I have been fortunate to meet some of the authors I only knew over the phone or on Twitter. One such author: Rakesh Satyal.
In January 2020, when we were all so very naive, Rakesh acquired my debut novel The Atmospherians. I had dreams of someday meeting him over lunch or drinks—the way an author might in a Netflix series—but the pandemic got in the way. And after a few passing encounters in Brooklyn, Rakesh and I were finally able to hang out in person on a sunny August afternoon over ice cream at Davey’s Greenpoint location.
Rakesh Satyal is far more than an editor. He is the author of two novels—No One Can Pronounce My Name and Blue Boy—and one of the most astute and funny voices on Twitter. He is a brilliant thinker with nearly twenty years in the publishing world, a writer and editor who is committed to making book publishing more inclusive, inventive, and literary. It was a pleasure to finally hang out with Rakesh in person to talk about writing, editing, and breaking the mold of traditional publishing trends.
How did you get into editing versus writing? What made you want to do both?
I took creative writing courses when I was an undergrad at Princeton, which is a very good writing program. It's generally thought that if they ever had a grad program, it would probably be one of the best ones in the country. But the school is focused primarily on undergrad education. I really think a grad program would be extraordinary, given the faculty. I talk often about the fact that because artists are minimized in society, in general, and writers, maybe more so than a lot of artists, I was one of those people who wrote all the time growing up, but I never thought about myself as a writer. And I never thought about making a legitimate career out of writing. And that's compounded by the Indian experience where I was also not exactly encouraged to, at least for a long period of time, to pursue it as a career.
So I took creative writing classes, and lo and behold, my sophomore spring, I had a course with a professor who pulled me aside after class one day and said, "Have you thought about becoming an editor because you give very pointed feedback during the workshop?" And I had never even considered this was a job. I knew editors existed. But like many people, I thought an editor was a copyeditor. It was sort of a pencil behind the year correcting grammar. And so I ended up applying for an internship before my senior year of college. It turned out that a friend of mine from school, his sister had started working in publishing, and she worked within Random House. She passed my resume along to HR and then I ended up interviewing with this well known editor. And he actually left after hiring me but then I ended up working for the editor-in-chief. He's a really legendary editor.
That was how it was decided for me. If there was a way to find a professional outlet for what I liked to do, creatively and academically, then I should have done that. So I did that internship. And then I was such a naive young college kid, because when I had my exit interview, from the internship, my boss was like, “Have you thought about what you're going to do after graduation?” Of course, like an idiot I tell him I might go to grad school. I didn't take the bait—he was basically telling me to work for him. Thankfully, shortly before I graduated, his assistant was leaving. And I reached out, he's like, Yeah, come, he wanted me to start working before I graduated. I was like, Well I do need to graduate college. So then, again, like many people, I didn't understand that it was a profession, I didn't know that you could actually make a career out of it. But I do love reading people's work. And at that point, I loved reading people's work and giving feedback. So that was one of the reasons why I ended up getting into editing.
That's fascinating. You talked a little bit about coming to a place where you could accept that you could do this as a career. And that was related to the Indian experience, as you said. We're in the midst of like—publishing, at least, is in the midst of reckoning with its own whiteness and its relationships to power and I guess, if you feel comfortable talking about it, what do you think your role is in moving publishing forward, especially as an editor, and also as a writer?
Editors, to be clear, are the ones who get projects in and champion them. I have tried to have my list reflect those values I want to put out into the world. And so I see that as a very important job. And that has informed a lot of my work. I look back on a lot of the books I've acquired and it's no surprise that a lot of them are by marginalized authors. So there are a lot of, you know, queer authors and authors of color. And it is a very conscious decision to do that. And I think things are changing to a certain extent, but the question is really going to become who lives it as opposed to people who do it because it is a trend or it's perceived as being a paradigm shift.
I don't want to make too causal a relationship but change will require people who truly are those things and believe in those things. Because the truth is, it's a very homogenous industry in a lot of ways. I do wonder sometimes if you need people with that lived experience, you need that to be really tied into how they want to see a better world and the changes they want to see happen. And since I've lived those things, it makes it a bit more urgent, in terms of why I represent a lot of the authors I do.
