WIHPTS: Danielle Evans' "Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain"

It's the return of "Would I have published this story?" which is a game I play where I try to imagine if I'd have voted "yes" on a highly acclaimed short story if it had come in as a random, slush-pile fiction entry at the magazine where I'm an assistant fiction editor.

It's impossible, of course, for me to really know how I'd have voted, since I really do know that this is acclaimed fiction, but I do the best I can.

This isn't really criticism or a review, although my views on the story's merit do tend to come out in the wash as I play the game.

With that out of the way, here we go...

Would I have published it?

I'm 80% sure the answer is yes. 

Synopsis


This is a great story. I'm almost halfway through the 2017 Best American Short Stories anthology, and this is my favorite yet. It's the story of Rena, a woman who travels the world photographing the traumatized, the war-torn, the dying and the destitute. Back at home, she's left a sister in a facility to care for her, because the sister's husband shot her in the head over an imagined affair, leaving her permanently impaired. This leads Rena to conclude that her line of work isn't really that dangerous, because you can get shot in your own home by the kid who grew up next door, the one who used to take out your parents' trash.

In spite of that dire backdrop, the story itself at times is borderline screwball comedy. Rena met a man on her travels once named JT, a man who has been finding reasons to delay marrying the girl back home. It just so happens that girl back home is a pastor's daughter. She's invited Rena to her wedding, although not as a bridesmaid. Dori, the pastor's daughter, has been suspicious of Rena since Rena and JT were stranded in a hotel in West Africa for several days once because of a quarantine. It's not clear why she invited Rena, except possibly as a passive aggressive means to force Rena to watch Dori marry JT and win a contest Rena hasn't been playing.

For wedding colors, Dori picked the whole rainbow. Each of the seven bridesmaids is one of the seven colors in the ROY-G-BIV spectrum (the title of the story, "Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain, is an old mnemonic device for remembering the colors of the spectrum). Rena self-selects black, so as not to steal the show from anyone. Dori is white.

Long story short, Rena bangs one of the groomsmen, but on her way out of the room, she catches JT running away from his wedding. The next day, Dori and Rena drive off together to find the groom after Rena lies and says she knows where to find him. It's a little bit "My Best Friend's Wedding," a little bit "Thelma and Louise."

What might have kept me from voting yes

Three things:

1) As everyone who knows me is aware, I tend to get triggered by depictions of evangelicals, because I almost always think they're wrong. Dori starts off looking like she's going to be a cut-out of an evangelical, or the author's second-hand imaginings of what an evangelical might be like. Dori ends up as much more than that, but I'd have had to get far enough to find that out.

2) The opening lines. By the end, I was okay with how it started, but when I first read them, I wasn't sure. "Two by two the animals boarded, and then all the rest of them in the world died, but no one ever tells the story that way." Well, actually, a lot of people tell the story that way. It's not a new objection to the story of Noah's Ark.

3) There are a few passages early on that seem to break third-person limited. For example: "Rena is not a bridesmaid but has been dragged along for the festivities thanks to the aggressive hospitality of the bridal party." That's nearly an analysis coming from outside Rena (so is the opening paragraph). Or again, describing how Rena met JT: "When they met, most of what they had in common was that they were Americans, but far away from home, that could be enough." That evaluation "that could be enough" sounds like an omniscient narrator, not Rena. But this kind of thing soon dissipates, and I'm pretty sure I'd have kept reading through it.

Coda

If I'm right that I would have persevered, I'd have been so glad I did stick with it. The ending of this thing really knocked my socks off. I'd been kind of disappointed in this year's anthology up to that point, but this one was one of those stories I read stories for.

Still, it's a little troubling to me that I'm not sure. When I first started editing, it was a little bit comforting to me as a writer to see how many good stories come in. It made me feel like when I was getting rejections, it wasn't that what I wrote wasn't good. It was just that there was a ton of good competition. Over time, I started feeling like that was no longer such a consolation. I started to feel the weight of the number of other good writers, and feel like I was trying to push into a glutted market.

