Over at Flash Fiction Chronicles today I’ve posted about how flash fiction lets a writer really experiment with execution, especially when it comes to authorial voice. In The Many Voices of Flash I talk about how flash’s quick and somewhat disposable nature makes it a perfect vehicle for experimentation, but beyond that it is the constraint of flash with its hard word limit that means such experimental means are often the best way to squeeze every ounce of effectiveness out of so short a story.

In the case of voice, I think it is such a powerful way to create character and mood that to not use it when appropriate — to adopt instead a plain, unadorned, or straightforward style designed purely for clarity or ease of reading — is to throw away one of the best tricks we have available to us. And on the question of voice, I like to draw a distinction between the author’s natural style and that adopted for the story in question:

Instead of voice I like to think of many different voices, those tricks of style that are as different from story to story as the characters, themes, and settings of each piece. Different because they are integral, indivisible parts of the story itself, whether they are the actual words of a first person tale or the differences in cadence and inflection in a third person narrative, there is no excuse not to bring a conscious mind to the creation of these voices. Especially, as I’ve said, in flash fiction where to fail to do so is to write without one of the most powerful tools in the writer’s arsenal.

I love playing with voice, writing in dialect, changing style to fit a story, and I think, so far, I’ve done so with a lot of success. If that isn’t something you yourself have attempted, consider doing so in a few pieces of flash fiction, its the perfect medium to play around in.

I’ve always loved single author short story collection, but I realize I’m in a minority — the sort of people who devour forewords, afterwords, and author’s notes, always hunt for biographical notes in books and magazines, and read non-fiction books about their favorite authors. Knowing that short story collections of any kind, both multi-author anthologies and single-author collections, don’t sell very well in comparison to novels and, having written and published some shorts with the ambition to keep doing more of the same, I’ve often wondered just how the single-author collection fits in with the modern genre fiction writer’s career path.

Over at The Fix prolific short fictioneer James Van Pelt sheds some light on the questions that many writers have about collecting their fiction in his ‘The Day Job’ column on Publishing a Short Story Collection. Van Pelt addresses the following concerns of burgeoning writers:

• When should a writer do a collection? Do they have to be at “critical mass” or have won an award?
• Small press or major press?
• How well do short story collections do?
• Do you need an agent?
• How do you choose the stories and how much input does the writer have?

If these are things you’ve thought about (I have), Van Pelt lays it all out nicely in his article. Small Press is certainly the arena for collections from writers who have yet to achieve significant book sales to tempt a major publisher, but Van Pelt also addresses self-publishing in his article. He closes with a list of some recommended science fiction and fantasy short story collections.

Following up from Monday’s post linking to Cory Doctorow’s advice for Writing in the Age of Distraction, I thought I’d mention two free writing applications designed to confront just that: Write or Die and Dark Room. Both operate on the principle that the less opportunities the writer has to break-off from writing, the better.

Write or Die is a free online application based around the philosophy that immediate punishment is a far more effective motivator than distant, intangible rewards. To that end it is customizable to present several types of punishments to the writer who stops typing, ranging from a warning message all the way to the actual deletion of the text you’ve been working on!

I’ve played a bit with Write or Die, going for the maximum penalty and least forgiving grace period (the time you may go without actually typing). And, while I got a kick out of it, I can’t really imagine it being all that practical for something longer than a blog entry — I certainly couldn’t approach writing fiction with any sort of artificially imposed limits such as this (which I can envision becoming distractions themselves). Still, if you have the attention span of a gnat, or a masochistic streak, have a look. And, even if it doesn’t sound useful to you,  the site alone is worth investigating for its humor and attitude.

Dark Room is of a more practical nature. Apparently based on a Mac application called Write Room (Ryan Harvey’s blog entry about it on Black Gate lead me to Dark Room, he also blogged about Write or Die here), Dark Room is basically a full-screen, green text on black, text editor with very simple interface. The page width, font, and colors are all customizable, but I like the default just fine. While it doesn’t seem like much, having a full-screen blacked out with no other menus, tabs, or task bars peeking out at you does help to reinforce concentration. Dark Room saves files as text documents.

