I promise that if you get past the opening, philosophical wonkiness of the next three paragraphs, this piece becomes practical and applicable to writing better. Stick with me.
My tendency in these articles is to couch most of the writing advice in terms of moving your writing closer to publication. But publication isn’t really the goal: clarity in thought, wording, and construction is the end game, and that finish line is more about what it takes to write the strongest work that best reflects your intense investigation into your internal landscapes.
Better writing requires and provokes growth in the writer.
It’s not about selling the work or building an audience or achieving fame. It’s about using the powerful self-investigative force of writing to discover what it is that you have to say, even, or most especially, the things you have to say that you didn’t know were in you when you started.
The best parallel I have come up with is that writing and rewriting mimics psychoanalysis without a therapist’s fees.
Eventually, if you dig deep, you face fundamental questions: Why do I care about this in the first place? What does it matter? What does it mean? Do my words communicate what I mean? And how do my sentences, my best ones, my most deeply considered ones, reflect my consideration of those questions?
Whew! That’s deep.
Fortunately, I can offer a strategy to unlock the power in writing to grow yourself, which is to write for publication. Write strongly enough that a qualified reader who doesn’t know you, who will only pay attention to the strength and interest of your words, will choose it above the other manuscripts they have.
Depending on the publication, you might have to be more interesting than 60% to 99% (or more) of the other submissions.
The best panels I’ve seen at writing conventions are the “live slush” ones. They’re sometimes called “instant editing” or “snap judgment” presentations, but they work the same way. A handful of editors (often five) will listen to the first 250 words from manuscripts that audience members submitted. At MileHiCon in Denver each year, one panel looks at manuscripts sent in before the convention, and another works with pages brought right then.
These could be the first page of a short story or novel. The form doesn’t matter. You can’t tell from the first 250 words how long the total work is.
No matter how it’s set up, a good reader will read the page out loud to the editors and audience. The best way I’ve seen this done, and also the most brutal, is that the editors will listen until they reach a point where they would send the manuscript back to the writer, rejected. When a majority of editors have raised their hands, rejecting the manuscript, they stop reading.
The editors who rejected will explain their thinking, and the ones who did not explain what kept their hands down.
I have seen slush panels consider eight to ten manuscripts in an hour-long session and reject all of them.
Also, some entries might be strong enough that only one or two editors (or none) raise a hand, so the reader continues until the end of the 250 words.
Everyone celebrates!
Imagine how tense this could be as a writer. You took your first 250 words, worked them and reworked them, maybe resenting the tiny window into your story they get to see (If only they could hear the NEXT 250 words, or the whole thing, they’d recognize my brilliance!), knowing that you have to capture their interest from the start.
The reader has reached your manuscript and begins reading. Maybe you titled it, which you should, or you didn’t and it’s not until they’ve launched into the piece that you recognize your words. Regardless, now you’re watching the editors, some with eyes closed, their heads cocked a little, listening.
One time at a slush reading, an editor raised their hand after only three words: “Wind blew outside.” The editor believed mystery writer Elmore Leonard’s advice, “Never begin with the weather.” On one level, it’s not true. What if your story is about the weather? On the other hand, Leonard wrote an article containing his ten rules for writing. “Never begin with the weather” encourages writers to grab the reader’s attention immediately with action or character. That’s not bad advice.
At any rate, everyone in the room, including the other editors, thought a three-word standard was ridiculously limiting.
But you get the idea. The bar for publication is high.
When I watch live-slush panels at conventions, I’m forced to reconsider my first 250 words in a particularly bright light. How would my opening page sound read by someone other than me to a handful of editors?
I don’t think it would be bad practice to watch a live-slush session or two, and then with that experience fresh in your mind, read the first 250 words of your manuscript out loud before you send it out.
How do you think it does? Are there reasons to reject it already, or are there reasons to continue reading? Is there an “oh wow” moment? Is the language and all your other choices interesting?
I’ve noticed these attributes when I’ve been a member of a live-slush panel that kept me reading:
- A unique or ferociously specific setting is almost always attractive (because so many rejectable pieces have generic settings).
- No cliches of character, dialogue, situation or wording.
- A strong, distinct narrative voice instead of a droning or personality-less one.
- Interesting or clever turns of phrase. In 250 words you might only have one of these, but woe to the manuscript that has none.
- A sense of immediacy of intent (I’m not sure how else to word this–it means the story sounds like it has a compelling reason to be told right now, and it must start at this moment in the story).
- Well-chosen action verbs almost always keep me reading, so much so that I flinch at the linking verbs when they show up too often, too early, or in a glaringly obvious place (for those of you who need a reminder, the linking verbs are am, is, are, was, were, be, being, verbs ending in be, being or been, or verbs that mean basically the same thing as “seems,” like “I felt angry.”)
The linking verb I hear most often is “was.” If you want to try a revelatory editing move, use the search function and look for “was.” In my version of MS Word, the word you are searching for is highlighted in yellow. Since I’m guilty of “was” overuse in rough drafts, my manuscript breaks out into dozens of yellow blotches. It’s sort of like literary jaundice. You might have a different word that the search function will reveal as overused in your writing.
So how can you make your writing survive the slush panel?
You might notice how my suggestions prioritize specificity and originality. Editors have the advantage over a writer in recognizing manuscripts that fail to be specific or original because they read so many manuscripts.
What editors see is not a bunch of bad submissions and a handful of brilliant ones; they see a broad swath of competent but familiar approaches that lean on vague writing, familiar word choice, underdeveloped key moments, other moments that are unneeded, and overused situations or approaches to the material.
You can avoid these pitfalls by being specific, reconsidering every narrative choice you make (an easy way to do this is to invent alternative moves—your first choice was the easiest for you to get to. It’s possible it would be the easiest for your readers to get to also), and weighing your wording carefully. The strongest work arises from the writer’s clarity of purpose, their belief in the importance of their work. Eventually, they will get to reading the work out loud. Does it carry conviction and passion and importance equally?
Are they the best words in the best order and arrangement?
The only way to achieve these goals is to think more deeply, to write more deeply, and to reveal to yourself the vitalness of your work, which is where we started.
Hmm. This turned into a longer post than I thought.
Apex Magazine has done you a service by sharing live-slush sessions well worth watching. You can find others.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft42Ox2onvw
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.
