The Feature Edit

A conversation with Kevin Nguyen, Features Editor at The Verge

Toward the end of the editing process for “The Lurker,” a story I wrote for The Verge in 2023, we hit a snag. The piece was about a stalker targeting Asian American professors. This had been one of those interesting story ideas that a freelancer likes to receive from an editor. That editor, Kevin Nguyen, had initially spotted a post on Twitter from a professor complaining about her harasser, and asked if I wanted to check it out.

After months of reporting and editing—involving years of documentation gathered by one of the victims, who is also a lawyer—the time had finally come to reach out to the accused stalker for comments and fact-checking. I had already signed up for DeleteMe, a company that many journalists use, which wipes your personal information (like home addresses) from databases. But I worried. I am also an Asian American professor. Would I become a target, too? Obviously, my byline was always going to be on this story. But me reaching out directly could have further incensed this individual, potentially inviting harassment.

Nguyen decided an editor should be the one to reach out. But Nguyen has an obviously Asian last name. So did the other deputy features editor involved in the story, Sarah Jeong. They, too, could have become potential targets. Nguyen found a high-level editor with an ambiguous full name, who agreed to make contact instead.

There were other bumps along the road, as with every deep-dive story involving real lives, legal dramas, and personal stakes. Nguyen carefully maneuvered along with me through the twists and turns of the story. This is the kind of complicated work that goes on behind the scenes of a longform piece. Readers don’t see it, but it is a carefulness and thoughtfulness that makes narrative features rich, compelling, and fool-proof, and it involves trust and respect between an editor and writer.

Before the wildfires hit the LA area, I caught up with Nguyen. We talked about the life of an editor, and the ideal working relationship with a writer. We also geeked out a bit on stories, and he talked about writing his first novel, as well as his second work of fiction, which is coming out in April (he is also reporting a third book, which is non-fiction). And yes, he’s still taking pitches through it all. He also broke down what he looks for in a feature pitch.

I know some of you want to learn more about longform editing specifically, so in the spirit of sharing, I am linking to Nguyen’s top notes for me on the first draft of “The Lurker,” a piece that ended up being 7,751 words. As you can see, they were kind, direct, instructive, and useful in guiding me to figure out a structural revision.

Great editors make you better. They’ve got your back. As a team, you puzzle through problems, which can be exciting, challenging, and rewarding. For me, an excellent editor has always been someone kind, who respects you and the difficult work, but also thoughtfully lets you know when something is not working. Nguyen is all of the above.

So here is my interview with Nguyen, features editor at The Verge, where he has edited finalists for the Ellies and the Pulitzer Prize. Previously he was a senior editor at GQ and has written for New York Magazine, The New York Times, The Paris Review and elsewhere. He is also the author of New Waves, a novel published by One World and one of NPR's best books of 2020, and the forthcoming novel Mỹ Documents.

Kevin Nguyen, author and features editor of The Verge.

Can you tell us what you appreciate or enjoy about editing features?

It's hard work, at every step of it. Just from conception to publishing. The thing I love about the feature well of a magazine is that no piece of writing gets paid more attention to, just in terms of the work that goes into it. You have multiple editors, you have a writer who has been working for months, you have the fact-check, and the copy edit, and usually there's a lot of art design resources applied to it. Your editor-in-chief reads it. This is all pretty consistent for features. Narrative features, I think, are actually our strongest units when it comes to a piece of writing. Even nonfiction books, which I love, don’t often get that much attention. Everyone who wants to write a nonfiction book should know that usually you have to pay for your own fact-checking.

Yeah, there are a lot of books that have no to very little editing happening, from my understanding, I did have editing, but fact-checking is up to you. You have to pay for it out of your advance, which in my case, was pretty small. When it comes to longform writing, do you still believe in the form as something that will sustain itself in this digital age?

Yeah, I think so. Not that I look at traffic that much. I probably should. But people still engage with this stuff on a deep level. Like Mia Sato's piece, “Bad Influence,” about the influencer lawsuit, which I think is 7,000 words long, was the “most read” story on The Verge the month it was published, by a large margin.

So, I think there's still an appetite for it, despite what everyone would say about people not having the attention span. But I also think, especially when you work in a publication, you are trying to make the whole thing feel complete, as an experience that offers you many different things. I think people tire of seeing one thing over and over. A publication must do many things. It should have something for you whether you are ready to sit down and read a feature, or you want to read a list, or you want to read a movie review. The classic structure of a magazine is still quite powerful, and you can hypothetically flip it open, or read through the digital version, and find something that is appealing to you.

