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"The restaurant was reduced to a collection of inverted faces, of nudging and whispering as her laughter snowballed...she grabbed the bearded man's plate and smashed it over his head. Yolk slid down his face as he jumped out of the booth, knocking down his Coke. He slipped on the soda and collapsed on the floor. My mother smiled and turned to me. 'I'll see you at home,' she said, waving me away."

That's a mix of slapstick, madness and passion from Felicia Sullivan's new memoir. Today she explains how a talented editor helped Sullivan convert her troubled relationship with her mother and her own battle with addiction into an elegant book, The Sky Isn't Visible from Here.

Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality conversations with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing. 

Jason Boog:
You said that you had a very close relationship with your editor while working on your memoir. Can you describe that in more detail? How did it work? How long did that revision process take? Any revision advice for fledgling writers?

Felicia Sullivan:
I am incredibly privileged and humbled to have a home with Algonquin Books. They're like an army in miniature, and my editor Amy Gash, its fearless leader. After turning in the first draft, we worked for over a year hammering down the structure, cutting sections, adding new chapters. At one point, I had cut out 90 pages and added 70 new ones. Continue reading...

Amy is very much involved in the editorial process - she's a meticulous line editor and my very best critic and she is always there to second guess me when I need second-guessing.

She was there for gut checks, and while she offered some difficult critiques, I trusted her judgment, and she never once asked me to compromise the story in its telling and its structure. From the onset, we knew the book couldn't be linear, and I remember an afternoon where we spent six hours spreading out the manuscript pages on a conference room table.

We picked up chapters, moved them around, read through them aloud, together, line by line. This sounds like a perfect fiction, right? An editor of the old guard. An editor who would spend six hours with her writer on a workday discussing structure.

I say without hesitation that this book is a better one because of my editor. She pushed me emotionally when she needed to, she challenged me in terms of craft, and I'm convinced that I came out of this experience a much better and meticulous writer.

Finding the right editor - the one person who completely gets your vision just as much, or even more than you do -  is much like finding a significant other. It starts with a courtship where you're polite, trying to sniff out how to work with one another, determine danger zones, and then you find yourself knee deep in a love affair, and when you're in the thick in the revision process, on draft 40, you consider throwing sharp objects at your editor even when you know they are 100 percent right.

Even when you know these changes will make for a better book. And the storm passes and you find you're in this comfortable place, on the same level.

Whether you're working with an editor of a literary journal or with an editor at a publishing house, check the ego at the door. Be willing to listen, to compromise, to try something even when you think it doesn't work, doesn't feel right, because it might take you altogether to another place in your writing you hadn't dreamed of going. Be willing to be honest, have an open dialogue, and stand your ground when it needs to be stood.

And don't phone your editor every ten seconds. They have other authors, too.