I knew a guy in the Marine Corps who'd been an honest-to-god cowboy before joining the military. He'd also spent a few years at Colgate, but by far, the more fascinating part of his past was that he'd once ridden a horse, carried a rifle to protect against bears, and herded animals. His first name was Michael, but he always went by his middle name, Bevan. Bevan! Have you ever known a Bevan? He's the only one I've ever come across, and his stories were as unique as his name.
His companion on many of his cowboy adventures had been a dog named Dog, who once--as Bevan told it--saved him from a giant rat that was leaping toward his throat out in the barn by catching the rat mid-leap and ripping him into two pieces with one shake of his head.
Bevan was a natural storyteller. He had a sonorous voice, and he knew how to draw out a story, build suspense, and get a laugh. People loved to listen to him.
It occurs to me from time to time, while reading the best literary fiction, that stories in, say, The New Yorker don't read like the kinds of stories Bevan would tell. All that metaphorical language that must have taken days of fasting and psychedelic drugs to come up with. All that tightness of language. When a scene is described, it's never in the language a normal person uses when telling a story. I can't imagine Bevan saying this, for example: "He was wearing a tattered coat and a faded black shirt, which gave him a penurious appearance. He ordered a coffee. I ordered a mint tea." (From "Sevastopol" by Emilio Fraia.) Or this: "There were six of us in the house. We were all about the same age, and at some point during the summer—I had moved in at the beginning of March, when the mornings were still cold, veins of ice glittering over the front steps—this became claustrophobic, unbearable. The house smelled of sweat and bike tires and something at the back of the oven being charred over and over again." (From "Old Hope" by Clare Sestanovich.)
What gives? Why don't the best story writers write stories that sound like the people we think of as the best storytellers?
Part of it is obviously the difference between the spoken medium and the written. Bevan can use his voice or his body language as a tool to convey feeling, emotion, or humor. The writer can't. All the writer has is the word on the page, so she has to sometimes use her tools in ways we don't normally think of in order to get the same effect. We're all familiar with the concept of having different vocabularies for speaking, listening, writing, and reading, with reading being the one where we know the most words and can handle the most complexity. So it's only natural that writers would push language to limits it isn't build to handle in the spoken word.
Nonetheless, I wonder sometimes if we aren't missing out by how seldom the tone of the spoken story influences the written one. It wasn't always that way. American literary history is full of writers whose voice could easily transfer to the stage or the barroom, from Twain to O.Henry to Vonnegut.
The distance between modern American fiction and the spoken story is nearly as great as the distance between modern American written poetry and music. I don't really want every poem I read to be as easily understandable on first listen as a typical song lyric. Most of the poems I encounter, I'm going to encounter in written form, and if it's a written story, then it needs to use the full set of tools the written word has at its disposal in order to be engaging. But every time I go to a poetry reading and have absolutely no idea what a poet is talking about when I hear a poem I've never seen before read out loud, I wonder if the propagation of the printed word hasn't robbed poetry of some of its organic pleasure. Poetry, more than any other genre, ought to be pleasant--dare I say fun??--to hear out loud. A modern poem that delights in upsetting expectations and resisting meaning provides one kind of enjoyment, but it's a different one from words that make music that conveys a feeling we've all had but couldn't find words for. A poem that requires hours to dissect, one that literally nobody can make much sense of hearing it read aloud without studying it beforehand, is providing a very different experience to the reader from what poetry offered for thousands of years of human history.
Storytelling has followed a similar, albeit less extreme, path. I'm not suggesting we all start telling stories the way Ira Glass does. The truth is, I'm not a great oral storyteller. In fact, I'm kind of bad at it. When I tell a story at work, I tend to get more "cool story, bro" type responses than fascination. So naturally, I'm going to lean toward the page-centric, written literary story when I've got something to say. But I think it's worth considering, when writing those dense stories, whether what we're writing has the potential to captivate a non-literary specialist, and if it doesn't, whether maybe it should. It doesn't necessarily have to be "fun." I don't think writing about child soldiers or rape or abuse is going to lead to a story that's fun to read. But it can still be captivating. It can still cast a spell on a reader that makes the reader feel he must keep reading, as opposed to a story a reader only gets through out of a sense of duty.
The last story I had published, "The Lifesaver on Board the Jamaica Mon," was me re-discovering what I myself find captivating. I actually had fun writing it, which I don't think has happened since I got serious about writing six years ago. After years of trying to learn how I'm supposed to write, I feel like how I'm supposed to write and how I want to write are finally re-converging a little bit. (Yes, I'm annoyed by an editorial insertion in the first sentence that put a questionable hyphen where a comma should go, but I'm trying not to let that spoil my fun.)
This is what I want to do from now on. I feel like I'm sort of figuring out style and voice. I know what a Jacob R. Weber story is, at least sort of. It's kind of a big step for me. And maybe the strongest evidence that it's really happening isn't so much the stories I'm writing, but my ability to quit chasing false leads and spend hours and hours writing stories that aren't really the kind of story I want to write.
Monday, December 30, 2019
Tuesday, December 24, 2019
Just in time for Christmas, Another Chicago Magazine drops my story about how cruise ships are from Satan
I don't want to take up your valuable time on Christmas Eve. (Who are those of you visiting this site today? Go be with your family!) But when you get around to it, and if you're so inclined, please visit Another Chicago Magazine, who just dropped my story about cruise ships, social inequity, and the end of the world. It's kind of long, so sorry to those of you who don't like reading digital versions of long text.
Here's the Randy Stonehill song I heard back when I was sixteen-year-old Bible thumper that probably first put the seed of this story in my head thirty years ago. This song plus maybe Johnny Cash's "When the Man Comes Around" are a good soundtrack for this story.
