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What I look for in a story As the Associate Editor/Fiction of Third Wednesday, I see every short story submitted for publication. I read and make my recommendation – yes, or no, or maybe if the writer did this or that. I do not have the final word – that is the province of LT, our esteemed Editor-in-Chief. But he listens to me, more often than not. When I receive an ms, I have no idea who the writer is. The stories are identified with initials only. It could be a Nobel Prize winner for literature, or someone writing their first story. So I have no pre-conceived notions about what I am about to read. I base my recommendations purely on the writing. I give a yes or maybe to, at most, one in twenty or thirty submissions. Here are some factors that affect my decision. When I read a new story, I want to know who is involved and what’s at stake right away. Another way of putting this is – I need to know ASAP why I should give a damn about this at all. So I seldom read past the first paragraph or two of stories that don’t give me this. Stories that begin with descriptions are the worst offenders. I receive dozens of these. Descriptions of pastoral scenes or bustling streets in exotic foreign lands or the weather, or even a description of Joe waking up in the morning, don’t tell me who’s involved and what’s at stake (unless Joe is on fire). They don’t tell me why I should care about whatever this eventually turns out to be about. I am also squeamish about stories that begin with a piece of dialog (I don’t know who’s talking, or why), and stories that begin with background information. A teacher of mine called this type of opening “throat-clearing”. Skip the intro. Just get on with it! (And don’t overuse exclamation points). Here are some openings I like, taken almost at random from books on my bookshelf. I hadn’t had a haircut in forty days and forty nights, and I was beginning to look like several violinists out of work. Not long ago there lived in uptown New York, in a small, almost meager room, though crowded with books, Leo Finkle, a rabbinical student at the Yeshiva University. Finkle, after six years of study, was to be ordained in June and had been advised by an acquaintance that he might find it easier to win himself a congregation if he were married. During the summer that I was fifteen, on a muggy July night with nothing much else to do, my father and I began working together, stealing from our neighbors. I went out to the farmhouse where Dundun lived to get some pharmaceutical opium from him, but I was out of luck. The Saturday in June that Vincent Root, driving his big Buick Roadmaster sedan, struck and killed little Sean Regan on Mayesville’s main street, was as lovely an early summer’s day as anyone could remember. According to the tapes, my father, then about as run-of-the-mill man as Joe Blow himself, didn’t want to see the thing. Not a damn bit, he says. But there it came anyhow, roaring in hard and tumbly from the west with a comet’s fiery tail, and then – ka-BOOM – enough bang to rock Chaves County left and right like a quake. If I get through your opening and feel compelled to keep reading, you’ve increased your chances, but you’re far from home free. What do I look for now? Competence and story. Incompetence is easy to spot – inexperienced writers make tons of inexperienced writers-type mistakes. I recommend the book Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King, which covers most of them. Story is a bit harder to explain – but a good writer knows that a story is not just a series of events, and not simply a character contemplating his or her misery, or a sketch. Knowing how to write one comes with reading and writing them. A few of my prejudices - I don’t want to see any more stories where the P-O-V character has Alzheimer’s. I don’t want to see stories that depend on dreams; I don’t trust dreams in fiction. I cringe when I begin reading another story about “mama”. I have a bias against stories in which the main characters are children or animals. I am bored by stories in which the characters suffer from some indefinable, generalized angst or ennui. I have a bias against stories which are mostly internal monologue or exposition; I want to see the characters “in scene”. I must also admit a prejudice against experimental fiction, or meta-fiction. My experience has been that most writers who claim to be writing such fiction are doing so because they cannot write a traditional story. But I try to keep an open mind. If I am undecided, here are a few other things I ask myself about the story I am reading -
Third Wednesday publishes what might be called short-short fiction – nothing over 1,500 words, and preferably even shorter. What can you do with this very short form? A lot. I recently read a 20-page story in workshop about a young woman who wanted to have a baby, or she wanted to have her husband pay more attention to her, or both (that indefinable, generalized angst or ennui I mentioned earlier). The piece labored (no pun intended) to tell this story, with long descriptions of exotic places and emotionally charged scenes. It wasn’t very well written, but that is not my point here. As I read it, I thought of Hemingway’s Cat in the Rain – a story about such a woman, a story that does it all, and does it really well, in only two pages. Short is good. This story-writing business is damned hard, but what a thrill when you finally get it right. Keep working. George Dila Associate Editor/Fiction
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