Lately, I've been starting to feel discomfort as an editor, not just as a writer. The quantity of good writing has overwhelmed me, and I'm getting to a point where I just can't give stories the attention needed to tell which of the many good ones is the best. New stories keep coming in every day from earnest people giving us their best shot, and I'm still trying to get through the slush pile from three months ago. I do my best. I really do. But would I have seen this great story for what it was? Would I have been the reader this story deserved?

Like it or not, I've become a gatekeeper of sorts. That's a big responsibility. I'm not sure I'm living up to it.

More of an HTGP than a WIHPTS: "Raptor" by Charles Holdefer

I've been doing a lot of Would I Have Published This Story (WIHPTS) installments lately, while reading through the Puschart Anthology from 2017. The last story I read was so good, I'm not even going to do a WIHPTS for it. Yes, I would have published it.

Instead, I'd like to offer a quick HTGP (How to Get Published). Very quick, actually, because that's how this story introduced the main conflict. Here's two things any fiction writer trying to get past numbskulled first-line readers (like me) should do:

1) Get into the conflict in the first page. Here's how "Raptor" does it: The first sentence teases it, "Cody was the only one to see the raptor descend." We then get two quick paragraphs telling us who is involved and where we are, then the conflict literally descends into the picture:

With a swoop the raptor grabbed Ronny and the baby chair and then began to arc upward, pumping its wings furiously

We have a family that was on one arc now completely redirected by something not only tragic, but freakishly unlikely beyond all imagining. That gets us knuckleheaded readers past the first page.

2) When you need to go into a flashback or offer some kind of exposition, give another lead-in with as much force as your opening sentence to the whole story. You've established one kind of momentum, but when you shift on the reader, you risk losing all that if you don't give it another shove to overcome gravity settling on it.

Holdefer did this with three sections that begin with "even if not for the raptor..." Even if not for the raptor, the mother and father might have had marital problems. Even if not for the raptor, the mom was prone to substance abuse and depression. Even if not for the raptor, the father might have started cheating on the mom. This uses the inertia-defeating thrust from the first section to power the backstory, making the exposition as quick-hitting as the main action.

Here's something I'd like to emphasize to writers: this is really excellent writing, but it's not something writers of average talent can't emulate. This isn't the kind of verbal painting that only the greatest virtuosos of the English language can hope to achieve. It's just good, normal fiction writing. More and more, I'm seeing that it's possible to write a really powerful story without necessarily having to have access to language that's beyond the reach of all mortals. Just stand in there and tell your story your way.

No for three in a row: WIHPTS, "Midterm" by Leslie Johnson

For this round of Would I Have Published this Story (WIHPTS), I make my second foray in recent memory into the seedy underbelly of the teenage, American, female psyche. A few months ago, it was for 13 Reasons Why, but today it's for the next story in this year's Pushcart Anthology, "Midterm" by Leslie Johnson.

The usual caveat: this isn't exactly "criticism," although my views on the story sort of come out while answering the question of whether I think I'd have recommended this story for publication as a reader at a literary magazine. The bigger point, though, is to look at the reasons, logical and illogical, why one editor might accept or reject a story, and to use that to help writers out there understand why their own stories might get rejected. 

How would I have voted?

Yet again, I'm fairly certain I'd have voted no. And yet again, I think I'd have probably been wrong.

Why would I have voted no?

There might have been a bit of an irrational reason to reject the story for me: the other day, Anis Shivani, something of a literary man crush for me, commented on my humble little blog. (Or it was at least someone convincingly playing the part of Shivani.) Soon after, I got his first book of fiction, "Anatolia and Other Stories." One of the stories in there is about a man at a writer's workshop retreat, who rather drolly notes that all of the women in his workshop seemed to be writing about anorexia. Which kind of made me subconsciously roll my eyes in sympathy with that main character when I got to "Midterm," about the struggles of a college freshman girl with anorexia named Chandra. I may have taken the proximity of Shivani's story as a clue I should reject the one by Johnson.

Even before I read that story by Shivani, stories about anorexia would have been a tough sell for me. They're kind of--and this is really not to dump on people who have it--played out and after-school-specially to me. My blogging buddy Karen Carlson said the voice of the lost-in-the-sauce female protagonist was "off-putting," even while it was the right voice for the story. Even Johnson herself seems well aware of how many readers might take such a character, and tries to let the reader know she has guessed the reaction by having Chandra's professor beg her not to write "another paper about anorexia" for class.