Thanks for reading! And thanks to ACM for believing in this story!
Friday, December 20, 2019
Okay, the hell with it, I will give a wrap-up post on Best American Short Stories 2019
I said I wasn't going to do it, because I didn't think there was any way to force unifying ideas onto this year's Best American Short Stories collection. In reality, trying to summarize BASS in any year will be fraught with peril, because the stories are just individually written pieces that nobody intended to go with the other choices in the volume. As an accidental anthology, it's not unlike the Bible, and for me to pretend one story echoes or responds to another is as shaky as suggesting the author of the Epistle of James not only wasn't contradicting the author of Romans, but that the two actually work together quite nicely.
So my point isn't to try to force some unifying theme out of these twenty stories, but maybe to offer a quick observation on good and bad applications of diversity. It's been decades now since Best American Short Stories, following trends in American intellectual circles, began to see diversity as a legitimate aim of its anthologies. The stories should not just be written about a diversity of subjects, but the actual demographics of the writers themselves ought to be considered in putting it together. This can mean different things to different editors. Last year, Roxane Gay included only four cis-men in the 2018 BASS. Just under half the writers were white. She isn't the first guest editor in the Best American universe history to take this approach.
Anthony Doerr, meanwhile, took a more conventional approach. The demographics of the writers he chose is a little more in line with the demographics of America, or at least as much as that is possible with a pie that can only be sliced twenty ways. There's at least some representation from pretty much every kind of group that "ought" to be there. The only exception might be LGBTQIA+ writers. I don't look deeply into the biographies of the writers, typically, so I might be wrong, but I don't think there were any LGBTQIA+ writers this year. There might have been, and they just chose to write about something other than queer/gender identity issues. But otherwise, Doerr gave us everything we've come to expect in terms of the range of stories and the range of writer identities.
You'd think that Doerr would have produced the better collection. Since Gay had a political axe to grind and Doerr was not aiming as specifically to promote writers from traditionally neglected groups, you'd think that Doerr would have found more compelling work. That's because Doerr would have: A) Had a larger pool of work to choose from, and B) Been more interested in quality of the work than in the identity of the writer.
But it didn't work out like that at all. Gay's anthology felt fresh, with an outsider kind of angry energy. Doerr's collection felt staid and flat. It felt establishment. The stories all had artistic merit. Some were outstanding. But there wasn't much novelty in most of the stories, nothing that isn't already a prominent feature of the American literary landscape.
There's a term I've picked up from my son through Internet culture: normie. It's a derogatory term used by various niche cultures on the Internet to describe those who will lazily accept what is mainstream. Normies will eventually embrace elements of outsider culture as they inevitably tire of the same fare over and over, but only after they have co-modified it and homogenized it to meet mainstream tastes. Normies will never innovate. Normies will be suspicious of whatever is outside their experience up to the moment when they find a version of it they like, at which point they will ruin whatever was unique about it as they consume a bastardized version of the once-edgy thing.
That was BASS 2019. In 2018, Roxane Gay gave us a raw version of diversity, which means she explored some of the weird and unknown manifestations of diversity that truly undiscovered voices can give us. Doerr picked enough stories from non-white authors and enough stories about subjects with topics related to diversity that he wouldn't be accused of being racist or sexist.
But while the stories he chose from white authors were very strong, he didn't pick great ones from non-white writers, with the notable exception of "No More Than a Bubble" by Jamel Brinkley. And I don't think the stories from non-white writers are the kinds of stories the communities those writers come from would have picked to represent themselves. It's like if YouTube wanted to honor meme culture in a "Best of YouTube" clip and picked "Behind the Meme" as its choice. Yes, a lot of people watch that channel, but they're not the people who create the memes in the first place, the ones always pushing the envelope of the weird and the creative. Gay, in other words, picked interesting stories precisely because she was deep enough in certain outsider cultures she found something that wasn't already played out in the mainstream. Doerr picked outsider things that appealed to his mainstream perspective, which ended up feeling nearly the same as just picking mainstream things.
The concept of diversity is fantastic. It's an attempt to channel the best of democracy by ensuring we are listening to all the great ideas, not just the mainstream ones. But we have to recognize that we are several decades into diversity as a concept itself becoming mainstream. Alongside truly outsider diversity is a co-modified establishment diversity, one that isn't really revolutionary or trail-blazing or even very interesting. Like establishment religion, it can be faked, with equally tepid and unconvincing results.
I think the best way to avoid falling into establishment diversity in future volumes is for the editors to feel freer to choose what really enchants them. The diversity in stories should be a function of diversity in editors, which means some years are going to focus more on traditionally marginalized voices than others. Gay chose nearly all stories from traditionally marginalized voices, and the results were phenomenal. (Interestingly to me, the two weakest stories I thought she picked were the two stories by white men. This parallels how the weakest stories Doerr picked were those not by white people.)
Having been picked to guest edit BASS, I think editors should honestly pick what fascinates them. If you're an angry, black, bisexual woman and you pick eighteen stories by something other than white men, great. At least there's a good chance I'll be reading the best of what you love produced that year. And even your choices from traditionally heard voices will be interesting, even if they're not great. By the same token, if you're a stodgy, white guy who went to Brown and you produce a stream of 800-page novels on the hypocrisies of white middle-class America, feel free to pick seventeen stories by white men. At least those might be the best stories by white men that year.
That's not to say a white guy couldn't pick eleven stunners written by Latina feminists. It's certainly not to say Doerr knowingly made his selections cynically. But the result was similar to what a cynically chosen list would have produced. The only way to ensure that the stories any editor picks really resonate is for the editor to feel no obligation whatsoever to satisfy any sort of establishment, even an establishment that was created to support as beautiful an idea as diversity.