There's so much of the cycle of news and social media, shorts, and TikToks, but there's something about the longform piece that does feel, when you really engage with it, like an immersive experience, where you're really learning, you're getting to know people, you're hit on an emotional level. It's a different feeling.

Yeah, and I don't want to shortchange the impact of news or pieces that hit you quickly. But with a narrative feature, you want it to be urgent, but more importantly, you want it to be read many years from now, and to still be a great piece of useful and enjoyable writing, and sometimes, if you're lucky, quite a moving piece of writing. You want it to be enduring in the sense that it stays with people. What usually stays with people is not the crux of the whole story, but some weird, specific detail, or something they learned, or a character, and what they said. Those are my lingering memories of features, and I have read hundreds or thousands of them at this point.

That's so true. Even as somebody who teaches too, there are certain moments or lines or chapters that just always stick with me. I always return to the way they wrote it, the way they said it, the point that they made, even if I don't remember the whole book or story so specifically.

Books are an even more powerful version of that. The book is the same endeavor as the feature, but in some ways the feature is a tighter, encapsulated version of what a book can do.

How did you start getting into this? As a writer first who liked longform? Or did you start with editing?

In a sense I was lucky to grow up in a house where my parents read a lot, which I don't think is a super-common experience for many kids of immigrants. My parents were good readers. They were mostly reading genre stuff. My dad's favorite author is Michael Connelly, who is actually an ex-journalist. But we didn't really get magazines. I was not reading New Yorker features as a kid. It was around college where I had scammed my way into a bunch of cheap magazine subscriptions that I started engaging with that a bit more. And then I ran a very mediocre literary blog for several years and we ran a lot of essays. That's how I learned to edit, at least at a base level.

Did you study journalism?

I studied English, and we didn't have a journalism program where I went to college. I went to a smaller liberal arts college that had 1,600 students in Tacoma, Washington. And I wasn't a great student and I graduated in 2009 so right into the financial crisis. But I don't think I ever thought I was going to get a journalism job or a writing job. So I worked in tech for years. I wasn’t an engineer. I was doing low-level, bullshit tech jobs at some startups.

I'll talk to journalism students, and they ask: “How'd you get the first job?” And I tell them: “Well, it took eight years of writing things on the side, staying up late and writing an article for The Atlantic for $250.

Also it just felt like a privilege, honestly. And you know, when you don't have a lot of money, an extra $250 is groceries for a month. So I just kept writing on the side, and then I actually ended up working at Google, which did pay pretty well. I just hated it so much. It really depressed me. I came in as part of a startup that I actually quite liked, an e-book startup. I didn't have to do any work. It was the most I had ever been paid. I was just getting fat on free pasta and playing ping-pong all the time. I eventually quit. And I just thought, I’m going to try to get some journalism jobs. So I got the GQ job on the strength of an editing test. Since then, I've been in it.

Can you talk about what an editing test is? Did they give you an actual story to edit?

It was a memo. Come up with this many story ideas. How would you change this? I think there was an editing component. I don't think it was that rigorous. It still feels a little crazy how I got the job. I think there was a little bit of strength in some of the freelance writing I'd done. One thing that is helpful is if you have a full-time job, you can really pick your shots and choose what freelance pieces you take.

Actually, the only real good advice I have for young journalists is nobody really cares if you have written a lot. They're just going to click on your first clip, and they want to see how good that is. They just want to know what your potential is, and that's the thing you want to demonstrate. So sometimes when people ask, “How do I get into journalism?” I actually think the way is to try and report something ambitious, rather than a lot of easy pieces.

That is really good advice, especially if you're wanting to do more ambitious stories in your career.

Even if you are applying for a job blogging, again, they're just going to click on one or two clips, tops. They're not going to need to see 20. They're certainly not going to read 20. They just want to know that you're a good writer. So the thing you have put the most thought and care into is what you submit. Instead of spending a year doing your version of 25 of those, just do two.

You're remembered for your highlights, not your lowlights.

When did you start gravitating toward features and longform, and thinking this is what you really liked to edit?

I was reading more of it before I got to GQ. Just seeing the process of how it is made, made me really fall in love with it. It was the best stuff we were doing in the magazine. There was genuine care. There just also was an ambition. With every feature, we were always trying to imagine how this could be one of the best things published. How could it win awards? How can we get the reporting there? How can we make the design amazing? I love that this was always the starting place in the genesis. How could this be excellent? And 95% of the things never hit that. But just start in a place where you're shooting your shot. I love that. I know it's kind of earnest, maybe a little naive, but it’s just a great way to conceive of things.