Johnson actually correctly guessed my thoughts twice in the story. The other time was when Eli, the boy who takes interest in Chandra, starts talking about his philosophy of how we all need to just be present and live our lives. It's the way only a self-important college student tool would talk, which is why Johnson has Eli say, after one monologue, "I sound like an asshole?" Well, now that you mention it, yeah...

Johnson understands that her story is a tough sell for the reader, but she's determined to make us care about Chandra anyway. Just because Chandra's troubles are kind of cliche, first-world troubles doesn't make them less troublesome for her. In fact, that's what makes it so pernicious: she looks very much like she's on her way to becoming a statistic, another girl who washed out of college in the first year. And she's such a cliche, the people in her life seem unable to summon the energy to help her adequately.

Johnson manages to make the reader care about Chandra, in spite of all the obstacles, which is quite an accomplishment. But I kind of think I'd never have gotten far enough as an editor to find out that she'd done it. I don't want to put hypothetical votes into the mouths of other editors I work with, but there are a couple of women at the journal whom I've seen on more than one occasion reject a story with the note "a little too 'YA' for my taste." If either one of them had said that about this story, I'd have probably agreed without thinking too much about it.

It's really remarkable this story managed to get past the inevitable knee-jerk reactions against it. I have to give the Colorado Review props for having accepted it in the first place. It shows a lot of willingness on the part of their editorial staff to hear a writer out. I'm not sure I'd have done as well. 

A very special WIHPTS

This is now the fourth round of Would I Have Published This Story? (WIHPTS), and it's by far the weirdest. A little while ago, I thought I was going crazy. I picked up the summer edition of Prairie Schooner and went to the first story in it, which is a breezy little story called "Sometimes I'm Suzanne" by the Australian writer Merran Jones. Congratulations, Merran.

It's a quirky story of a boy named Matthew who has a second person rattling inside his brain, in this case, a middle-aged woman named Suzanne. She's there like some people might be born with an extra finger, not really malignant, just one of those things that happens from time to time and makes Matthew a little different. She sometimes takes over Matthew and does things an older woman would do. She and Matthew have some dialogue between them. But she's not always there, which is why Matthew says "sometimes" he's Suzanne. But sometimes, he's just himself. On his own, he's not particularly effeminate. His father, who had daddy issues of his own, eventually hates the girly behavior of Suzanne so much he leaves.

The thing is, I knew I'd read this story before. I just couldn't think of where.

Finally, it struck me. She submitted it to our journal, the one where I'm a volunteer editor. I remember it because we, the editors, talked about it a lot. We very nearly said yes to it. Two editors said yes, two said no, one said maybe. While we were kibitzing over it, the story got accepted by Prairie Schooner.

How did I vote? I voted no, with a great deal of hand-wringing. It was one of the first stories with a split vote I'd weighed in on. Might have been the very first. Here's my note in Submittable:

I see why there's division on this. It's witty and quick and ultimately kind of sweet, but it hits a few wrong notes. Beyond "fell into a sar-chasm" (wah-wah) there's the tell-not-show of "Kev could never escape his dad's Stockholm Syndrome-clutch." I'm voting down, although it feels like in doing so, I'm voting against moms. 

 A few days later, the story was withdrawn when it was accepted elsewhere. 

The "sar-chasm" joke, by the way, is still there in Prairie Schooner, so I guess they liked the joke that I didn't. The line about Stockholm Syndrome is there, too.  I feel some parts are edited somewhat from what we read, but I'm not sure. One of our other editors mentioned that Kevin, the father, seemed like something of a cut-out, just a one-dimensional boorish lout. I feel like the version that's in P.S. draws him a little fuller, but I might be totally mistaken about that. Maybe we just thought one thing about him and the editors at P.S. thought something different.

In any event, this story really proves what the WIHPTS series is supposed to prove: that fiction editing by literary journals is far from a science. I guess it's not a total crapshoot: the story did get our attention, so we treated it with more care than most of the stories we get. Both we and P.S. realized we had something worth taking a closer look at. But we still ultimately differed on whether it was "good enough."  

