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 Devil and Judd Apatow

I have a rather low tolerance for vicarious embarrassment. Vicarious suffering I seem to be somewhat okay with, but if I have to watch a fictional character humiliate himself, I struggle to keep going. Mrs. Heretic hates to watch a lot of shows with me, because I honestly have to pause them every five minutes to gather my strength to continue watching someone be debased.

Right now, I'm watching the series "Love" on Netflix. I have to watch it alone. Mrs. Heretic would never stand for how each 30-minute episode takes me 90 minutes to watch. Judd Apatow and the writers on this show seem to be masters of nothing so much as sticking characters in crucibles built by their own vices. It's wonderful and excruciating.

Writers are often told to make terrible things happen to their characters. I've certainly done that to mine. I'm able to make them suffer. But I have a very hard time humiliating them. I suppose I gave characters in "Brokedick" and "The Strongest I've Ever Been" some humiliation, but it was temporary and they bounced back from it. I can't imagine constantly torturing characters the way Apatow does.

I think there's some of my religious past at work here. If God exists, He apparently has no problem allowing his creations to suffer. It's one of the reasons I don't believe in God anymore. I feel like I owe my creations better than that. I want to use my omnipotence better than He does. So I tend to make sure that if someone endures something, there's a point to it. They live through it and become better somehow. I know this isn't how it usually works out in the real world. What doesn't kill you in the real world doesn't make you stronger. It doesn't make you anything. It just happens. I'd like the worlds I create to be different.

Yes, your characters are incredibly life-like and relatable. Please make them less so.

I wonder, when I consider my unwillingness to be a negligent parent to my characters, if writing is really my calling. I have the same weaknesses as a writer I do as a parent. I want to solve things for others instead of letting nature take its course and seeing if they've got the stuff to make it on their own.

Maybe that's the real link between alcohol and writing. It isn't that alcohol unlocks visions for writers, it's that if you become enough of an alcoholic, you can also be enough of an asshole to let terrible things happen to the people you've created.

Writing is not your day job, so don't treat it like it is

In grade school, I loved the math game we called "travel." You've probably played it, even if it was called something else. Two students stand and the teacher reveals a math question on a flash card. Whoever shouts out the right answer first moves to the next desk and faces off with whoever is sitting there, and the process repeats itself. The student who travels the most desks during the game wins.

I guess I must have been a cocky kid. Strange, since now I have almost no confidence in anything I do (or, more accurately, I vacillate wildly between total confidence and crying in a corner), but I liked that there was a game that not only tested whether you knew something, but how quickly you could get through it. It was a way to show how easy math was for you.

In graduate school, when I read Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, I learned of the notion of virtu, which the kids today might translate as "skills." Castiglione proposed that a distinguished gentleman of court would strive to not only show himself skilled in all the subjects a gentleman should be adept in, he should also strive to make it look easy, to show his virtu, his skills. It wasn't enough to succeed, you had to succeed with style, to hide the hard work that went into becoming adept in the first place.

Trying to make it look easy can win you admirers, but there's also an obvious downside to it. Josh Waitzkin, the one-time child chess prodigy who was the subject of the book and movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, noted once that when he was a child, he would often beat better chess players because they were hurrying, trying to make it look like beating a child took nothing out of them to accomplish. Trying to look cool cost them big time, and they ended up looking like doubly uncool as they would have if they had just let everyone see that beating this particular kid was not that easy.

At my day job, I am sometimes guilty of trying to make the work look easier than it really is. Part of this is just work politics: if bosses think there's no work I can't handle, then I get the good assignments and more responsibility. In theory, one day this will lead to me getting promoted and paid more. I also tend to mistrust the perfectionists, whom I sometimes believe are using the quest to make zero mistakes as an excuse for malingering. Whatever picayune mistakes I might sometimes make, I more than make up for in quantity of work.