You don't see everything that goes on behind the scenes as the reader. But you're saying the whole process behind the scenes is a process of passion, ambition and love for the craft, and also respect for the work, because the work is hard.

It's really hard. I think I love that work, and I think a normal person would not like that work, and they would be correct. I feel like, when I interview directors of movies, that's the closest other thing. Or people who make documentaries. The amount you have to put into it. You must love the nitty-gritty, and you must love the collaboration. You must love all the problems and the challenges. I do think of people I know in my creative fields, doc people are the most admirable for that reason.

I often think of the structure of a story as a problem that I'm always thinking about as kind of like a puzzle. Even in my family, my grandma was obsessed with jigsaw puzzles. There’s something about problem solving. Maybe there is a genetic component. I wonder how you think about that too, the structure and the problem-solving aspect of storytelling that you have to do as an editor.

I think it can be the most rewarding part of it, because no matter how many features you edit, it's always a slightly new problem, right? Structure is the thing that is the most challenging. In longform journalism, usually when we talk about structure, we're actually talking about sequence. Because most narrative journalism is linear.

Sequencing is an interesting thing, because you're thinking about what you tell or what you withhold. The big difference between writing a news article and narrative feature is the inverted pyramid. With news, you just give them all the information up top, as if you could die at any moment while reading it, and at least we’ll have given you the most information we could have before you died. Sometimes there are ways of doing that in narrative, but you just don't have to be bound to that. It's about how you sequence information that you give the reader.

My favorite features are stories where you think something's going one way, and then it goes the other, and you ping-pong back and forth. Usually those kinds of stories end up in ambiguous places. Like in The New Yorker recently, a piece from Katy Waldman about a romance writer that is suing another romance writer for ripping her off. You read it and think: Oh, those are a lot of coincidences. And then you realize: Oh, but these are genre tropes. And then it goes back and forth, there's a level of structural sequencing that they're manipulating. There's intention in how you guide the reader. And it's not about giving them maximal information at all times. It's actually like that Miles Davis quote, “It’s not the notes you play; it’s the notes you don’t play.” Or the space and silence between the notes.

Like holding your cards and deciding which ones you're going to play, and at what point, not just putting all of them out on the table.

Yeah, you don't even have to play all your cards, right?

Right, the twist. Actually, “Who is the Bad Art Friend?” just came to mind. I also work with the editor who edited that story, and I remember she mentioned thinking of the story as the dress that changes color, which people see totally differently in the same photo. In editing the story, if I recall this correctly, she told the writer, Bob Kolker, “make it like the dress.” I am also thinking of the recent story you published in The Verge, “Friend of Faux,” on an AI romance, at the end of it, when the company shuts down, it is a big twist.

That writer, Josh Dzieza, always does an intense amount of research. We usually have all the research before we have the narrative thread through it. And that works for him. I don't think that order works for every writer. There is a main narrative, and it ping-pongs, section by section, between a main narrative with a character, and then all the context that he wants to provide.

Something happens in a scene, and then you give a little more context that either makes you understand it better, or makes you question what just happened. We keep bouncing back and forth. The hard thing about that as a structure is it's actually quite easy to lose people. If the story is digressing, it comes down to pretty strong writing to solve that. If it works there is just an inherent tension always happening. Kind of like a TV show that has parallel plots, and you're just thinking: How are these plots going to intersect?

I do like that style though. I mean, it can be challenging and it's true, you can totally lose people in the digressions. But then the digressions can also add so much. Like “Friend of Faux” also even had philosophical angles to it. It wasn't just, “here are all the things I know about AI.” It was more asking those deeper, kind of existential questions.

I think it's a writing challenge to pull it off. “Bad Art Friend” is amazing because it is ping-ponging, but it's ping-ponging between two characters all the time. It's harder to lose people that way. It’s my favorite kind of story where the stakes are actually quite low, but for the characters, they could not be higher. Everything hangs in the balance for them. You as a reader have this distance, and you know everyone's being ridiculous. In terms of a structure of pieces where there's a narrative and then context, my favorite one of these is “Up and Then Down,” in The New Yorker, by Nick Paumgarten.

Oh my god, I love that one. Yes, I teach it. The guy is stuck in the elevator, and Paumgarten pauses and goes into the history of elevators. It’s one of my favorites.