So my point isn't to try to force some unifying theme out of these twenty stories, but maybe to offer a quick observation on good and bad applications of diversity. It's been decades now since Best American Short Stories, following trends in American intellectual circles, began to see diversity as a legitimate aim of its anthologies. The stories should not just be written about a diversity of subjects, but the actual demographics of the writers themselves ought to be considered in putting it together. This can mean different things to different editors. Last year, Roxane Gay included only four cis-men in the 2018 BASS. Just under half the writers were white. She isn't the first guest editor in the Best American universe history to take this approach.
Anthony Doerr, meanwhile, took a more conventional approach. The demographics of the writers he chose is a little more in line with the demographics of America, or at least as much as that is possible with a pie that can only be sliced twenty ways. There's at least some representation from pretty much every kind of group that "ought" to be there. The only exception might be LGBTQIA+ writers. I don't look deeply into the biographies of the writers, typically, so I might be wrong, but I don't think there were any LGBTQIA+ writers this year. There might have been, and they just chose to write about something other than queer/gender identity issues. But otherwise, Doerr gave us everything we've come to expect in terms of the range of stories and the range of writer identities.
You'd think that Doerr would have produced the better collection. Since Gay had a political axe to grind and Doerr was not aiming as specifically to promote writers from traditionally neglected groups, you'd think that Doerr would have found more compelling work. That's because Doerr would have: A) Had a larger pool of work to choose from, and B) Been more interested in quality of the work than in the identity of the writer.
But it didn't work out like that at all. Gay's anthology felt fresh, with an outsider kind of angry energy. Doerr's collection felt staid and flat. It felt establishment. The stories all had artistic merit. Some were outstanding. But there wasn't much novelty in most of the stories, nothing that isn't already a prominent feature of the American literary landscape.
 |
| Posting this is possibly the most normie thing I could do, but it gets the point across |
There's a term I've picked up from my son through Internet culture: normie. It's a derogatory term used by various niche cultures on the Internet to describe those who will lazily accept what is mainstream. Normies will eventually embrace elements of outsider culture as they inevitably tire of the same fare over and over, but only after they have co-modified it and homogenized it to meet mainstream tastes. Normies will never innovate. Normies will be suspicious of whatever is outside their experience up to the moment when they find a version of it they like, at which point they will ruin whatever was unique about it as they consume a bastardized version of the once-edgy thing.
That was BASS 2019. In 2018, Roxane Gay gave us a raw version of diversity, which means she explored some of the weird and unknown manifestations of diversity that truly undiscovered voices can give us. Doerr picked enough stories from non-white authors and enough stories about subjects with topics related to diversity that he wouldn't be accused of being racist or sexist.
But while the stories he chose from white authors were very strong, he didn't pick great ones from non-white writers, with the notable exception of "No More Than a Bubble" by Jamel Brinkley. And I don't think the stories from non-white writers are the kinds of stories the communities those writers come from would have picked to represent themselves. It's like if YouTube wanted to honor meme culture in a "Best of YouTube" clip and picked "Behind the Meme" as its choice. Yes, a lot of people watch that channel, but they're not the people who create the memes in the first place, the ones always pushing the envelope of the weird and the creative. Gay, in other words, picked interesting stories precisely because she was deep enough in certain outsider cultures she found something that wasn't already played out in the mainstream. Doerr picked outsider things that appealed to his mainstream perspective, which ended up feeling nearly the same as just picking mainstream things.
The concept of diversity is fantastic. It's an attempt to channel the best of democracy by ensuring we are listening to all the great ideas, not just the mainstream ones. But we have to recognize that we are several decades into diversity as a concept itself becoming mainstream. Alongside truly outsider diversity is a co-modified establishment diversity, one that isn't really revolutionary or trail-blazing or even very interesting. Like establishment religion, it can be faked, with equally tepid and unconvincing results.
I think the best way to avoid falling into establishment diversity in future volumes is for the editors to feel freer to choose what really enchants them. The diversity in stories should be a function of diversity in editors, which means some years are going to focus more on traditionally marginalized voices than others. Gay chose nearly all stories from traditionally marginalized voices, and the results were phenomenal. (Interestingly to me, the two weakest stories I thought she picked were the two stories by white men. This parallels how the weakest stories Doerr picked were those not by white people.)
Having been picked to guest edit BASS, I think editors should honestly pick what fascinates them. If you're an angry, black, bisexual woman and you pick eighteen stories by something other than white men, great. At least there's a good chance I'll be reading the best of what you love produced that year. And even your choices from traditionally heard voices will be interesting, even if they're not great. By the same token, if you're a stodgy, white guy who went to Brown and you produce a stream of 800-page novels on the hypocrisies of white middle-class America, feel free to pick seventeen stories by white men. At least those might be the best stories by white men that year.
That's not to say a white guy couldn't pick eleven stunners written by Latina feminists. It's certainly not to say Doerr knowingly made his selections cynically. But the result was similar to what a cynically chosen list would have produced. The only way to ensure that the stories any editor picks really resonate is for the editor to feel no obligation whatsoever to satisfy any sort of establishment, even an establishment that was created to support as beautiful an idea as diversity.
Monday, December 9, 2019
The process of deciding what to publish never seems less legitimate than when I'm in charge of it
For the last few weeks, I've been part of a couple of processes to help pick the winners in writing contests. One was Sixfold's writing contest, which I've written about already and in which I only played a small role. (A very, very small role, since the winners were stories I didn't like.) But I have a much bigger role in the Washington Writers' Publishing House fiction contest. The deadline to enter was November 15th.