That seems like such a difficult thing to bring up, especially for the people who might be in those positions right now, who are, as you say, passionate and interested, right, but what is that gap of understanding, which can be a huge difference in what sort of passion they bring, what sort of unconscious biases—not even biases—but inability to fully engage with something. This is something I talked a little bit about with Jeanne Thornton. She talked about how trans authors might move more and more into big presses. She speculated that it might take more trans editors moving up the ranks rather than just there being an interest in their work. Is it just a paradigm shift that is driven by the bottom line? Which is one thing. Or is it actually driven by the desire of the people who are there and a real essential impulse to see different writers in the world?
It's a very difficult question. That's absolutely correct, but it's difficult because there's also the difference of who has institutional power. And so the problem is that there's the question of having representation within the ranks. But then who gives value to that representation? Who are the decision makers and what are the power structures within the buildings actually giving voice to [diversity]? I'm very lucky to be in a role right now where I work for a publisher who has had a long-standing commitment to diversity way beyond the catchphrase or trendy nature of that term. She's invested not only in having people who represent certain communities but making sure they have a framework to succeed and a framework to make those voices heard.
I was really interested in the relationship between your editing and the things you're trying to create on your list, the people you're trying to publish. How does that shape how you think about your own writing? Or are they separate?
Yeah, you know, they're separate because you should keep your professional and personal creative worlds separate. It's very important. But [my professional life] does inform what I do. I mean, especially the last book that I wrote, it engages, especially in the last half, very directly with this question about publishing and about writing about identity. And I can always tell when I run into a publishing colleague who has not read my work, when they ask me these questions, as if they don't know that I've talked about this.
So it does find a way in. One of the things that frustrates me is that if I sit down and write something I'm absolutely bringing to bear what I know about the world of writing and publishing. And that does find its way into my work. And so one of the things I have to think about is if I'm making a conscious decision to write about something, from a specific perspective that may seem limited or quiet, somebody reading it, if they know that about me, should understand why I've made a conscious decision to do that, and then ask themselves why I've done that. That is true of writers from any marginalized background.
If you're a trans writer, and you're trying to transgress certain conventions of form or structure or voice, and it strikes somebody as odd or too out there, or unconventional or obtuse -- what people need to start doing is ask themselves why it feels that way and what value that might add to the existing literature. I think you know this, but I worked for a few years in the world of branding. And one of the things that really emerged for me during that experience was being creative in that world means you really have to learn the landscape of something. So you have to learn what exists in the marketplace. What have people done in this space, what ad campaigns have been there, how people engage consumers in a different way.
And what you start to understand is what trends really mean in that context. The idea that somebody creates something that really engages with people because it goes completely far out. And it is so odd in a way, but then you start to see other people take that and run with it. This is a very random example, but Skittles is an example I mention. Their ad campaigns were very, very strange. Like if you look at them within the past 10 years or so what they did, especially in appealing to younger generations, some of those early ads on MTV and VH1, you know, those were odd ads, and they still are, but totally different from what you see. Then you start to see brands starting to adopt that a little bit, piece by piece.
I'm thinking of like Old Spice or something which seems to have been influenced deeply, like the same sort of absurdity between the two of them, right?
Yeah, exactly. Think about that in music too, like a good example, to use an example from current events: Look at Britney. People forget how unique, how different she was in that landscape. And she came out with the idea of having a pop princess in this way, and having somebody who was playing with ideas of sexuality and all these things in a different way. And so then you saw Jessica Simpson, and you saw Christina Aguilera, and you saw all these people who came afterwards, and then you start to identify [people] breaking the mold a little bit in pop culture, then people follow suit to open a certain conversation. So writing is similar where—if something comes along, and it's a bit different, and it seems off the beaten path, there's stock in that, you have to put value in what people are trying to say. And just because it doesn't match what came before, it doesn't mean that it doesn't have value. And you have to understand why it's happening and why it connects with people. And this seems like a very basic idea, because it is. But I think that's what I try to do: take the existing rules and subvert them a little bit.