Right, you have the story of the guy that is stuck in the elevator. Every digression, actually, I don't think connects up that strongly to the main story. It works because it's just so interesting. Paumgarten is just going down a weird rabbit hole about elevators. Again, I think it's the strength of writing.

Any good feature is urgent and enduring. But I think some of my favorite features are not urgent at all. But they are the most enduring, right? Like, you can read about the history of elevators for the next 200 years. That is a good lifespan for a piece of journalism.

Totally. I mean that's a story that has been around for so long, and it's still one that I'll pull out and refer students to because of the structure. And the reporting. And then the guy who got stuck, I will play the clip of the video online that showed him stuck in the elevator. It was sped up, and they had music to it and he's trying to open the doors, trying to smoke his last cigarette. Every time I get in an elevator, I think about that story.

If there's a connection between that story and “Bad Art Friend,” it is that both tap into that very primal fear that you have. Every time anyone gets on an elevator, they think: “Am I going to get stuck in here?” And with “Bad Art Friend,” it’s the feeling of: “Are people talking about me?” Everyone has that fear on some level. And the crazy thing about “Bad Art Friend” is that she's right. They are talking about her.

Can you talk a bit about how you approach editing? When you and I worked on “The Lurker,” I remember getting a memo, which I think is a helpful way to start. You read a whole draft, and that's often what I do, too, when I'm working with students or my peers. You can't just dig in on the first draft and do line edits. It's always kind of the big-picture points that you're making. How do you begin to dig into a 7,000 or 8,000-word piece, and work with a writer?

That's a good question. When you're an editor, the job is trying to fix a problem. Some of those problems are big. Some are small. I do think that it is a good part of a working relationship to try and let the writer solve it first. I think that is pretty important. I didn't want to come in and just tell you how to do things. We also have a lot of trust in each other as well. Then sometimes you find that a writer actually just wants you to tell them what to do. And that's also fine, but I like to give them the opportunity to do it themselves. The other thing you have to remember, the writer knows the story better than you as an editor. That's just the truth. They spent months reporting it, months poring over the words, and filing drafts, and they're the closest to it. Acknowledge that. You can't come in and just be like, “I know better than you,” because you don't.

Actually, if an editor does know better than the writer, something has gone wrong in the reporting. I usually try to send a memo first, for something that long, and just let them take a stab. I also do want to reiterate the importance of getting on the phone.

Both of those are important, the big-picture notes and the conversations, but also I think most editors are pretty respectful of writers, because they recognize the work that goes into reporting. But I have had some in the past who are not very nice. As a freelancer, you don't have to ever work with them again. But for the majority, they understand being in the trenches is hard.

Usually when I get a pitch that I like, I always get on the phone with the writer. I never accept a pitch without talking to a person, because part of it is you are just feeling it out, if it's going to be a good working relationship. If you are going to spend months talking to this person, just make sure you get along. If we're going to commit to this, it's literally a relationship, then we should make sure that we like spending time with each other.

That's the best kind of editor-writer relationship, because the ones that are incredibly top-down, it's just not enjoyable when you're just being barked at.

For features. If it is fast and busy, I can see the case for that a little bit more. But great features take time. You just have to love the work.

Nguyen’s first novel, New Waves.

Okay, so now I have to ask you, though—because you also have a new book coming out, and another you are writing, and you've already published a novel. New Waves. Did you think: “Oh, I'm going to write a book?” Did you do it on the side? What is the other side of you, besides the editing, that pursues your own writing projects, including fiction?

The origin is kind of stupid. I had been in New York many years, but there was just a time where I was just always in the subway when it’s very crowded so I would usually read. But there were times when it was too crowded to pull a book out, so I would just be on my phone writing a lot of stuff into my Notes app to pass the time. Imagining dialogue, things that happened at work. I always came up with these weird ideas and I put it all in one note.

One day, the note had gone so long that it crashed on my phone. But I could still open it on my desktop, and I copy/pasted the note into a Google Doc, and I realized the note was 20,000 words long. At first I thought: What a waste of time. I could get paid for 20,000 words if I actually focused. But then I read through it all and there was a weird through-line. So my first book kind of comes out of that.

Maybe the central narrative mystery is actually, how do all these disparate things connect? It's about two friends. I never intentionally tried to write fiction, but I've read novels all my life, so I thought: Oh, maybe I can try this. And I didn't think it would go anywhere. And I feel very grateful and lucky that it did go somewhere.