The publishing house is a co-op. We run a poetry contest and a fiction contest every year. Anyone within 75 miles of D.C. is eligible to enter. So it's aimed at giving a boost to local writers. And it has. A few of the past winners, like Melanie Hatter and Dave Ebenbach, have gone on to pretty big things after winning our contest. The way it's supposed to work is that after you win, you come give of your time to the publishing house for at least two years afterwards. This is my third year after my own win. I'm now in charge of running the fiction contest. That doesn't mean I have sole responsibility for picking the winner, but I am the one getting everyone else together to make the decision, and so I have a lot of influence over the eventual winner.
We got the most entries this year since I've been part of judging it. I've really put a lot of effort into trying to pick the best entry, but no matter what I do, I can't get past the feeling that what we're doing just isn't good enough. I always felt this way during my year I spent as an editor for the Baltimore Review, as well.
One reason our method for picking what to publish seems so inadequate has to do with the review/analysis I've been doing for the past few years on the Best American Short Stories or other anthologies. One of the important things I've learned from doing this is how often my impression of a story ends up being profoundly different after a second reading than it was after a first. That probably sounds a little bit obvious. Everyone knows a story is different the second time through. But I've been really surprised just how different the second reading sometimes leaves matters. Many stories I didn't like after one read became my favorites the second time through.
So really, the minimum I ought to do for the entries is to give them each two reads. But it's also impossible. I don't have time to read them all twice. Nobody helping to make the decision does. The fact is we don't read most entries all the way through once. The process is something like this: I read roughly the first 25 pages of each entry. I pick the five to seven most promising out of that. Everyone else is welcome to do the same. I offer my list to everyone else. Those with time to read through everything and make recommendations send out their lists. The people with less time just read through our recommended best lists. So only two or three people are deciding what the whole board of five or six even narrow in on. Our of the five to seven I picked as the most promising, I then read those all the way through once. Unless I don't, because sometimes about halfway through a reading, I just know it's not going to be a winner and I move on.
I've always consoled myself with this sampling approach by saying that if I don't want to keep reading something after 25 pages, no potential reader we're trying to market to would, either. But I don't know how satisfying that really is, given how profoundly I've changed my opinion after giving something a deeper reading than I otherwise might have. Even if I didn't love it immediately, if we market the book well, the reader is going to give it the benefit of the doubt and get past the beginning to place where she loves it like we did.
Beyond just the basic philosophical question of fairness, there's an emotional aspect to the process. I get rejected over a hundred times a year, and one of the biggest questions I always have is how that decision was made. Was it a really skilled editor whose opinion I would respect? If so, did he hate it completely, or was it just a shade shy of making it? Or was it some grad student just looking for credit for working on the school's lit mag? Did the person or people who voted down on it give it serious consideration, or were they just trying to clear out the queue, so they latched onto something unimportant and used that a reason to make a quick no-vote and move on? Every hint of laziness I see in myself makes me wonder how many other decision makers allow themselves an equal or greater latitude.
I wonder if this isn't having an impact on content in American literature. Some people have made the criticism that a lot of American literature, especially that coming from writing program graduates, all sound the same. I don't agree that it all sounds the same, but sometimes I do wonder if I'm not just reading a variety of ways to say something similar. The political viewpoints of most stories I read in good journals now is pretty much similar to everything else. I don't mean that as a dog whistle, like it would be if someone wrote that in Quilette. I'm not asking for more stories written with traditional, nationalist political viewpoints. But I wouldn't mind some heterogeneity within the side of the political spectrum I did I identify with. It's not just themes; a lot of the subject matter is becoming very familiar. I wonder if writers aren't learning to hit the things that overworked editors have shown will respond to. I know the stories I've written that got published tend to fit this mold more than the ones that haven't, although some of the ones I've written that haven't are quite likely better. The more stories with certain characteristics get published, the more they lead to other work doing something similar.
Maybe that's too alarmist. I really don't know. I only have my own very small experience as a writer, editor, and reader to go off of. But even if the editorial processes out there aren't actively killing American literature, I think it's almost a given that there is great work getting missed, and it's our fault--the fault of those of us who, at any level, play gatekeeper without living up to the responsibility.
At the very least, if you're a writer I've rejected in my life, just know I didn't take any joy in it, and I haven't yet become calloused about doing it. I hate every rejection I give, and I know exactly what you feel when you get one.
The publishing house is a co-op. We run a poetry contest and a fiction contest every year. Anyone within 75 miles of D.C. is eligible to enter. So it's aimed at giving a boost to local writers. And it has. A few of the past winners, like Melanie Hatter and Dave Ebenbach, have gone on to pretty big things after winning our contest. The way it's supposed to work is that after you win, you come give of your time to the publishing house for at least two years afterwards. This is my third year after my own win. I'm now in charge of running the fiction contest. That doesn't mean I have sole responsibility for picking the winner, but I am the one getting everyone else together to make the decision, and so I have a lot of influence over the eventual winner.
We got the most entries this year since I've been part of judging it. I've really put a lot of effort into trying to pick the best entry, but no matter what I do, I can't get past the feeling that what we're doing just isn't good enough. I always felt this way during my year I spent as an editor for the Baltimore Review, as well.
One reason our method for picking what to publish seems so inadequate has to do with the review/analysis I've been doing for the past few years on the Best American Short Stories or other anthologies. One of the important things I've learned from doing this is how often my impression of a story ends up being profoundly different after a second reading than it was after a first. That probably sounds a little bit obvious. Everyone knows a story is different the second time through. But I've been really surprised just how different the second reading sometimes leaves matters. Many stories I didn't like after one read became my favorites the second time through.
