Fiction Consultations with Robert Long Foreman

My expertise as an editor comes from a couple of different places. I was a tenure-track creative writing professor for four years; prior to that, I taught writing courses part-time and in graduate school, off and on, for twelve years. In the classroom, especially when instructing undergraduates, I was in a position to help young writers take their first steps, or most deliberate steps, into taking themselves seriously as artists. This is delicate work, when it is done right; many such students are being critiqued for the first time, and it’s important to tread lightly. You have to be critical, but overdo it and you lose the one you’re trying to help.

For seven years, since I left academia, I have been a freelance editor for writers who seek to publish books. I have edited novels, self-help books, memoirs, and collections of short fiction, as well as individual essays and short stories. Many of these texts are by first-time writers; others are authors with several books already to their names. This work is very different from what I did in the classroom; the writer who hires me to edit or critique a finished book wants to publish it traditionally, or self-publish, as soon as is reasonably possible. So I cannot mince words. I must identify all visible problems and plot the most efficient courses to addressing them that I can determine. The goal is to assess how much labor a work will require before it is ready for publication, and show the writer what it seems they must do in order to accomplish that.

My goal, when editing or critiquing a manuscript for hire, is to have the sense of urgency that clients so often have, while at the same time indulging the lapsed teacher in me, who believes that all work undertaken seriously has something to offer; that even the roughest work only requires revision(s) to find it, some more than others; and that no investment of time is too much for a project the author believes in. I have had a great success rate with helping clients see the unrealized potential in their works-in-progress. Through my eyes, they recognize the shortcomings of the approaches they have taken so far, and I take pains as well to show them the ways their work succeeds, the things they have already achieved and can build on—which we writers, self-critical to a fault, are too often oblivious to.

I strive at all times to be both the incisive critic and the generous professor. I don’t want to be a doomsayer, nor will I handle the material before me with velvet gloves. When I write my pages-long summary critiques for the writer, and when I offer commentary on the texts as I pore over them, I ensure that I am clear, thorough, and as helpful as I can be.

In addition to my work as a professor and as an editor, I have published three books of my own—a novel, essay collection, and short story collection. I have published essays and short stories in many magazines, including The Missouri Review, AGNI, Kenyon Review Online, Indiana Review, and Beloit Fiction Journal. I am a contributing editor at The Missouri Review and Copper Nickel, and I have been a first reader for fiction and nonfiction at a number of literary journals in the last twenty years. My work has won a Pushcart prize, the Nilsen Prize for a First Novel, the Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose, and the Robert and Adele Schiff Award at the Cincinnati Review, among others, and has been shortlisted six times for Best American Essays.