So in the last book that I wrote, I was looking at these tropes of immigrant literature and what people thought about South Asian literature in particular, just tried to subvert them a little bit. And I think that's what you try to do creatively. And people's first instinct when they need something like that is to have their hackles raised. And especially when you try to go for subtlety, and you try to go for something that's about the human experience in a subtler way. The dismissiveness often comes because the stakes aren't raised in narrative and one of the things I personally and professionally try to put stock in is that stakes are raised for people who come from marginalized communities. And just because it doesn't read as immediately tense in the way that it does when you're dealing with people who aren't that way, it doesn't mean that it doesn't have value. And in fact, maybe it has more. And so interiority and subtlety I find really compelling. And I think people have to be a bit more open to what that means.
That makes me think stakes are cultural, right? Like, the stakes of a white family having a bad Fourth of July or something like that might be very different from the stakes of a microaggression, which a white reader might think, Oh, how is it the same thing as the blue frosting coming out purple instead of blue, right? And a white reader can say, Oh, my God, that's a terrible thing if this color is off, and then look at like a microaggression and wonder what's the big deal because they don’t understand. How we understand different forms of stakes, I think is really, really difficult to convey.
A go-to response as an editor is that I just didn't feel invested in this, or I just didn't connect with it as deeply as I would have liked. Now, that's a very valid point a lot of the time, because there is writing that doesn't necessarily connect with you. But I do try to perform a gut check before I reject something, for example, as to what is driving that. Is it really lack of narrative flair? Lack of aptitude? Is it lack of execution? What is leading that? And if I go back to it and it's my discomfort because it seems different, then there's merit in questioning that a little bit. And I understand that volume of work makes editors do that; we have to be very quick about things because of the volume [of submissions]. But sometimes we use that as a crutch. And that's where the problems begin.
From the other side, what are some of the things when you are reading that you're seeing maybe, I don't mean this to be like a listicle. But what are some of the mistakes that you're seeing from authors who ended up submitting to you. I want to ask about this both in pre publication when they're on submission, and also post-publication, since you've been editing for how long?
Yeah, I've been working in publishing for almost 20 years. Yeah. But what are the errors?
Yeah, what are the things you see younger writers doing either in the submission process or even after they have had a book accepted for publication, and maybe in that pre pub spot or even post publication?
That's a difficult question to answer, because at that stage, yeah, a lot of it is the publisher's responsibility.
Let me try to rethink that. What do you feel when debut authors, when they're submitting to you, when you're seeing their work: Does it feel like their books are ready when they're coming to you? How do you think authors can put themselves in the best position to be prepared to submit to you?
Sometimes I'll read something and there are some very basic things in terms of mechanics, or just things I think a writer should know how to do about perspective or structure, and they just haven't thought about it enough to push it to a more polished version. If I read it and I can't tell if the author knows, that's the problem. That's what an editorial conversation is for, that's why when you’re intrigued by something, that's why you set up an author call. Because it's sort of a fact-finding mission. Does this author know what needs to be improved? If I bring up something that I want to discuss as an editorial point, and they're open to it, and they get what I'm trying to say, and I feel like they can accomplish it, then I feel I can work with them and take it somewhere. But if they're not capable—first of all, if they're not open to feedback, not open to hearing, that's a problem. But I don't read anything assuming it's perfect. There's an internal process that needs to happen. But sometimes you do get something and you're just like, This is not ready. I don't think you showed this to another person whose opinion you trust. This is especially true of nonfiction when I see it, which is that I don't know if the author and the agent had enough of a dialogue before it got to the stage where I'm seeing it to understand what the project is really shaping up to be. Is the material representative of what the project is supposed to be?
You said that you're always expecting there to be editorial work, you're never receiving something to give your stamp of approval and get it published. So what are your expectations when you begin working with an author? Do you think there were times when you're ready to do an entire re-envisioning of a book or do you prefer to be one who takes it from like 80 to 100?
I think it depends on the book, but sometimes you'll read a book and you'll be like, Okay, there's a whole third of this novel that needs to change significantly. In which case, you can offer that feedback and say, Once you've managed to do this, then I would love to see it again. Because that shows you how the author works, what their work ethic is like. Then there are logistical concerns. If you get a manuscript in and it needs a lot of editorial work, one of the reasons why editors will pass on it sometimes is because they need to know what the pipeline of the project looks like. Because there's certain questions about timing and publication and payment and all these things that come in.