Don't quit your day job, but also don't try to do your day job at home

But I sometimes take this attitude home with me to the stories I write. I act like just having written a lot of more or less passable stories is what I'm aiming for, instead of ripping into the depths of myself to write the best story I possibly can right now, even if it's the last thing I do. I try to charge through my writing to-do list like it's a list of weekend chores: finish rough draft of story about the unfairness of the immigration system; touch up story about a young woman's ambivalent search for her own racial identity, but really ratchet up the tension in the climax and if you can, see about making that description of the hospital unforgettably beautiful and yet haunting.

It doesn't work like that. Writing isn't raking leaves.

I blame those writing advice givers for making me think it is. I mean the ones who tell you to write every day, as though writing were nothing more than a set of push-ups to do in the morning. Writing is hard. Or, it's hard if you're doing it right. That doesn't mean that every time you sit down to write something, it's going to feel like drawing blood. Sometimes, the writing comes rather naturally. But getting into that state where the writing comes to you--that's what's hard. You're not going to be in that state every day of your life.

I'd wager one of three things is true about those who write every day:

1) They're professionals. All they do is write, so they can arrange every day in such a way that they are in the right space to write;
2) Their writing sounds like it was cranked out by force (i.e., it sucks); or
3) They write a lot of wasted words.

I realize everyone has their own way of approaching writing. If writing every day works for you, and you don't mind writing a lot of words that are going in the trash, have at it. I find that just wears me out, and delays me getting into the right head space to do the good writing I need to do.

In my last post, I indicated that I hadn't written in a few months. It was partly a loss of self-confidence, but it was also just exhaustion. Work has been very tough the last few months, and I eventually wore out trying to match my energy during the day when I came home every night. I needed a few weeks of mindlessness, of doing anything except writing, in order to get to where I could write again. The writer's mind is a well. It can run dry if you are over-using it. You have to give it time to fill up, and you have to give it reading and experiences and just plain idleness so it fills up again.

I just had one of the most productive weekends I've ever had. All that lack of self-confidence I had a few months ago melted as the words just came to me. I'm on such a roll right now, that I really need to give it a rest for a few days. Common wisdom might be to keep going while I'm on that roll, but I think it's really better to leave while you still want more. In a few days, I'll come back to where I was with fresh eyes and new energy.

Some people fear that if you don't keep pushing through the same work while you're in the same frame of mind, it will end up sounding like it was written by more than one person. I actually don't think this is always such a bad thing for a story. Most stories I read for my magazine where I volunteer start off pretty strong and then flag. They get bogged down and lose their initial energy as the writer starts trying to get into the exposition. This is a very difficult thing to avoid, but doing different parts in a different state of mind can actually give each its own propulsion. You are really taking the work of another person--the writer you were the last time you were working on this story--and riffing off of it as the person you are now.

You can probably write a story all in one go if you're writing micro-fiction. If you're not, it's going to take you a while to write the story. It really is. That's because writing is hard. If it seems hard to you, that means you're doing it right. Don't try to keep pushing through as though it isn't. 

On writing drunk

The subject of writing drunk--namely, whether it's a good idea for a writer--is one that pops up now and again on writing sites. Some really believe it helps with the creative process by freeing the mind of inhibitions and getting the brain to open up to new possibilities. Some think the benefits are imagined, and that in any event, drinking past a certain point will make your writing so incoherent, any benefits you've gained from freeing your mind will be offset by the nonsense of your prose when looked at in the cold light of the next day.

One common means of trying to marry the mental liberation of alcohol with the benefits of clear-mindedness is the old aphorism, often credited to Hemingway, of "write drunk, edit sober." That is, use alcohol as an aid to opening up creativity while slapping down that first draft, but then look at it later with a more critical eye, smoothing out the roughness left by your free-thinking drunkard. (At least one writing advice blogger tried this for a week.)

Just from a basic smell test perspective, this idea does make some sense. A lot of writers advise not censoring yourself too much during the first draft. Burroway's textbook on writing emphasizes the importance of "shitty first drafts," without which the stunning eleventh draft would never be possible. Just get it out there on the page. You can fix shit, but you can't fix nothing.

