Over the last few years, I’ve reported back on my experience as an editor, both as Fiction Editor for Space and Time and for a number of other projects I’ve participated in. As always, I believe assuming editorial responsibilities is valuable experience for writers. Nothing is more humbling than reading hundreds of stories from peers trying to get published just like you. And sending out rejections is no piece of cake when the next email you may get is a rejection from your own submission to a market you wanted to crack.
There’s value for the job of writing in knowing what kind of critical eye is waiting for you when you’re putting together that killer opening paragraph or figuring out characterization and development. Of course, that kind of experience doesn’t make writing any easier, but then, writing isn’t supposed to be easy.
Rejections. When stories don’t fit the market or have obvious flaws, they’re not too hard.
But picking stories from the pile that aren’t flawed in the obvious ways, that catch your interest, that may have cool characters, style, plot, emotional throughlines, and that offer something unusual or different to the reader, is no picnic.
Sometimes the idea is fresh, but the execution shaky. Or there are structural problems. Beginnings that don’t begin anything (more on that later). Or the writing is smooth as silk, seductive, entrancing, and yet, there’s a nagging doubt, caused perhaps by old ideas, flat characters behind flashy masks, a lack of emotion, imagination.
As an editor, you have to think it through, weigh stories against others, analyze.
Anyway you cut it, sending out hundreds of rejections isn’t fun. As an editor, you may know some of these folks, run into them at conventions, or they may be editing their own projects you may be trying to break into. And the occasional critique an editor may be inspired to write, because a writer struck a particular chord, is always risky business. Not everyone appreciates editorial feedback. Same for asking for rewrites – it’s cool if the story eventually sells, not so nice if it doesn’t.
By the way, a critique in a rejection isn’t an invitation for a rewrite. An invitation to rewrite and resubmit is an invitation to rewrite and resubmit. Projects are often time-limited. Or the story isn’t quite right for the market, but the editor likes it enough to help you try selling it to a more appropriate market.
Anyway.
Space and Time recently completed a month long reading period to acquire stories for upcoming issues, so I figured it’s time to revisit the topic and talk about some issues that came to mind.
For me, as well as a couple of the other editors, one of the things that stuck out was expectations for quick response times by some of the folks sending in stories.
Listen. I’m old. I grew up in the age of snail mail. You put your typewritten ms in an envelope with a cover letter and return envelope (self-addressed and stamped, of course) and waited for a response.
You waited a while for an answer.
In the old Space and Time days in the late 90’s (when Gordon Linzner owned and edited the magazine), we passed around those manila envelopes by hand after writing workshop meetings. We’d take them home, read them, send out snail mail rejections or gave them back to Gordon with a recommendation.
That all took time.
In the computer/internet age, I understand the expectation that things should go much faster.
We order something online and, presto, a couple of days later, it’s at our doorstep. We pay bills online the day it’s due. We (well, some of you, not me) Twitter and Facebook life and all its ups and downs, expecting instant feedback, sympathy, congratulations.
But, you know, not everything needs to, or should be, rushed.
At one point during the reading process, I had to send someone a blow by blow of how stories go through Space and Time to a contributor who didn’t understand why things were taking so long.
So, okay. Here it is. At least, for Space and Time.
First, your ms comes to me through the website email. During the first couple of weeks of the reading window, 10-15 stories come in every day. I distribute them, by email, to the associate editors. I also read a good number of them myself.
I take time from writing and other parts of my life to read a lot of stories. Sometimes, I have a certain flexibility to do this. Not everyone does.
All of our associate editors are writers themselves. They have deadlines that come up suddenly. Business is business. Or, family emergencies, day jobs, or other responsibilities take up time. They may have to wait a week or two to get the stories.
Computers crash. Emails get lost or accounts mysteriously stop functioning.
Just like in the old days, strange things happen to the mail.
Manuscripts may fly, time does not, and where they land is not guaranteed.
So.
The first wave of rejections very likely come from me, or maybe one or two of the other editors who have the time deal with all the stories they receive.
I remember I had a really good day, no interruptions, and kept reading stories back to back until, at one point, I answered a submission about an hour after it was sent.
I’ve gotten rejections like that. I can’t remember if I’ve ever been accepted that quickly.
But it does happen. Not very often. Certainly it is not a standard, though there may be some voracious editors out there who can do this.
And, it isn’t good news.
Not every story is rejected, of course. I’ll hold stories that interest me for a second read. The other editors pass their recommended stories back to me, and I put them in my second read pile.
At some point in those first two weeks, that pile begins to grow and I have to slow down the first reader job and get into reading, and re-reading, and re-re-reading those hold-over stories.
I start sending stories I really like to Hildy Silverman, publisher and Editor in Chief of Space and Time. The final buy decision is hers. She has her own second read pile, her maybe list. She has her own job selling Space and Time, getting the next issue together, going to cons, selling ad space. You know, publisher business.
And, oh yeah, family and job and stuff like that.
Sometimes she gets back to me quick. Other times, it takes a while.
I send out acceptances and rejections, accordingly.
This process goes on through the reading period. And beyond.
I stress, beyond
I say all this to give you an idea where your manuscript may be, not only in Space and Time, but in publisher’s reading process.
Here’s a quick observation:
No news is good news.
Your story is still being considered.
Yes, your story may have been eaten by electronic rats, and after a while it isn’t a bad idea to query.
The old standard used to be three months. In the electronic age, I can see that being shortened, depending on the market.
If an online market report tells a response time is a few days, please, read carefully. Are those responses all rejections, or do they include acceptances? Because all that report may be saying (and is saying, when it comes to Space and Time) is that some people are getting fast rejections.