Three other things to think about: 1) This story ended up getting accepted by a top 50 journal, so just because an "easy" publication turns you down doesn't mean a "hard" one will, too. There's a good deal of luck involved no matter where you send it. 2) The first two votes on this story were yes for us. The third was maybe, which led to more editors taking a look. If voter #3 had just said yes instead of maybe, our chief editor very likely would have accepted the story then, and we might have gotten it before P.S. The difference for one editor between maybe and yes ended up leading to two more no votes, which, had P.S. not accepted it, might mean Jones would still be trying to get it published because of that one near-vote. 3) I think I'd maybe vote differently on this story now than I did then, after more than six months on the job. You can't control as a writer how experienced or smart your fiction reviewer will be. So just keep submitting.

It's also possible to draw this conclusion: what the fuck do I know?

WIHPTS? "After Reading Peter Bichsel" by Lydia Davis

It's time for another round of Would I Have Published This Story (WIHPTS), in which I attempt to demonstrate the arbitrariness of short fiction publishing by taking stories that have earned critical praise and trying to guess if I'd have voted for them to be published in the small literary journal I work for if I'd have seen them come in without anything to flag them as special.

The first two times I did this, I was pretty confident I'd have voted to publish the acclaimed stories, which kind of undercut my theory of arbitrariness. Let's see what happens this time, with "After Reading Peter Bichsel," originally published in The Paris Review and later re-printed in the 2017 Pushcart Prize Anthology.

Here is my caveat about what this game means and doesn't mean:

This isn't really literary criticism, although I guess my opinion on the story will sort of come out in the wash as I try to guess what my own reaction might have been. The bigger point than just criticism of one story is to cast a light on how fickle publishing is. This is a story that has been deemed one of the year's best, but that doesn't mean it might not have met a different fate, that there wasn't some luck involved.

Short Answer: Would I have published this?

No! I'd have rejected it, probably with extreme prejudice, after reading perhaps two or three pages. And I'm relatively confident other editors would have agreed, and our journal would have rejected it with a non-personalized note. There is one other editor in particular I'm thinking of who would have called this story "thinly fictionalized memoir."

Synopsis

This is an achingly slow and subtle story, something the narrator (author?) offers a bit of apologia for early on. She recounts being given a book of stories by Swiss writer Peter Bichsel. She wants to read the book to improve her German while she is traveling throughout Germany and Switzerland. The narrator remarks on these stories that:

He (Bichsel) will also sometimes begin a story, or remark in the middle of a story, "There are stories that are hardly worth telling," or "There is almost nothing to say about X," and then sometimes follow that with a "but": "But I have wanted to tell this story for a long time now," or "But it has to be told, because it was the first story in my life, the first one that I remember." He then goes on to tell a lovely, quiet, modest story, a story that glows with human kindness, or love, or some combination of compassion, understanding, and honesty. (Or am I, these days, finding this quality so marked in his stories because I am seeking it?)

The narrator says, before launching into the main narrative, that this characteristic applies to her own story: "I wanted to say...that there was not much to tell...there was a scene, one that involved a peculiar character, and later a coincidence." Not very promising to be warned early on that there isn't really much of interest in the story.

Why would I have voted no on it?

1. I already alluded to the main reason: it feels like memoir. It sounds like a travel anecdote, barely fictionalized. I'd have wondered if the writer meant to send this to  the creative non-fiction category.

2. It's adjective heavy: In the first page after the main narrative launches, we get: "small, undistinguished, reliable, attractive, crowded, noisy, buxom, energetic, peaceful, small (again), large, placid, agreeable, vague, comfortable, companionable." I don't have quite the revulsion to adjectives that some writers/editors do. Sometimes, I'd rather have one succinct adjective rather than a long rendering of why the author applied that adjective. That is to say, sometimes, it's okay to tell, rather than show. But so much of this right at the outset of the story, after first being waylaid by a lengthy framing of the story, would have made me feel the story had something of an amateurish feel.