So really, the minimum I ought to do for the entries is to give them each two reads. But it's also impossible. I don't have time to read them all twice. Nobody helping to make the decision does. The fact is we don't read most entries all the way through once. The process is something like this: I read roughly the first 25 pages of each entry. I pick the five to seven most promising out of that. Everyone else is welcome to do the same. I offer my list to everyone else. Those with time to read through everything and make recommendations send out their lists. The people with less time just read through our recommended best lists. So only two or three people are deciding what the whole board of five or six even narrow in on. Our of the five to seven I picked as the most promising, I then read those all the way through once. Unless I don't, because sometimes about halfway through a reading, I just know it's not going to be a winner and I move on.
I've always consoled myself with this sampling approach by saying that if I don't want to keep reading something after 25 pages, no potential reader we're trying to market to would, either. But I don't know how satisfying that really is, given how profoundly I've changed my opinion after giving something a deeper reading than I otherwise might have. Even if I didn't love it immediately, if we market the book well, the reader is going to give it the benefit of the doubt and get past the beginning to place where she loves it like we did.
Beyond just the basic philosophical question of fairness, there's an emotional aspect to the process. I get rejected over a hundred times a year, and one of the biggest questions I always have is how that decision was made. Was it a really skilled editor whose opinion I would respect? If so, did he hate it completely, or was it just a shade shy of making it? Or was it some grad student just looking for credit for working on the school's lit mag? Did the person or people who voted down on it give it serious consideration, or were they just trying to clear out the queue, so they latched onto something unimportant and used that a reason to make a quick no-vote and move on? Every hint of laziness I see in myself makes me wonder how many other decision makers allow themselves an equal or greater latitude.
I wonder if this isn't having an impact on content in American literature. Some people have made the criticism that a lot of American literature, especially that coming from writing program graduates, all sound the same. I don't agree that it all sounds the same, but sometimes I do wonder if I'm not just reading a variety of ways to say something similar. The political viewpoints of most stories I read in good journals now is pretty much similar to everything else. I don't mean that as a dog whistle, like it would be if someone wrote that in Quilette. I'm not asking for more stories written with traditional, nationalist political viewpoints. But I wouldn't mind some heterogeneity within the side of the political spectrum I did I identify with. It's not just themes; a lot of the subject matter is becoming very familiar. I wonder if writers aren't learning to hit the things that overworked editors have shown will respond to. I know the stories I've written that got published tend to fit this mold more than the ones that haven't, although some of the ones I've written that haven't are quite likely better. The more stories with certain characteristics get published, the more they lead to other work doing something similar.
Maybe that's too alarmist. I really don't know. I only have my own very small experience as a writer, editor, and reader to go off of. But even if the editorial processes out there aren't actively killing American literature, I think it's almost a given that there is great work getting missed, and it's our fault--the fault of those of us who, at any level, play gatekeeper without living up to the responsibility.
At the very least, if you're a writer I've rejected in my life, just know I didn't take any joy in it, and I haven't yet become calloused about doing it. I hate every rejection I give, and I know exactly what you feel when you get one.
Saturday, December 7, 2019
The results are out, and they seem to say that people need to be ruled
I recently mentioned that I entered a story in a Sixfold contest, the literary journal that picks its stories through reader voting rather than a board. I finished in the middle. I didn't even get out of round one.
I actually happen to have read the top three stories that won. They were assigned to me during the final round of voting. I didn't vote very high for two of them, including the winner, which I thought was pretty weak. The second place story was awful. The third place story is okay. If I had been on an editorial board and they had picked the two top stories over some of the other, better entries I saw, I'd have quit the magazine. It's a little hard to tell, because not everybody lets their names go into the final voting list, but I don't see any of the stories I actually liked during voting anywhere near the top. So I think my preferences just don't match the magazine's. I honestly don't think most of the stories they picked as the winners would make it through a halfway decent literary magazine with an editorial board.
As far as the feedback I got on my story from the voters goes, the funniest feedback I got was from one reader who said she gave my story a high vote. But she actually put my story fifth out of six in the first round. That means she was confused about how the ranking works: one is the highest and six is the lowest. She meant to put me second, but she put me next-to-last. Her misunderstanding might have been enough to knock me out after round one. Overall, out of the six votes I got in round one, I got three second place votes, two fifth, one of which was by mistake, and a fourth place vote. The other person who put me in fifth wrote this: " I found the presentation of Jenna as a ‘hypocrite’ for being a powerful woman, but also having emotions, quite problematic. It wasn’t clear enough to me whether this was an intentional comment on the catch 22 of being a powerful woman or not, but it definitely struck me a little incongruous with the overall effect that I think you were trying to create." I don't know what to tell you, dude. It's a first-person story with an obviously flawed narrator, and I found it incredibly clear that you shouldn't take his attitude as the attitude of the story. If you don't get that it's satire after the uber-absurd ending, I don't know how to help you.
Overall, I'm sorry to say that Sixfold's voting process does not seem to work better than a board. There were, like there are with most journals, a lot of bad stories submitted, and each of those bad writers got a vote. The results are sad to me, because I really think it's a great idea to try. I wonder if more journals tried it, if there'd be a place where it worked better. I think the problem with this particular journal, based on the stories I read, is that the taste of the people submitting is rather sentimental. There were a lot of stories where the whole story was a series of sad events resolved with a sudden happy ending that referred to the title, which is kind of a bush league writing tactic. But I can imagine a community forming that has a different taste. If other journals did this, I think you might see identifiable styles emerge from those communities. Sixfold's idea is solid, it just so happens that the writers who submitted, at least in the contest I entered, don't seem to really like sophisticated stories, based on what I read and what I see the readers chose. I'd like to see other journals that try this idea, but with a grass-roots push for a particular aesthetic at the same time. I would describe Sixfold's aesthetic as "ninth-grade girl who's watched a lot of Hallmark Channel."
