Reminding People of My Editing Rates

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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I just finished the first pass on the slushpile for If This Goes On. The anthology is intended to be half solicited manuscripts; half from the open call, and I’m happy to say that I don’t think it’s going to be hard to pull that together. I’ve got five or six definites on my list right now, and I’m setting them aside. I did read through every story except for a handful of less-than-serious ones; thank you to the slushreaders and publisher Colin Coyle for winnowing those out.

If I can, I’ll take one more pass through the first third or so of the slushpile, when I was reading and not knowing how strong some of the submissions would be. I suspect at least a third of those can be winnowed. Then I’ll ask the publisher to send out that round of rejections.

By then I am hoping I’ll have narrowed things down to a few dozen stories. These manuscripts have officially made it to the final round. At this point I’ll be looking at some things that include:

• Is this a common theme or something unusual? A few commonalities have emerged and I will probably only have one underwater people story, one abortions-are-illegal story, one from-a-child’s-POV story, and one post-apocalyptic landscape story, which may or may not be one of the several that featured a particular dietary item.
• How much bang for the buck does it yield in terms of editorial work? If it’ll be amazeballpants (common editorial jargon), then I’m willing to put more time into it. Along the same lines, I’ve got one serviceable story that would only take a little work to deepen its emotional impact. It’s also a strong contender.
• What’s the tone? I’ve got lots of gritty, desperate stuff and some humor in there to leaven the mix is necessary. At the same time I don’t want things that will seem incongruous next to each other.
• What did the slushreader(s) think? Unfathomable as it may seem, I have been known to be wrong. If I was meh about a story but someone else raved, I’ll certainly go back and take another look.

Then will come the final passes, where I’ll be reluctantly saying goodbye to some stories for reasons that might include:

• They don’t fit the overall theme as strongly as the others.
• They don’t play off other stories, or else are too similar to another piece.
• They will take a lot of editing, but the amount of work required by other pieces with similar strengths/themes is significantly less.

I hope that the slushreaders have learned something from all of this, including a better sense of what submitters may or may not want to avoid, and how varied the slush pile can be. With a few of them we’ve done some talking about stories, but not all. For most slushreaders, I would suggest if you’re passing up more than half the stories, you are not being harsh enough, but if it’s only one in ten, you may be leaving out some stuff the editor will want to see, unless your tastes are perfectly aligned.