It’s been about a year since I pitched the idea of a mixed-genre anthology for the Western Colorado Writers’ Forum to sponsor. The book itself will make its debut appearance at our authors’ book release party on June 24, 2025. During the three months the editorial board read and debated the qualities of the submissions, I constantly reminded myself of the innate and pervasive subjectiveness of judging art.
The path to publication is not straightforward. Not in the least.
I think I learned this first and best while trying to give my high school creative writing students a real-world lesson.
I took the poems my students wrote for the week, combined them all into one document, which I’d done with every weekly assignment, and then gave them back to them. Their names were removed from the poems. By the way, this dynamic worked the same way if I had given them a packet of short stories (or novels – as if a high school class would ever write novels).
For this lesson, I had them break into groups of five or six students. They became virtual magazine editorial boards. They had to give their magazine a name. The instructions were that, as editorial boards, they were choosing work for their magazines. Each magazine had space for three poems. They had to choose their three from the 24 poems in the packet. I showed them the standards we had used the last time I did the school’s literary magazine, and also a copy of an acceptance letter and a rejection letter. I stressed that what they would be doing, at least in their imagination, would be sending out three acceptance letters and twenty-one rejections. Ouch!
Oh, this was a lively class!
They reported the results of their work, and this is where the lesson became the best ever. The first group read their three choices and explained why they liked them. That was cool, and the three writers who were chosen felt good about themselves. Then the second group told us their three choices. Their three choices were completely different from the first group! I actually saw jaws drop. A different group, using the same criteria, sent rejections to the three poems another group had sent acceptances to!
By the time we went through all the groups, eleven of the twenty-four poems were accepted by at least one group (there were only four poems that were chosen by two groups).
We talked about how many times works that went on to gather quite a bit of acclaim were rejected before they found publishing homes.
Here’s what we concluded about the poems that weren’t accepted by any group. Either A), the poem needed more work. Or B), there weren’t enough editorial groups.
It was a great lesson.
Below are the guidelines we used for the school’s literary magazine, and the sample guidelines I gave each editorial group before they started reading.
General Guidelines for Accepting Work for Publication
- Look for skill, grace or power in presentation.
- Surprising uses of language.
- New or arresting imagery.
- Original or thought-provoking connections.
- New ideas in new forms, new ideas in old forms, or old ideas in new forms. Reject old ideas stated in old ways.
- Reject unconscious use of cliches or trite language.
- Reject traditional topics treated in traditional ways.
How something is said is more important than what is said, or another way to think of this is that the skillful saying of something is what makes it important.
The toughest sell on this list is the last one: “How something is said is more important than what is said.”
At first, this sounds ridiculous. Of course, “what is said” is the most important element, the students argued. And in many cases, I told them, this is true. So if you say, “I love you, Mom,” to your mother, what could be more important than that?
In our interpersonal world, “I love you, Mom,” is vital. But when we’re looking at literary work, we aren’t judging the importance of what is being said in isolation. What if we are looking at six short stories, each of which has the theme, “I love you, Mom”? We can only choose one. Now we are considering not what is being said, because they all say the same thing, but how they say it.
In literary terms, how something is said is what gives it its power, makes it moving, emotional, thought-provoking.
As writers, we have important thoughts we want to say. Our job is to figure out how to say those important thoughts so that someone else who has looked at many writers’ important thoughts will pick it out of a pile and elevate it to publication.
As we can see from the experiment in my classroom, though, choosing the best of the important thoughts is subjective. Different editors using their unique judgments may see more importance and competence in different works.
Heck, once I received a story back in the mail. The editor liked it enough to suggest revisions. I thought about the suggestions for a couple weeks and decided the editor was mistaken. My original composition was the best form for my thoughts (this was true arrogance on my part), so I resubmitted the work, telling the editor I appreciated their insight and the chance to rework the piece. The editor wrote back, said the story was much better, and bought it.
I hadn’t changed anything. Also, I don’t recommend other authors try this technique.
The difference in my unchanged story was that it was a different day for the editor. Choosing work is subjective, even within the same person.
At any rate, this essay has been a long way around to get to the point that the difference between published and unpublished work isn’t just the quality of the writing; it also is who looked at it, and what mood they were in on the day they looked.
The author’s job is to say the important thought they were trying to say in the best form for them to say it. I think one path to making how we express our thoughts publishable is to pay attention to the suggestions I gave my creative writing class so many years ago.
It’s all in how you say it.
And it’s also the right editor seeing it on the right day.
Here’s how I handle the unpredictable world of seeking publication.
- I always try to put my works in the best form possible, keeping in mind the guidelines I listed above.
- I send the works to the markets that say they are looking for my kind of work.
- I never take a rejection personally. They didn’t reject me. All they did was decide not to take my piece – I know, it’s hard not to take it personally, so if you have to, you have permission to sulk, but limit yourself to a manageable time, say five minutes.
- The sun sets on no rejected manuscript in my house. When a piece is rejected, I immediately find another market for it, then send it out.
- For me, it’s helpful to have more than one story in the mail at the same time. This way if a work is rejected, I still have hope for the other. Right now, I have twelve stories in the mail.
- Of course, if you are just starting, you may not have a bunch of work out for consideration. You might just have one. So, the best piece of advice I received that dealt with this was from an editor who rejected one of my earliest submissions. They said, “I hope while you were waiting to hear about this piece that you were working on your next.”
James Van Pelt has been selling short fiction to many of the major venues since 1989. Recently he retired from teaching high school English after thirty-seven years in the classroom. He has been a finalist for the Nebula, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, Locus Awards, and Analog and Asimov’s Reader’s Choice awards. Years and years ago he was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He still feels “new.” Fairwood Press recently released a huge, limited-edition, signed, and numbered collection of his work, THE BEST OF JAMES VAN PELT. He can be found online at his website or on Facebook.