I'm really kind of sad. Not that I didn't do well. I mean, I wish I'd done better, mostly so it didn't seem so much like I'm just questioning the results now because I didn't do well. But I sort of thought, after reading the stories I saw during voting, that this wasn't my audience. I just really hoped that readers voting would lead to better work getting selected. I wanted to believe in democracy. But it turns out that, as the Internet proves every day, the masses quite often aren't very discerning.
I actually happen to have read the top three stories that won. They were assigned to me during the final round of voting. I didn't vote very high for two of them, including the winner, which I thought was pretty weak. The second place story was awful. The third place story is okay. If I had been on an editorial board and they had picked the two top stories over some of the other, better entries I saw, I'd have quit the magazine. It's a little hard to tell, because not everybody lets their names go into the final voting list, but I don't see any of the stories I actually liked during voting anywhere near the top. So I think my preferences just don't match the magazine's. I honestly don't think most of the stories they picked as the winners would make it through a halfway decent literary magazine with an editorial board.
As far as the feedback I got on my story from the voters goes, the funniest feedback I got was from one reader who said she gave my story a high vote. But she actually put my story fifth out of six in the first round. That means she was confused about how the ranking works: one is the highest and six is the lowest. She meant to put me second, but she put me next-to-last. Her misunderstanding might have been enough to knock me out after round one. Overall, out of the six votes I got in round one, I got three second place votes, two fifth, one of which was by mistake, and a fourth place vote. The other person who put me in fifth wrote this: " I found the presentation of Jenna as a ‘hypocrite’ for being a powerful woman, but also having emotions, quite problematic. It wasn’t clear enough to me whether this was an intentional comment on the catch 22 of being a powerful woman or not, but it definitely struck me a little incongruous with the overall effect that I think you were trying to create." I don't know what to tell you, dude. It's a first-person story with an obviously flawed narrator, and I found it incredibly clear that you shouldn't take his attitude as the attitude of the story. If you don't get that it's satire after the uber-absurd ending, I don't know how to help you.
Overall, I'm sorry to say that Sixfold's voting process does not seem to work better than a board. There were, like there are with most journals, a lot of bad stories submitted, and each of those bad writers got a vote. The results are sad to me, because I really think it's a great idea to try. I wonder if more journals tried it, if there'd be a place where it worked better. I think the problem with this particular journal, based on the stories I read, is that the taste of the people submitting is rather sentimental. There were a lot of stories where the whole story was a series of sad events resolved with a sudden happy ending that referred to the title, which is kind of a bush league writing tactic. But I can imagine a community forming that has a different taste. If other journals did this, I think you might see identifiable styles emerge from those communities. Sixfold's idea is solid, it just so happens that the writers who submitted, at least in the contest I entered, don't seem to really like sophisticated stories, based on what I read and what I see the readers chose. I'd like to see other journals that try this idea, but with a grass-roots push for a particular aesthetic at the same time. I would describe Sixfold's aesthetic as "ninth-grade girl who's watched a lot of Hallmark Channel."
I'm really kind of sad. Not that I didn't do well. I mean, I wish I'd done better, mostly so it didn't seem so much like I'm just questioning the results now because I didn't do well. But I sort of thought, after reading the stories I saw during voting, that this wasn't my audience. I just really hoped that readers voting would lead to better work getting selected. I wanted to believe in democracy. But it turns out that, as the Internet proves every day, the masses quite often aren't very discerning.
Tuesday, December 3, 2019
Six cheers for Sixfold
Like the majority of below-the-radar writers out there, I submit stories to a lot of journals. I realized a while ago--mostly as a result of working as an editor who made decisions on what to publish myself--that the odds of getting into even the most marginal journal are long, and the best bet to be able to share work with readers is to take the lead from what fish and reptiles do: drop a bunch of eggs in the hope that a few of them will survive.
Most of my stories meet the same fate as most eggs. They find a fast, quick death. The problem for me as a parent to these stories is that I really don't know what fate befell them beyond the fact they didn't make it to adulthood. Did they almost make it? Do I have the right overall strategy for raising my young? Am I way off?
Almost all rejection letters just say "no thanks." A few say the editors really liked the story, but it didn't quite make it. Lately, I've been really encouraged to be getting these kinds of rejections from some of the better journals, the ones that bring a lot of readers to the table. But most rejections I get are still quiet on what kind of rejection it was.
I've said before that I wish editors would be brave enough to give you a one to ten score. There wouldn't be any requirement to justify it, just a raw score. Ten is "we published you" and one is "I stopped reading somewhere on page one." I think a six or maybe a seven would indicate that the editor read all the way to the end with interest. That might be depressing, but at least it's some kind of response other than a form letter.
Sixfold is very enthusiastic about their process. Like, they're really, really big believers in it. I can see a few problems with it. One is that if I'm a voter but also looking to get my work published, aren't I motivated to vote down the best stories so I hurt the competition? Granted, my vote is just one of many a story will get, but what if a lot of voters are doing the same thing? Couldn't you end up with a good story getting dumped on preemptively? 500 voters who are also candidates is different from just having 500 voters.
Secondly, like any journal, a lot of stories aren't that good. Which means you're getting votes from people who don't write very good stories themselves. Granted, someone can be a bad writer and a good reader, but I'd trust a good writer more to have a meaningful vote. Whatever the plusses and minuses of having a board are, most editorial boards have writers who've at least published a little bit themselves. There's no real requirement to be a voter at Sixfold other than to enter the contest and follow the rules.
