David Wroblewski, continued

LR: Who were some other people who were influential in helping to shape the manuscript?

DW: There's a long list of people who helped along the way, in the form of reading drafts and providing feedback, but at the top, by a mile, is Kimberly McClintock, my partner, significant other, amore -- pick your favorite label for committed unmarrieds. Kimberly read more drafts than anyone, suffered through more revisions than anyone, consoled me more than
anyone, and gave me the hardest news of anyone. When something didn't work, she told me.
She was my first and last reader. If something didn't make her happy, it had to change.

There was also a group I called the Edgar Sawtelle Advisory Committee, my creative board of directors for this book, who'd read one or another of the drafts. I felt free to call them for sanity checks: I'm thinking of changing such-and-such, what do you think? They'd have to wrack their brains to recall how important that such-and-such was. It was incredibly valuable to have those minds to draw on. They often didn't agree, but that was perfectly fine with me. I took that as a signal that the decision wasn't simply binary, but a question of proportion, as so many
design decisions turn out to be.

There are also the teachers I studied with while completing an MFA: Ehud Havazelet,
Margot Livesey, Joan Silber, Richard Russo, and Wilton Barnhardt. They were endlessly patient.
I tend to write really wacky first drafts, and they were often confronted with crazy stuff,
out of control experiments. These were followed by many naive questions of the form, "But why NOT do it that way?"

A FINAL NOTE: TAKE A LOOK AT LYNN'S INTERVIEW WITH DAVID!