Editor Pat Strachan on Her Career and the Business

Poets and Writers magazine has an interview with Pat Strachan. Aside from the general interest for people in the business, there are some practical nuggets of advice you can mine. For example, she mentions the "stopper" - a term from her New Yorker days meaning some image "that causes the reader to stop and read in a daze over the next pages." So you don't want to follow something like that with a section that is critical to the book, because people will miss it. Or there's the most common problem with first fiction books:

They can be too controlled. I find a lot of first novels too careful and too polite. I mean, let’s face it, Housekeeping is a wild book. I don’t think Marilynne had ever published anything before, even short pieces. She was doing what came from her mind and her experience. Larry Heinemann’s book is another example, a graphic war novel, but just gorgeous. Sometimes others can be a little tight and a little fearful of being messy.

Certainly not something I would have known. Also, she generally knows within ten pages whether she'll like a book. It's definitely worth a read.