This time around, one or two folks withdrew their stories while they were still being considered. One submission email hadn’t even been opened.
And I’m talking about a couple of weeks after being sent.
Others sent mildy cranky emails. After a couple of weeks.
I understand. I busted a gut finishing a story for a market right before the Space and Time reading window opened. And in the few days between finishing that thing and become swamped with manuscripts, I worried. I wanted a quick response. I needed to know. I was anxious.
I left it alone. Got involved with other things, and the Space and Time happened, and I haven’t thought of the story since.
I’ll sell it to that market, or to another one. I’m pretty sure it’s not a dog. I’ve sent out some stories out for years until they were sold. Others, I retired after a few rejections, knowing they were dogs.
They linger, in the doghouse. Sometimes, I go back to them, tear them down and rebuild them, based on critiques or the perspective of time. And, yes, I’ve sold the ones I’ve rebuilt.
My advice, based on 40 years of launching stories into the Great Abyss, is to send your story out and get busy on the next one. When stories come back, know what market you’re going to send it out to next and get it out. When stories find a home, celebrate.
Have some sort of tickler and, if you use an online market site, figure out a reasonable estimate for a response time. Send out a polite query. When do you send out a query?
And when you’ve exhausted markets, or your patience, put them aside, revisit them with fresh eyes. Or the eyes of a Ray Bradbury, or Gene Wolfe, or Peter Straub, or whoever your literary heroes are. And perhaps you’ll find the way to make them better.
At Space and Time, as I write this, it’s been two months since we opened the reading window. We closed it a month ago. We’ve gone through most (but not all) of the initial submissions. Hildy has bought a few stories.
Some editors are still going through their piles, reading and re-reading stories.
Do you want to rush them?
Remember, the better the story, the longer it may take to figure out. Is it like something we’ve already bought? Does it remind of us a TV show or movie we just watched? Is there something missing, or too much of this or that? Or, is it a story we really want?
Would you rather have a fast rejection, or a careful and thorough consideration of a piece that may eventually be purchased?
I estimate that by the end of the third month since opening the reading window, the end of September, we’ll be done.
That’s an estimate. I told this to someone, and received a vaguely annoyed response along the lines of “you’d better be.”
You see, these are the kinds of things editors talk about at editor panels at conventions and on internet boards.
Don’t be that guy.
Oh, yeah. The serial submitters.
Some of this expectation for quick responses may come from the need to barrage a market with a lot of stories, especially when that market does not want multiple submissions.
Send us your best, is the usual code-phrase to curtail this behavior.
If you’re going to do this, making the stories very different – style, subject matter, even genre – might give you a stronger chance of acceptance.
But sending the same type of tale, the same voice, sometimes even a similar plot, well, you’re not improving your chances.
And sending these stories out the same day you get the rejection, each time, for, say, 3 or 4 or even 5 times in a row, especially after fast rejections, well, your story may be passed to another editor with “fresh” eyes and you’ll probably get a different style of rejection letter. But it’ll still be a rejection letter.
Try your best. Send your best.
And if you send several stories, because you haven’t heard in a few days or a week, you may actually be competing with yourself and tie up stories you could be selling elsewhere while they compete with each other.
This happened to some folks during the reading period.
Marketing is crucial to a good writing career. But how you send stories, how you present yourself to publishers and editors, is part of that marketing.
You want editors to look forward to hearing from you again, even if they’ve never bought anything from you.
**
Somewhere up there I mentioned beginnings, and ones that don’t begin anything. I can’t stress enough how strong story opening stand out in the slush pile.
I’m not saying fast starts, with blazing action and a lot of people we don’t know running around. I’m saying strong. Compelling. Mysterious. Promising something different. Something bigger to come in the pages that follow, bigger on the inside, like the Tardis, than it appears on the outside.
A character, in a situation, now. An odd thing happening, asking the question, why? How? A disturbing detail. If you’re a Ramsey Campbell or Lucius Shepard, you can just describe something that will carve out a reader’s heart and make them scream for more. If you’re Joyce Carol Oats, you might start with a disturbing character, in pain, traumatized. However you start, with plot, through dialogue/characterization, description, mood, whatever technique is your strength, the reader needs to know something important is going on, needs to feel a promise is being made.
Of course, then you have to deliver on that promise. You can lie, make a reader feel the promise is one thing, while in fact it’s quite another. In fact, that’s the very best kind of story, bigger than it appears to be.
Stories that don’t promise much, or promise predictable, ordinary things, are read. But if they wind down quickly, head straight for a predictable ending, without giving the reader anything different, they get beaten by the competition. They are only what they appear to be.
As an example, look to characters and emotional throughlines – even when ideas have been well used. One trick is to put different characters into plots or ideas that you know are a little worn, that were hackneyed when they were on Twilight Zone. Relationships and their emotional tensions, the choices that result in action and consequences, can turn a story on its head. Put a gay couple in the old blood feeding garden, for example, or a young man and his cat in a haunted house.
Right from the start, there’s the tension between two things that don’t typically go together. By following the consequences, the story, hopefully, goes in unusual directions.
The point is, beginnings are a good place to take a chance. Be bold, in style, voice, language, concept, idea, character. Play to your strength. And don’t be afraid to go back, as the story develops, and sharpen or even change the opening, make it richer, deeper.
In this reading period, I read a lot of stories I thought or felt were doomed from the start. They weren’t awful stories, they just didn’t – as I like to say – break away from the pack. They followed the stories that had come before them, stayed safe in terms of idea or character.
They were predictable. They didn’t make editors work hard to find a reason to turn the story away.
Most of all, they didn’t draw the reader into a world that was bigger, even if only slightly, than should reasonably be contained in its pages.