3. Putting in the bit about reading some Swiss writer--in the original German--felt to me like a humble brag on the part of the writer. Actually, if this had been presented as creative non-fiction, I'd have accepted this much more readily. But labelled as fiction, this felt like there was too narrow a distance here between the narrator and the author, and the author was trying to show off that she spoke a foreign language and that she read someone in that language. Given that I've pushed through my share of novels in foreign languages more difficult than German (my own humble brag), I wasn't that impressed.

Of course, we might have been totally wrong to overlook this story

The point I want to make through this WIHPTS series isn't that some stories get praise without deserving it. It's more than your story or mine that has been overlooked might not have deserved to be overlooked. With this story, I'd have applied some pseudo algorithms I've developed over time to help cut down on my work load and get through the slush pile more quickly. One is that if I don't want to keep reading after a page or two, neither will a magazine reader.

But reading this story not as a slush pile candidate but as an already validated and lauded story, I can see something of why people see value in it. The point of WIHPTS isn't criticism, so I'm not going to go into it deeply here, but there is definitely something interesting in the reaction of the narrator at a few points in the story. She hesitates to give a woman a pen, although she has a spare. She wants to ask something about the woman when she sees her again later, but she is overwhelmed by the logistics of getting through it in German. She reads to improve her German, but doesn't actually speak to anyone, which, of course, is also a way to learn German. At the end she sees a man on a train who is an avid reader like herself, and when the train moves, he braces himself against its movement. Is that what reading is to some people? Just a way to prevent being moved, being changed?

When I made myself read the story, I actually somewhat liked the non-hurried pace of it. So many literary magazine stories are frenetic, because we writers are told how critical it is to keep the story moving. This has a feel to it like a story from a century ago, when writers were still self-assured of their own raison d'etre they weren't always in a rush, didn't always have to have explosions.

So this story might very well deserve its place in an anthology of the year's best, although I'd still have rejected it from our small literary magazine in ten minutes or less. I'm pretty sure an unknown author would have had a very hard time publishing this story.

Next round of WIHPTS: Kendra Fortmeyer's "Things I Know to Be True"

I had so much fun playing my first round of "Would I Have Published This Story?" I've decided to play again. The idea is pretty simple: I take a story that has won a fair amount of praise, in this case "Things I Know to Be True," from this year's Pushcart Anthology, and I try to guess if I would have voted to publish this story if it had come at random into the literary journal where I volunteer as a reader.

This isn't really literary criticism, although I guess my opinion on the story will sort of come out in the wash as I try to guess what my own reaction might have been. The bigger point than just criticism of one story is to cast a light on how fickle publishing is. This is a story that has been deemed one of the year's best, not only by the original journal that published it (One Story), but the editors of the Pushcart Anthology. But that doesn't mean it might not have met a different fate, that there wasn't some luck involved...

Short answer: Would I have published this story?

Probably, but I wouldn't have liked it. Sometimes, I vote for a story because I can see it was written well enough that it deserves to be published, even though I don't really like the story very much.

Synopsis

 It's the story of a Vietnam veteran, Charlie, struggling to get his shit back together after a traumatic experience...you know...back in 'Nam. He goes to the library every day and reads something, which then often triggers some reaction in him demonstrative of his anguished mental state. For example, while reading Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado," he believes that the existence of words describing a man who is encased means there really is such a person. A story of a fire makes him put the book under water to put the fire out. Charlie has a sign above his bedroom door, his "things he knows to be true," and they are responsible for his inability to tell fact from fiction. His list: 1) The past and the future exist through stories, 2) Stories are made of words, 3) Words make the future and the past exists.

There's a coping mechanism in there for dealing with the ghosts from Vietnam, but Charlie hasn't learned to use it right. He's victim of a sort of magical-realism break with reality, when what he needs is to learn how to use words to his advantage. The key is that if words make reality, then Charlie can re-write the story of his life to control the past. Charlie eventually learns this ability, which is the climax of the story.