Did you write the whole thing and then sell it?

I wrote the majority of it while I was working at GQ. People didn't show up to the office until 10 or 11 a.m., so I just woke up at seven and wrote for a couple hours. It wasn't that hard to make time, and I just had to be disciplined.

And then you just found an agent and sold it? Or did you have an agent?

The publishing scene in New York is kind of small, so I had met a bunch of agents already. Just having lunches and feeling them out. I didn't really like any of them. But I had a friend, Sarah Bowlin, who was an editor at Henry Holt. We used to watch football together in New York. She suddenly moved to LA. So I hadn't seen Sarah in a while, and then she came back to visit and wanted to get drinks. Then she told me: “Oh, I'm trying to become a literary agent. Do you have anything?”

I think she assumed that I would be writing non-fiction. I told her I had some okay pages of a novel. And she looked at them, and thought they were good. I thought: Sarah is a great editor, I’ve read books she's edited, she has great taste. I have no idea if she's a good agent. She's clearly never done this before. But I still chose Sarah over the other more established agents that I had been talking to, because I figured even if this book won’t sell, one thing I can guarantee is I will get a great edit from Sarah. And then it turned out, she's a really good agent. I was client number two.

I want to give her a lot of credit here. I don't think I would have finished the first book without her. The most important thing about my relationship with Sarah, she's just someone I trust. And as an author, you know the book you want to write—but another human being goes out into the world and talks about your book on your behalf. Books don't sell all the time, for many reasons. A lot of them are random. It has nothing to do with you. But at least you have the confidence that someone went out there and put their best foot forward, and talked about the book in the way you want it to be talked about. I actually think this happens with a lot of journalists I know who signed with agents, and they have a really specific idea of the book, and then the agent, to make the writer more marketable, talks about it differently. Then the writer is stuck writing it in a way that they did not ever intend to, and it's a really tough place to be.

So you just finished another novel that is coming out. And you are reporting a third book. Can you tell us about them?

My next novel, Mỹ Documents, comes out in April, and it imagines if Japanese incarceration happened again today, but then I made it happen to Vietnamese people. All the Vietnamese are going to get incarcerated, and the characters don't know the history, that this had happened during World War II to Japanese Americans.

Nguyen’s latest novel comes out in April.

What has your experience been like after coming out with a book? Do you have high expectations? Do you feel it's exhausting to do the promotion?

I find publishing a book quite gratifying, even if it's quite painful. My first novel came out in March 2020. So I got one event, and then the world shut down. I mostly feel grateful that I got the one event, and all my friends were there. It was the last time I saw most of them for six to nine months.

I think the incentive for me to write a book was to have something out in the world that lasts a bit longer than a news cycle, or even longer than the feature cycle. That's proving out to be true. I did not enjoy the experience of publicity or promotion, but I like it now that I'm a little bit away from it. I still get weird, random emails about specific plot points, and I'm happy to answer that stuff. But I'm about to go through the publicity and marketing again, and it’s painful. But I'm quite proud of this book, so I'm also excited.

Can you tell us about the new book that you're reporting?

I'm working on a biography of this Japanese composer, Ryuichi Sakamoto, who passed away a couple years ago. It's been very different. If you sell a novel, usually you need a full manuscript. When you sell the novel, you've written the whole thing, and the hard part is over. And then with most non-fiction, you sell it on a proposal, which is the potential of a book. So you're excited, and now the hard work is just beginning. Obviously, it’s still gratifying, and I feel very lucky and grateful, but it did not feel as good to sell a book the third time.

It's different because now the pressure is on and you have a deadline.

Totally, and most of the pressure is self-imposed. I want this book to be good. But I also haven't really written it. I've just written the idea of it. But the reporting will get you there. When you get stuck in writing a novel, you just have to figure it out. If you're stuck in a piece of reporting, just go do more reporting, and that usually shakes the tree loose.

For people who are reading this and want to pitch you, what are you looking for? Are you open to new writers?

I think a good pitch accomplishes three things: First and foremost, prove you can write. Two, tell us about the reporting and the story. And three, tell us who you are. And I think you can accomplish that in three or four grafs.

For a feature, you need to be a good writer. The reporting is important. But if you want to sustain a narrative feature, the writing is slightly more important than the reporting, because you can teach someone reporting. So the pitch would just be your lede graf, really hook us in, then summarize where you think the piece will go, and a little bit of evidence that you've done light work. Then tell me who you are.