My writing relationship with alcohol

I do drink while writing sometimes. I don't drink much--maybe once a week--so it's easy for me to get a rapid buzz going. I don't so much drink because I feel it helps me write as I drink because I tend to write a lot on the weekends, and that's when I also like to drink. I don't want to write and then drink, because by the time I'm done writing, it's a little late to get my drink on, so I tend to just multi-task and do both at once.

I can't say whether alcohol helps with creativity. It's a little hard to tell, because I can't isolate alcohol enough to make it a controlled variable. There are some nights where Mrs. Heretic and the kids are happily doing their own thing, I have several hours of uninterrupted writing, and I get a lot done. If I happened to have been drinking during that time, I might credit it to the alcohol when in fact, it was more just the peace and quiet. Since I write around work and fatherhood, I sometimes get up in the wee hours of the morning to write before anyone else is up, and that can oftentimes be as productive as drinking and writing in the late hours on the weekend.

I don't think the alcohol makes me a better writer. But, it does probably have one very profound effect on me while I'm writing. The most frequent reason I stop writing before getting done what I'd wanted to is self-doubt. "This is shit, I'm wasting my time, writing is stupid and so am I." That's probably how about one in three writing sessions ends for me. But I'm invariably a happy drunk. It helps me get past my own self-loathing long enough to get something onto the page.

I took a long time getting to where I drank at all. My first drink was at 23. The first time I got drunk, I was 27. After that, I would still sometimes go an entire year without drinking any alcohol. I had a weird sort of philosophy. I believed life was shitty, and that it was the responsibility of a serious thinking person to face the full shittiness of life without pain killers. I think I was under the impression that if I dulled my senses at all, I'd end up thinking life was less awful than it is, and I'd see it in a less truthful way. In the last, say, five years or so, however, I've become far more flexible on the subject. I'm just trying to make it to fifty. If a little booze-backed vacation from my problems every now and again helps me get there, I'm no longer going to deny myself that. I'm like a mother who swore off taking an epidural during labor who finally, after two or three kids, gave in and got one. Now I just wonder why it took me so long.

I certainly think that drinking and writing is worth a try. Don't drink so much you're out of it. Try to find that happy buzzed zone and stay there. There is somewhat mixed evidence that moderate alcohol can make you better at foreign languages; there's no reason to think that wouldn't be true of using your native language creatively.


-Composed whilst drinking Weyerbacher's Blithering Idiot; edited the following morning while drinking tea.

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.

Gallimaufry of observations

Nothing big enough for a full post here, but a few half-thoughts.

1. Amazon apparently enforces its terms of service for comments on books

I had never really thought Amazon had tough rules for its comments. Based on past history like the three-wolf shirt comments thread, I kind of thought the comments could be a place to throw some absurdist commentary. I left a comment on my own book that gave it five stars, but also said the book was terrible. I was kind of proud of it. After over two months, Amazon I guess noticed that it was me, and removed it. They also did not allow a post from my mother, although I'm not sure how they knew it was her. It's not really a big deal to me. It's apparent that barring something unforeseen, this isn't going to become a huge seller, and a few comments one way or the other aren't going to change that. But it does seem like an unlikely to be really followed policy. The FAQ tells us that Amazon doesn't "allow individuals who share a household with the author or close friends to write Customer Reviews for that author’s book." I'd guess that the vast majority of people who actually write reviews on Amazon of smaller press books have some kind of relationship with the author.

2. I had a reading the other day, and I had a wonderful time

The publishing company, Washington Writers' Publishing House, is just fantastic. It's made up entirely of past winners, and many of them came out, got a book, heard me read, asked questions, listened to me talk about writing the book, and generally made it a great day. A few friends actually gave up football just to come hear me read a story they've already been hounded into buying. Made me feel like a real author. I could do that every day.

I rock a pencil and pen in my shirt pocket nearly all the time. It's kind of my thing.

It was also kind of encouraging to be at a book store that looks like it's going to stay open for a while. I'm thinking I'm going to start buying my books from here, if I can. They support the local writing scene and they provide some sort of alternative to Amazon, so if it's a few dollars more, it's worth it.