What's good and bad about it

What I don't like about it has more to do with personal taste than critical assessment. In the last decade, there have been a LOT of stories about veterans with PTSD coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of them even are framed as stories written by veterans as part of their PTSD therapy. Vietnam was obviously before we had things like PTSD therapy writing sessions led by MFA candidates, but this does sort of have a Vietnam-standing-in-for-Iraq kind of feel to it. The narrative style of the mentally ill person writing the story reminded me rather too pointedly of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

I also found the theme of narrative as a means to make the world whole again a little well-worn. I tend to be a little suspicious of themes in fiction that are about fiction itself. While it's true, of course, that the stories we tell ourselves greatly affect our outlook on life, there are also some wounds that words seem a little pathetic to try to fix. I don't think Charlie would really have a philosophy about stories like the one given to him; that's the author putting a list above Charlie's door for him, not Charlie. It's just a little too precious, fiction trumpeting the real-world value of itself. It's the kind of thing that's guaranteed to titillate editors at fiction magazines, which is why it did so well.

Still, I'd have probably voted for it. The narrative is crisp, it doesn't waste words, and it has a clear theme. (I prefer a theme I'd quibble with to a story whose theme I can't begin to fathom.) And much as the story might make too much of fiction's real-world power to overcome the past, it's probably much healthier than a story where the veteran is simply overwhelmed by his demons and can't make the center hold. Secretary of Defense James Mattis has suggested that much of the understandable impulse to help veterans of the two long wars overcome PTSD has actually led to the proliferation of a victim mindset. This story at least puts a weapon in the hands of its veteran and allows him to fight back.

A personal aside: what troubled me about reading this story

I just posted about a story I thought of on a Friday and got accepted for publication by Monday. Some of the things I've just said bothered me about "Things I Know to Be True" are things I myself did in my own story. It also uses the first-person narrative with a main character who is using writing as a means to overcome a trauma.

Rather than learning to write my stories my way, I wonder if I'm just learning to write the kinds of stories that literary journals will accept. It does seem that the stories I myself think are among my best are the ones I seem unable to get published.

Let's play "Would I have pubished this story?" (WIHPTS)

It was unfair, of course. Was it monstrous? A mistake had been made, but the numbers all but guaranteed mistakes. The sheer numbers. Every system had its failings. -Chris Drangle, "A Local's Guide to Dating in Slocomb County"

I've been reading the Best American Short Stories and Pushcart anthologies pretty faithfully for the last four years, figuring that's a pretty compact and efficient way to keep up with what's good--or at least critically well reviewed--in American fiction. When I read these stories, I often like to play a game with myself. It goes like this: If this story had come into the literary journal where I am a fiction editor, and I knew nothing about the author or had anything to mark this story off as special, would I have voted for it to be published?

Here, I offer to the public the latest round of this game I've just played, which was with Chris Drangle's "A Local's Guide to Dating in Slocomb County." This is an appropriate story to show how the game works, I think, partly because of that epigraph above. The story is about how an injured veteran's wounded dog, who is also a war veteran, is accidentally put down by a clinic, and what happens when the veteran comes to pick up the dog he thinks is still alive. It could also be a metaphor for the editing process at any literary journal: we have so many stories to go through, it's inevitable we're going to make mistakes and "put down" the wrong ones sometimes.

Quick Answer. Would I have voted "up" for this story?

Yes. It's a compelling story with a clear conflict, and the central conflict is introduced within the first page. We have two characters drawn with enough detail that we, the readers, are troubled to see them as they unintentionally come into conflict with one another.

There is a caveat to my yes, however. Our journal has a 5,000 word limit, and this story goes well over it. It's always strange to me that so many journals have 5,000 or 3,000 word limits, and that it seems easier to get a story published if you can get your word count down, but for the anthologies, it seems most of the stories are longer. I think there's still a feeling that a really short story isn't serious, somehow, even though all writers trying to break into publishing are pushed to write shorter pieces. 

What might have made me vote no?

1. A confusing passage early on.  There are two female characters, Portia and Naomi, who both work at the animal shelter where the dog is accidentally put down. Naomi is the one who fucked up. Early on, when we're still learning how to differentiate the two, we see Naomi leave a room and check a few things to see if it was her fault. We then get Portia again. Here's the passage:

     Back in the staff room, Portia was biting her nails and Dennis was stirring the instant tea.
     "How did it happen? "Dennis said.
     "I don't know."
     "This is so fucked up," Portia said.
     "Shut up," she said. "No, sorry. Let's just think."