Third is what I'd like to call Weber's Rule of Workshops, which applies here as well. 90% of readers will only put 50% of the work into reading your work that they'd like to get themselves. Really, reading a story thoroughly ought to include reading twice. I didn't do that. But I did read every story all the way through once, which is more than I do when I'm an editor on a board. However, it's not like the magazine is checking to see how closely each reader read. It's an honor system. I did the best I could with the time I had available. I read closely, took notes, and tried hard to rank them. Usually, #1 and #6 were easy, but #2 through #5 were harder to define.
In spite of these problems, I still think Sixfold is a great idea. It's transparent--you get to see all the responses of all the readers. Readers who don't respond get their own stories eliminated. It ensures that our fate on the slush pile isn't just in the hands of one grad student somewhere. You might get some garbage feedback. My experience with workshops is that you almost always do get some thoughts you are better off ignoring from almost any group of readers. But even this ambivalent something seems better to me than the nothing I usually get.
I'm writing all this now, when the results of the vote I entered aren't back yet. I don't want anyone thinking I praised it too highly because they picked me or that I qualified their value too much because they ditched me in round one. Honestly, based on the stories I got to see when I voted and the stories that have won before, I can very much see my story going either way. Nothing between first and last would surprise me. But whatever the result, I think the approach is interesting, worth trying, and probably likely to come close to what a regular journal with a board could do in terms of quality. I plan to report back at the end with whether there were any surprises, like stories I voted low that won.
Most of my stories meet the same fate as most eggs. They find a fast, quick death. The problem for me as a parent to these stories is that I really don't know what fate befell them beyond the fact they didn't make it to adulthood. Did they almost make it? Do I have the right overall strategy for raising my young? Am I way off?
Almost all rejection letters just say "no thanks." A few say the editors really liked the story, but it didn't quite make it. Lately, I've been really encouraged to be getting these kinds of rejections from some of the better journals, the ones that bring a lot of readers to the table. But most rejections I get are still quiet on what kind of rejection it was.
I've said before that I wish editors would be brave enough to give you a one to ten score. There wouldn't be any requirement to justify it, just a raw score. Ten is "we published you" and one is "I stopped reading somewhere on page one." I think a six or maybe a seven would indicate that the editor read all the way to the end with interest. That might be depressing, but at least it's some kind of response other than a form letter.
Enter Sixfold
I just learned about Sixfold. Its model is different. Rather than having an editorial board, they let the readers decide. Everyone who submits a story becomes a voter. They have a very complicated, three-round process you can read about here. Most of the complicated parts are transparent to the reader/voter. You just have to read six stories, rank them from one to six, and then do it again for two more rounds. At the end, they've got their top stories based on votes.Sixfold is very enthusiastic about their process. Like, they're really, really big believers in it. I can see a few problems with it. One is that if I'm a voter but also looking to get my work published, aren't I motivated to vote down the best stories so I hurt the competition? Granted, my vote is just one of many a story will get, but what if a lot of voters are doing the same thing? Couldn't you end up with a good story getting dumped on preemptively? 500 voters who are also candidates is different from just having 500 voters.
Secondly, like any journal, a lot of stories aren't that good. Which means you're getting votes from people who don't write very good stories themselves. Granted, someone can be a bad writer and a good reader, but I'd trust a good writer more to have a meaningful vote. Whatever the plusses and minuses of having a board are, most editorial boards have writers who've at least published a little bit themselves. There's no real requirement to be a voter at Sixfold other than to enter the contest and follow the rules.
Third is what I'd like to call Weber's Rule of Workshops, which applies here as well. 90% of readers will only put 50% of the work into reading your work that they'd like to get themselves. Really, reading a story thoroughly ought to include reading twice. I didn't do that. But I did read every story all the way through once, which is more than I do when I'm an editor on a board. However, it's not like the magazine is checking to see how closely each reader read. It's an honor system. I did the best I could with the time I had available. I read closely, took notes, and tried hard to rank them. Usually, #1 and #6 were easy, but #2 through #5 were harder to define.
In spite of these problems, I still think Sixfold is a great idea. It's transparent--you get to see all the responses of all the readers. Readers who don't respond get their own stories eliminated. It ensures that our fate on the slush pile isn't just in the hands of one grad student somewhere. You might get some garbage feedback. My experience with workshops is that you almost always do get some thoughts you are better off ignoring from almost any group of readers. But even this ambivalent something seems better to me than the nothing I usually get.
I'm writing all this now, when the results of the vote I entered aren't back yet. I don't want anyone thinking I praised it too highly because they picked me or that I qualified their value too much because they ditched me in round one. Honestly, based on the stories I got to see when I voted and the stories that have won before, I can very much see my story going either way. Nothing between first and last would surprise me. But whatever the result, I think the approach is interesting, worth trying, and probably likely to come close to what a regular journal with a board could do in terms of quality. I plan to report back at the end with whether there were any surprises, like stories I voted low that won.
Sunday, December 1, 2019
The most popular stories from BASS 2018, according to my blog stats
I only just finished blogging about the Best American Short Stories anthology of 2019 a few weeks ago, but I think now is about the right time to go ahead and call it on what the favorites from the anthology from last year were. I'm using my blog stats for this. I think most of the people who read my analyses of BASS stories are students. Students of the fall semester this year would have read the 2018 anthology, because the new one didn't come out until October. Next semester, they'll do the 2019 anthology, which means I'll start getting new visitors to this year's posts. Right now, at the end of the fall semester, the clicks for 2018's BASS have finally just about stopped, and I think I've got an accurate enough read at this point to call the favorites. I'm going to rank the stories based on which ones got the most clicks. (My guess is that most of those clicks represent a student who wanted to research a story, Googled it, and ended up on my blog.)