3. It's fall, so that means the rejections are coming in

I shot for the moon with nearly all my submissions this fall. I feel like after the book, I'm writing better work, but I also feel like I need to move forward in terms of the level of respect of the journals I'm appearing in. That means the job of getting published--which is hard enough in any journal--got a lot tougher. I've already had seven rejection of the work I turned in last month. Two seemed encouraging, which I guess ought to make me feel good.

I have to say, a lot of the fancy journals are really on point with handling submissions. They are making decisions quickly, much quicker than my journal is usually able to do. I think that's because many of them are either tied to schools or can otherwise command large numbers of slaves intern readers interested in getting in on the ground floor of publishing.

4. I paid $45 to have an agent proof read my query letter for my novel. 

I'm not sure yet if the final product is great, but I can't complain about the level of effort from the agent. For $45, I got three rounds of edits, which were not in any way half-assed. I'll start sending out more query letters next week after the last round of edits is done, and I'll report back on whether the next 25 letters got any better response than the first 25.

Editing Roald Dahl

This is going to seem presumptuous as hell, but there's a point to it. Who am I, Writer McNobody, to suggest changes to the great Roald Dahl? Well, that's not exactly what I'm saying. Dahl IS great. I'm not arguing that. And I wouldn't want to change a word that he wrote.

Unless he were trying to get published today.

What I'm saying has more to do with something I suggested a few months ago, something having to do with not having read a lot of modern fiction until very recently. A lot of people who start writing have read a lot of fiction, but a good portion of what we've read is older. We've read a lot of the type of stuff we were assigned in school. I know when I first started writing, I'd read more 19th-Century literature than all other literature put together.

The 19th Century is great. Melville is great. I wouldn't change a word of Moby Dick. But you couldn't write Moby Dick today and get it published. You couldn't write Shakespeare today and get it published. Right or wrong, each generation has certain expectations it has to write to. As much as journals love it when someone turns those expectations on their heads, there are still some things you just can't do. In the 19th Century, journals often paid by the word, which lead to florid sentences. That was part of the expectation of editors and readers. But if you tried to write a story now with a bunch of seven-line sentences, you'd be rejected before the first page was up, unless you were writing something that explicitly channeled the age, such as John Knowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman.

Same goes for the early-to-mid 20th Century. There are things writers from that age did that tend to have a low reputation among editors nowadays. You can argue with me that this is stupid, that the currently approved lit-fic conventions are terrible and banal and lead to literature that all sounds the same. You can argue that, but if you stick to your guns and write like O. Henry or Roald Dahl or Dash Hammett or Ring Lardner because that's what you read in your teens or whenever your introduction to great literature came, you're probably facing an uphill slog getting your short stories published. So fight me if you want. I'm just the messenger here of what editors are looking for.

Two things to avoid

I just read Dahl's "Lamb to the Slaughter" this week, because my son was assigned it for his English class. Two things stand out about it that, as much as I enjoy them in Dahl, I would advise writers to avoid now if they want to get published in a good literary journal.

1. The "dark and stormy night" beginning. Okay, Dahl's opening here isn't hackish like "it was a dark and stormy night," but it is a cold start onto scene setting: "The room was warm, the curtains were closed, the two table lamps were lit." Now, right after that, we get action, so this might not really be a problem, but I see a lot of stories come in as an editor that go on with scene-setting for a page or more. There was a time when this was a standard way to begin a story. ("A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight...") But nowadays, there is an expectation that right from the jump, you're going to start to establish not only mood and scene, but also character and, if possible, a unique voice. Generally speaking, it's advisable to give an opening line that introduces the people we'll be getting to know. If possible, make it sound like no other opening line ever, so we know that there is also something special about the people we're about to meet. That's expecting a lot, and maybe it does lead to cookie-cutter fiction by making every opening line predictably unpredictable. But that's sort of what's expected. Don't believe me? Here are the opening lines from the first ten short stories in this year's Pushcart Prize anthology:

1) I was once a star on YouTube.
2) Full disclosure up front: I am a gay black man, a proud New Orleanian, thirty years old, five out of the closet, a decade on the down-low before that; bi-dialectical as every educated brother in this city must be, a code-switcher as needed; a poet in my spare time, in my unspare time a poetry teacher devoted to dead French guys and live black ones.
3) My former daughter-in-law is sitting in the next room eating cookies off a plate.
4) Barnes Hollow was actually Jason something, but no one dreamed of calling him that.
5) Afterward, Eva turns her face to the wall and falls asleep immediately, smacking her lips like a newborn.
6) It's the middle of the night and the woman can't sleep.
7) Her parents always said they'd dig their own graves if anything ever happened to their children, so when her sister Claire disappeared on a camping trip in the White Mountains, Elsie kept at eye on things.
8) He lived in a world of grease, and no matter how often he bathed, which was once a day, rigorously--and no shower but a drawn bath--he smelled of carnitas, machaca, and the chopped white onion and soapy cilantro he folded each morning into his pico de gallo.
9) Joan had to look beautiful.
10) When Father Tom comes to a party, people look embarrassed, even the ones who invited him.

As you can see, you don't have to necessarily have fireworks going off. Most of these are actually rather modest starts. But one thing they all have in common is that the people in them are in sentence number one. We eventually will get setting, but that's not where we start. We start with people, normally. I'm sure you can find exceptions. I'm not telling you not to break the rules. I'm telling you what the rules are.

2. The plot twist as the story's raisson d'etre. Plot twists are great. I'm sure a lot of the stories we all grew up loving were built around plot twists. "The Gift of the Magi" comes to mind. (I just re-read that not long ago. It honestly stands up pretty well to the test of time.) But you can't make the plot twist the thing on which your whole story stands. In Dahl's "Lamb to the Slaughter," we get three moments where the plot turns: the man tells his wife some secret, probably that he is leaving her and their unborn child for another woman; she murders him with a frozen lamb leg; and then she feeds the murder weapons to the police who worked with her husband.

Again, I'm not saying Dahl's story is some cheap one-trick thing. It's a strong character study of a woman who puts too much of her own self-worth into how her husband feels about her, a story of a woman treated badly but who finds, suddenly, that she has the emotional reserves necessary to bring about her own resolution. If the story doesn't resonate with us today quite as much as it might have with readers in 1953, that's because we're now used to stories of abused women fighting back. It's like expecting us to be impressed with the special effects from Ben Hur.

But that's not the problem for a modern writer who would try to build a whole story around a plot twist. You can certainly have plot twists, but if we feel that's the whole reason you offered us a story, if that's what was gnawing at you until it spilled out of you into words on the page, then an editor is going to feel you've cheated him, that you didn't really have that much to say. The plot, in modern fiction, is a result of two things: what the author throws at the character, and how the character reacts. If the editor feels that the end result of your story was something you had in mind from the beginning without pausing to get input from your characters, then you're going to get a polite letter thanking your for your story, which isn't quite right for the journal right now.

And so, I offer this simple edit:

In order to make it not feel like Dahl is trying to spring surprise on us as the main draw of his story, and also to make the story open on Mary, rather than the setting, I would simply suggest that he change his opening sentence, if Dahl were alive and unknown today and trying to get his story published. I'd offer these two sentences: "The day Mary Maloney killed her husband with a leg of lamb, she was sitting with equanimity on the couch in front of the curtains, which were closed. The room was warm, and the two table lamps were lit." Now, it no longer seems like Dahl is trying to shock the reader with a plot twist more characteristic of mystery genre fiction than literary fiction. He's fine from there. Mary is still a fully realized character, and interesting for the way she reacts to her whole world being blown up with a few words uttered off camera. 

So there you have it. Open on people and don't make a surprise ending the whole draw of the story. Mock me if you wish for suggesting a legend should change to suit my dull tastes. Just keep some of what I said about those dull tastes in mind if you're trying to get published in a journal of serious fiction.  

Very short P.S.A. from your friendly, local literary journal reader

The word "amble" and its various conjugations appears a lot in stories sent to literary journals. I understand you want something more descriptive than "walk" or "move," but I don't think this is your choice quite often. Just like you've probably read not to overdo fancy words that are just dialogue tags (e.g., just use "said" instead of "remonstrated), it's maybe better sometimes to use "walk" or "move" than amble, when amble really doesn't seem to fit. I won't disqualify your story because you said "amble." Just FYI, since a lot of stories are of nearly equal merit, and every little bit you do to not make the judges squirm in their seats will help you.