I was confused about who "she" was in that last line. We've had Portia's name twice since we last heard from Naomi, so I'd think it was her. But it can't be Portia, because then it wouldn't have been a new indentation and a new line. Eventually, I got that it was Naomi, still in the scene, talking. But getting confused early on in a story, even for a second, sometimes puts an editor off for good.

2. Screwing up a detail about military life. There is a section that gives the back story for Fisher Bray, the wounded veteran, about how he ended up in the Army, how he met the dog, and how get and the dog were injured. I think Drangle did enough homework to get through that section without messing it up. But before that, Fisher explains that he was in the "First Battalion, 25th Infantry." If you know anything about the Army's makeup (or just look here), you know that "25th Infantry" is a division. Below a division are several brigades, each of which has several battalions. So there are many "First Battalions" in the 25th Division. Fisher Bray wouldn't say "First Battalion, 25th Infantry," in other words, unless I'm missing something.

I wouldn't have disqualified the story for this, even though I've kvetched before about people screwing up this kind of thing. It would just have given me a slight, instinctive nudge toward a no vote, and I'd have added a note for the writer to edit it. (Drangle might also have been wrong about Fisher shaving at 4:40 AM in basic training; when I was in boot camp, hygiene came at night. But that was the Marines, not the Army, and it was a long time ago, so I might be wrong. It wouldn't be a meaningful mistake, anyway.)

3. Would Fisher have really liked Megadeth? Infantry guys are know to like their hard-core rock, but this seems like something a Gen-Xer would have liked, not a kid who was 19 around 2007 or so. Again, not a big thing.

4. My often-felt uncertainty about an inconsistent narrative distance from the character. Just for review, third-person limited, which is the most ubiquitous point-of-view choice in literature today, means we, the readers, can only see the story through the five senses and the thoughts of one character. This story has different POV focus characters in different sections, which is fine. That doesn't violate point-of-view. That's just rotating third-person limited. Lots of people do it. No problem.

There is also an aspect of distance to point-of-view, however. That is, how far the voice of the narration varies from that of the point-of-view character. For example, it's very rare that a third-person narrative would have a character speak in dialect during dialogue and also have the main narration keep this dialect. The main narration has a distinct voice from the point-of-view character.

But how far this distance between narrator's voice and character's voice should be is not something discussed much. I don't feel it's something most editors read into too closely. But it does bother me sometimes when a nameless, invisible narrator gives us descriptions the main character himself/herself couldn't have come up with. That's part of the light criticism I made years ago of the story "Long Tom Lookout" by Nicole Cullenhttp://workshopheretic.blogspot.com/2015/07/how-to-be-lazy-as-shit-as-writer-and.html. Sometimes, the narrator's voice is actually the thoughts of a character. Sometimes, it's a voice that is saying things I don't think the main character would think. If this distance from the main character is too great within the same passage, I find it a little jarring. Here's an example from "A Local's Guide":

     After lunch she stepped out for a short walk. It was seven thousand degrees outside. The cotton field behind the shelter was halfway into flowering, the dark bolls splitting around the cloudy blooms. In a month the strip picker would start lumbering down the rows, huge tires and green chassis and bright yellow teeth in front, thoughtless and methodical.

The "it's 7000 degrees out here" thought is Naomi's. The poetic rhapsodizing about the strip picker and the bolls and the thought that the strip picker rolls on impersonally like so many forces in life--that's all Drangle.

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I don't think there's any "rule" against this kind of mixing in writing how-to thought. It's certainly done all the time. I do it. But it's kind of a cheat for a third-person limited narrative. The idea of the third-person narrative is that the writer is going to give you a catharsis through the life rules and philosophy of the character, not the author. But authors sneak their own thoughts into third-person limited stories all the time, and sometimes they do it though a bit of supernatural intervention into the universes they've created.

None of these quibbles would have kept me from voting for it, I think. It's an excellent story, with a sharp conflict and plot that suggest strong themes. But one never knows. If I'd been in a bad enough mood that day, maybe I'd have looked at how long it was and thrown it out as soon as I got confused for a minute on page two.