These numbers show some of the idiosyncrasies you'd expect from college students. For example, the story with the second-most clicks was "The Cougar" by Maria Anderson. I'd guess some of the reason it was so popular was that it was the first story in the collection. So some students, when asked to research and write about any story from the collection they wanted to, lazily picked the first one. I'd also guess some students did more research at the beginning of the semester than the end, which made for a bias in terms of stories early on in the anthology getting more clicks. It's also possible some students don't like the way I write and just quit clicking on Google links to my blog after a while.
But for whatever reason, here are the click counts. Keep in mind that Google doesn't tell me when someone views something by just cruising through my blog. I only get specific click counts when someone clicks directly onto a particular post. So there may be others who looked at some stories without it registering.
From most clicks to least:
1. "Boys Go to Jupiter" by Danielle Evans - 1683 clicks (this was also my favorite story, so good job, Internet)
2. "The Cougar" by Maria Anderson - 1651 clicks (the first story in the anthology)
3. "Come on, Silver" by Ann Glaviano - 1082
4. "The Brothers Brujo" by Matthew Lyons -1017 (this story and the next were my two least favorite; I can only assume the Internet wanted to research them in order to write more scathing papers about how the stories weren't that good)
5. "The Baptism" by Ron Rash (it was shorter than most, so maybe that appealed to students with busy lives playing Fortnite)
6. "What Got Into Us" by Jacob Guajardo - 842
7. "Control Negro" by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson - 684
8. "Items Awaiting Protective Enclosure" by Tea Obrecht - 666 (someone please click there now and de-curse the number)
9. "A Family" by Jamel Brinkley - 568
10. "Good with Boys" by Kristen Iskandrian - 539
11. "Whose Heart I Long to Stop with the Click of a Revolver" by Rivers Solomon - 525
12. "A History of China" by Carolyn Ferrell - 481
13. "The Art of Losing" by Yoon Choi - 461
14. "A Big True" by Dina Nayeri - 434
15. "Los Angeles" by Emma Cline - 404 (This was my second favorite, so I'm puzzled by its low number of clicks)
16. "The Prairie Wife" by Curtis Sittenfeld - 317
17. "Suburbia!" by Amy Silverburg - 277
18. "Unearth" by Alicia Elliott - 263
19. "What Terrible Thing it Was" by Esme Weijun Wang -205 (which may have been hurt not only by being the last in the anthology, but also by me not putting the title in the title of my post about it, meaning Google didn't recognize it as easily)
20. "Everything is Far From Here" by Cristina Henriquez - 168 (and while I didn't really like this story, I think part of the reason it had so few clicks is that it's not a difficult story to understand. Some clicks I get are no doubt of the "I don't understand this story" variety.)
These numbers show some of the idiosyncrasies you'd expect from college students. For example, the story with the second-most clicks was "The Cougar" by Maria Anderson. I'd guess some of the reason it was so popular was that it was the first story in the collection. So some students, when asked to research and write about any story from the collection they wanted to, lazily picked the first one. I'd also guess some students did more research at the beginning of the semester than the end, which made for a bias in terms of stories early on in the anthology getting more clicks. It's also possible some students don't like the way I write and just quit clicking on Google links to my blog after a while.
But for whatever reason, here are the click counts. Keep in mind that Google doesn't tell me when someone views something by just cruising through my blog. I only get specific click counts when someone clicks directly onto a particular post. So there may be others who looked at some stories without it registering.
From most clicks to least:
1. "Boys Go to Jupiter" by Danielle Evans - 1683 clicks (this was also my favorite story, so good job, Internet)
2. "The Cougar" by Maria Anderson - 1651 clicks (the first story in the anthology)
3. "Come on, Silver" by Ann Glaviano - 1082
4. "The Brothers Brujo" by Matthew Lyons -1017 (this story and the next were my two least favorite; I can only assume the Internet wanted to research them in order to write more scathing papers about how the stories weren't that good)
5. "The Baptism" by Ron Rash (it was shorter than most, so maybe that appealed to students with busy lives playing Fortnite)
6. "What Got Into Us" by Jacob Guajardo - 842
7. "Control Negro" by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson - 684
8. "Items Awaiting Protective Enclosure" by Tea Obrecht - 666 (someone please click there now and de-curse the number)
9. "A Family" by Jamel Brinkley - 568
10. "Good with Boys" by Kristen Iskandrian - 539
11. "Whose Heart I Long to Stop with the Click of a Revolver" by Rivers Solomon - 525
12. "A History of China" by Carolyn Ferrell - 481
13. "The Art of Losing" by Yoon Choi - 461
14. "A Big True" by Dina Nayeri - 434
15. "Los Angeles" by Emma Cline - 404 (This was my second favorite, so I'm puzzled by its low number of clicks)
16. "The Prairie Wife" by Curtis Sittenfeld - 317
17. "Suburbia!" by Amy Silverburg - 277
18. "Unearth" by Alicia Elliott - 263
19. "What Terrible Thing it Was" by Esme Weijun Wang -205 (which may have been hurt not only by being the last in the anthology, but also by me not putting the title in the title of my post about it, meaning Google didn't recognize it as easily)
20. "Everything is Far From Here" by Cristina Henriquez - 168 (and while I didn't really like this story, I think part of the reason it had so few clicks is that it's not a difficult story to understand. Some clicks I get are no doubt of the "I don't understand this story" variety.)
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