Carry on writing.

All readers are douchenozzles. I am a reader. Therefore...

If you read through some of my previous posts, you'll see that Blake Kimzey, author of Families Among Us, the book that won the Black River chapbook contest, was nice enough to respond on this blog, even though I wasn't 100% happy with his feedback on one of my short stories. He even sent me one of his short stories, one that he says he really is invested in, but can't seem to get a single journal to bite on. I gave him my thoughts on the story, not because I think I know how to write a story that will get published, but more as an example of his eventual typical reader--someone who reads literary journals. In the feedback I sent him, I quoted Kurt Vonnegut: "Readers...are selfish and have no compulsion to be decent about anything."

I've been thinking about this idea a lot in the last week. Readers have lives, lives in which they not only have literally millions of choices about what to read, but millions of choices of things to do other than reading. As a writer, you are always one split-second of unappealing writing away from losing your reader forever. And a reader has no more reason to feel bad about dumping your story than he does about deciding to take a nap instead of watching Fried Green Tomatoes for the eighty-seventh time on TNT.

I can think of two examples in the last month where I myself was guilty of being a dirtbag of a reader. One was the short story "Yachts" from the Spring/Summer edition of Glimmertrain. I almost didn't read it at all, because just from the title, I thought it would be about some rich characters in Kennebunkport or something. I set the magazine down, and didn't read it again for two days. If the story hadn't made it clear in the first page that it was actually about a poor person from New York who gets talked into a yacht trip in the Mediterranean with his wealthier friend, I don't think I'd have ever read it. A second example was a story from the Baltimore Review's 2014 compendium of all its work. "Patience" by Janice Greenwood began with these words: "Shortly after Maria had been released from the hospital, the snails began to destroy the garden." I thought there would be a lot in the story about gardening, which I consider to be boring. I put the story down and read something else. I haven't picked it back up yet. Totally unfair.

When I was at the Baltimore Book Fair a few weeks ago, I attended a workshop led by Baltimore Review's editors on "making the ordinary extraordinary." Seth Sawyers asserted that "you can talk about anything that interests you, and if you really are passionate about it, a reader will follow you." I'm not sure he was right. I'm kind of a jerk. I assume others are, too. If you try to sell me on a story about a lady who knits sweaters, I doubt I'll stay with you. I might, depending on how clever you are in writing it, but you've definitely turned up the difficulty on trying to get me to stay with you.

The upshot of all of this is that maybe it's good when you get feedback from someone and it includes some ideas that maybe reflect that the reader didn't all the way "get it." Because your real readers certainly aren't going to be MORE attentive than that. I still think I am right to have been annoyed by the lazy readership I got in grad school workshops, because, well, I was paying a lot of money to get a better readership. At the very least, I deserved more than half thought-out criticisms by other beginning writers who were struggling to keep up with classes, their own writing, and part-time jobs.

I really think the "literary service" was a nice middle ground. I can't afford to use it on every story, but really, I'd recommend it over a writing program for a lot of writers looking to get their careers started. I certainly got a closer reading than I ever got in grad school, and I got more useful feedback. But it wasn't TOO useful. That is, it wasn't so sympathetic to me that I got an unrealistic idea of how sympathetically my asshole readers in the real world will read it.

So does the basic selfishness of readers mean that you must always choose high-octane story lines that will prevent them from getting bored? I don't think so. If your pool of potential readers is a random sampling of the general public, then I reckon that for every person like me who loves Schwarzenegger films and hates gardening, you'll get one who loves to make their own socks and grow herbs. But you do have to keep your readers in mind as you write. This is definitely not something you do during an early draft, but as you get near your completed story, you need to kick the tires to make sure you don't have anything in your story that will make someone put it down for good. And getting feedback from a reader, even a distracted reader, can be useful for this. Your friend, family member or paid editor is still giving it more care than the person out in the world will.