“Abby was the editor of my novel Idlewild (2023). My name is on the cover, while Abby’s is buried in the acknowledgments, but the published version —the version that won awards—is as much Abby’s work as mine.

What do I mean by that? The work of an editor is invisible in the end, so a lot of people don’t really understand what it is. Many assume it’s just glorified proofreading, which is like thinking an aerospace engineer is the one who paints the outside of the spaceship. Abby does have a sharp eye for the sentence-level stuff, but that’s not what makes her the most brilliant editorial mind I’ve ever known. Abby has a gift for looking at a whole manuscript and seeing it as a system of moving parts, and thereby identifying precisely what needs to be fixed on a mechanical level.

In my case, Abby diagnosed the problem in our very first meeting: she read my manuscript and told me simply that my entire plot built up to a climax that wasn’t thematically connected to any of the ideas I’d been exploring. Fair enough, but what should I do about that? She then wrote me a 12-page editorial letter in which, among other things, she broke down my novel into a numbered list of seven “threads and themes.” “Not all of these threads are presently sustained through to the end,” she noted, “and very few of them are evoked in the climax—it really only hits #4, with a little bit of #6 and #1.” She suggested one way I might rework the plot to tie all seven threads together, and I did end up taking some elements of her idea, but her specific suggestion was less important than her grand unified theory of how my novel worked. She had disassembled the novel to its parts and given me the tools to rebuild it on my own.

Which is not to say that she gave me these notes and then dusted off her hands. Abby is an extremely involved, hands-on editor, and the greatest joy of the whole writing process was going back and forth with her in the Track Changes comments. She is such a funny, engaged reader, and I felt newly excited about my novel when seeing it through her eyes.On the rare occasions when I disagreed with her notes and pushed back on them, she was super open to hearing my perspective and cheerfully willing to reconsider. Being edited by Abby is a true collaboration, like Lennon and McCartney, and working with her brought out something in me that I couldn’t access on my own.

And I miss it so much. The possibility of getting to work with Abby again is motivating me to work on my second novel. In the meantime, I’m jealous of you and anyone else who gets to bask in the light of her editorial attention. Also, I recommend a novel called Eli Harpo’s Adventure to the Afterlife. I read it recently knowing only that it had the same publisher as Idlewild, and as it built to a climax I thought, “This novel moves so gracefully and feels so structurally perfect—I bet Abby edited it.” I checked the acknowledgments, and sure enough, there was her name.

—James Frankie Thomas, author of Idlewild