Women Destroying Fantasy: What I'll Be Looking For

A week or so ago we had the orientation session for the slush readers. I gathered them by posting announcements in my newsletter and other social media, but I also tried to reach out to a range of people in order to ask for recommendations in order to ensure I had a diverse pool. We ended up with over a dozen slushreaders, and one of the things I want all of them to take away from the experience is better understanding of stories and how to sort through things.

We video-recorded the session, and the publisher went over the mechanics of the slush system in that as well. Parvus Press has mentioned recently that I asked to have the slush read blind, which to me seems like a better approach. Studies have shown that perception of the attached name can change the way someone reacts to a scholarly paper, and I’m reasonably sure similar things happen when reading fiction.

One of the things I’ve stressed is that typos and grammatical errors aren’t a dealbreaker – we can fix those. A compelling story with some issues like that is something I want to see. But the world’s most immaculately formatted story won’t do much for me unless there’s a good story attached, by which I mean a story that entertains while at the same informs or engages or makes you think or hopefully some combination of all of that. Look for the stories that startle and amaze you, I told them. Or really piss you off, I added, because sometimes that’s the sign of a good story.

If the story is from a viewpoint radically different than their own, I’d like them to make sure some other eyes check it out. (Nonetheless I’m going to be a pain in the rear and read everything, partly because I want to be able to talk to the slushreaders about stuff as it comes up.)

I emphasized a policy that I have borrowed from John Joseph Adams, who has edited a kerjillion anthologies, and asked people not to talk about the slushreading experience in anything but vague and enthusiastic terms. I know writers will be watching those utterances and often taking stuff to heart that was not intended for them. In my early years, I had the odd experience of having an IGMS slushreader blog about my story submission in mocking terms. This probably would have been more discouraging if the actual editor hadn’t just bought the story, but I will always remember reading through their account of the slushreading party and the lines about all of them laughing about hitting a story written from an elephant’s POV. The vividness of that moment is not something I really want the slushreaders inflicting on other writers.

We closed up by talking a little about how to stay un-depressed in the light of what may well turn out to be a whole bunch of grim stories. It’s okay to step away from the keyboard sometimes, and we have enough slushreaders that plenty of eyes will be looking at the stories.

The always fabulous Jude Marie Green mailed me. Her question, which got me thinking, was: What does an editor do (besides acquire) to make the issue “come together”?

It wasn’t the first time this question’s come up, and I’ve never seen much about it, so I wanted to talk a little about the idea of arranging things. Because an ideal magazine issue or anthology isn’t just a bunch of stories in a box. In theory, at least, the editor has selected stories that resonate with each other and arranged them in a way that’s meaningful. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Here’s the only practical thing I’ve ever heard on the subject: Lead with your strongest story, and end with your second strongest. That seems like good advice to me, because a) first impressions flavor the way they’ll read what follows and b) at the end, you want the reader left feeling satisfied (or intrigued or delighted, but hopefully a favorable adjective, rather than let-down, disappointed, or relieved that the book is over.)

Beyond that – and this is entirely my philosophy and there are no guarantees any other editor feels the same – you want the stories to speak to each other. I’ve mentioned in another post that I used what was then a forthcoming collection, Near + Far, as an exercise for my online editing class. I gave the students the stories and told them to figure out an order and then be prepared to explain why they picked that order. Since there were actually two sections of the book, they actually did two ToCs, one for the “Near” part, which contained only near-future SF, and one for the “Far” part, which was devoted to SF farther out in time. It was enlightening (and sometimes entertaining) and I used that feedback when determining the actual order.

So here’s what I think about when arranging stories:

• Texture: I’m looking at style here, and trying not to clump stories together that are all the same. I want a sense of variety, where a plain style story follows one that is ornate. I may try not to make those transitions too jarring, to have the book flow from highly ornate prose to less ornate to unadorned, and then back again.
• Rhythm: When thinking about rhythm, I’m looking at length as much as anything, varying short with longer pieces. I want them to alternate a bit, rather than have a structure where I have three pieces of flash in a row followed by three longer pieces.
• Theme: Here, actually, I might clump things, and have, for example, three stories dealing with loneliness together, in order to give the reader a sense of alternating perspectives. Theme’s sometimes the guideline for an anthology overall, where every story deals with a particular concept, but even there I’d look for subsets and try to arrange them that way.
• Emotion: Personally, I’d follow a sad story with a happy one, or alternate humor and tragedy. Again, I’m striving for a sense of variety, but I also don’t want to have, say, three downers of a story in a row and give someone the feeling that the whole book will fall along those lines.

Some of these seem contradictory? Yup. Putting something like this together is a balancing act, and answers to what should go where are often dependent on what’s already been decided. Next time, I’ll go through the final versions of the ToCs for Near + Far and talk about why they’re in the order they are. Hopefully, that will show some of this in action.

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