If you can't see the end of where the book is going to be, what the timing is going to be, how long the author needs to work on it, where it's going to go in the schedule, that can be difficult because you are on a publishing schedule and you're trying to figure out where things are going in the season. If you don't know if a book is going to go through several rounds of editing, that's a problem, because you need to understand where you're putting it in the schedule and how you're talking about it in-house. If I read something and I'm like, This needs a lot of work and I need the author to do this work so it can get to a certain point, I want to A) See if they can do it, to put the work in and do it, and B) I don't want to sign it up and have those things not be decided because it’s actually bad for the book in the long run if you don't understand how it's going to come together.
I think that puts the author in a really tough spot. I've talked to friends who have been in that position: they thought the book was gonna come out in one year, and then it comes out two years later. And then they're just wondering what to do. And they're really in that sort of middle zone.
So you’ve written two books so far. How do you stay inspired and committed between books? What is keeping you going to book number three to book number four?
I was just giving a talk to a group of writers. You really have to think about what your voice as a writer is. People have that conversation a lot when you're writing a debut book. They're like, What is your voice? What are you trying to say? But that actually becomes more important the more books you write. What is the worldview you're trying to put out? And what are things that you care about and themes you want to be exploring? How are you approaching them in a new way? Because if you've written books that address those themes, then is it the same themes that you want to be working on and are there truisms of your work that you need to carry from book to book and how are you going to keep those fresh?
Or, there are moments—obviously the past few years, politically—that have a bearing on what people think their work should be doing. What do you want to be accomplishing? For whom do you want to be advocating? All these questions are very serious and worth thinking about.
The thing that keeps you going is—I still love the process of writing, I still love the process of creating something. I often say that if you ever have writer's block [the solution is] to write a sentence that entertains you. That's where you keep things fresh. Can you write a sentence that surprises yourself? So I think that's one thing that keeps me going. Because it is about the work, you know, regardless of financial considerations and publication. So I think that's really key to what keeps you writing and what keeps you exploring. You have to look at what's going on in the world around you and want to be in conversation with it. How is your work going to do that? And how is it going to address the things that really matter to you?
In my work, I want to explore things like identity and representation and the political act of being yourself when people tell you you can't be yourself. Those are things that will be threaded throughout the work. And then comedy in a way. I've tried to write things that try to—not be flippant about things—but that find levity and gravity at the same time and figure out what the role of that is. That's the thing that's been the biggest challenge probably for a lot of writers in the past few years: How do you toe that line? Because everything is so cataclysmic. How do you find humor in them? And yet there is humor in everything somehow, you have to figure out how you're going to address that.
Yeah, I was talking to Jeanne [Thornton] about that as well, too. We were talking about how in a lot of queer narratives where the events are so dark, but like, we lived through it, and there is a way to find humor in that. Jeanne also brought up the work of Brandon Taylor, how there can be really sly humor in his work. Things can be really bad sometimes but it’s because the characters pushed it into this bad space and there's levity in this drive to see things collapse.
As a final question: What is your advice to people who want to become an editor? You talked about your own process for it—and based on what we also talked about with the reckoning in publishing, things probably seem a little different than they were when you were first getting into it. So what would your advice be to people who want to get into publishing?
It is a difficult job. You are taking on the big considerations of professional life right now: the intersection of art and commerce. What is a more fraught discussion? That is what we do. It is challenging. There's an analogy to be drawn between the way that you challenge convention in your writing and the way that you challenge convention in publishing. To challenge convention in writing you need to learn the "rules" that exist within the genre and exist within the literature—and that's how you subvert it. Because you need to know what the parameters are. You have to understand what is succeeding in that space. What has connected with people? And then how do you find other things that add to that conversation and subvert expectations?
The exciting thing is, especially with the health of independent publishing the past few years, we have seen books succeed in ways that are very inspiring. The perfect example is In the Dream House and Carmen [Maria Machado]'s first book, which are both very experimental and really transgressive and sold very very well. Her voice is so fresh and her vision is so clear and that made those books so successful. Brandon [Taylor] is a good example too. He achieved a way of opening a window onto an experience that is very interior. The plot of it is emotional. Emotion is the plot of that book. Editors can often be dismissive of that or publishing can be dismissive of that because it feels "quiet." But a lot of people were able to connect because that isn't quiet. That's very loud. If we're living in this anxious world, what is more narratively compelling than the tension you feel inside?