Dark Room is a bit like an Alphasmart Neo, it’s a ‘first drafter.’ Meaning, when I’m done working with it, I still have to jump through hoops to open my file in a word processing program for formatting and spell checking. Maybe that trade-off in efficiency is worth it sometimes but, frankly, often it seems like a hassle. As much as I like the working environment of Dark Room, I still don’t see it as being that one application that can suit all my needs.

But when I do find that application that final lets me part ways with Microsoft Word, I’ll let you know.

Over at Locus online an interesting article by Cory Doctorow (they’re always interesting, actually) deals with writing in the internet age. You know how it is — never before has it been easier to write copy with our ultra-portable laptops, spellcheckers, online encyclopedias, and laser printers stuffed with cheap paper, yet matching pace with these advances is our ability to distract ourselves from the work at hand. I know I’ve wrestled with this myself, and even bought myself a piece of kit, the Alphasmart Neo, as a help around some of my distractions. Doctorow offers some good advice, some of which I very familiar with and can endorse from experience, and some of which is new to me.

Probably the two biggest ways to ensure steady production is to create an unflagging, but manageable, work schedule and stick to it even when you can write more, and to leave the day’s work unfinished. Combined, these two rules ensure your mind is propelled forward toward the next day’s writing and, that when you sit down the following day to pick up in the middle of a sentence or scene, you have a much easier time getting started.

Then Doctorow suggests we don’t research as we write, a sin I’m guilty of. While sometimes I have no problems googling a quick reference for a story I’m writing and then jumping back into the flow of things, other times I’ve fallen into what Doctorow warns against: “an endless click-trance that will turn your 20 minutes of composing into a half-day’s idyll through the web.” The times I have successfully and by necessity pulled this off were for very small projects in which my enthusiasm far exceeded my knowledge, and I more-or-less researched and wrote simultaneously. But I can’t imagine that approach working on anything other than a very short story. Doctorow shares a tip used by journalists, inserting ‘TK’ into the the text where you are unsure of the content, as it’s easy to pick up with a search later ( the letters TK only rarely appearing next to each other in English words). I use brackets for the same reason, as they stick out and don’t get used much for anything else.

He talks too of the worst distractors on our computers, the IM, chat, and RSS feeds that give us up to-the-minute distractions. But the one tip he gave that really intrigued me, as I’ve been thinking the same thing, is to lose the fancy word processing software in favor of simpler programs. He recommends text editors, but I’m not sure I want to go that far — especially as I’d have to go through the process of copying the text out of them and into whatever spell-checking and .rtf file generating software I’d use to prepare the manuscript. I’d love to find some middle ground, something with the stark simplicity of a textpad (or, preferably, dark room) and some of the functionality of a word processor. This demands further experimentation on my part, but I’m open to any recommendations.

. . . put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.

• Title: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
• Author: Stephen King
• Genre: Nonfiction — Writing
• Year:2000

At some point in the middle of writing this book — On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft — Stephen King nearly died. The events of the accident that almost killed him are recounted at the very end of the book in a section entitled “On Living: A Postscript,” but they form a powerful coda through which everything else in the book, which is at least as much a celebration of the writer’s life as a primer on the craft of writing, is magnified and given a kind of gravity that elevates it beyond its humble intentions. Earlier in the book King, in what could be construed as his thesis, remarks that a person may come to writing for whatever reason, but the one thing they must not do is come to it lightly — and in this memoir the serious business of writing and the serious business of life are inseparable.

We all have some idea of who Stephen King is, right or wrong, but On Writing provides a look at the man through the lens of his craft. While not King’s autobiography, perhaps it should be, as it addresses his early years with an eye toward his future career. The first part of On Writing, then, is the part King calls his “C.V.,” an autobiographical look at some of the events and early writing experiences that formed him into the writer he is today. Recounting events from the traumatic to the absurd — the ear-drum piercing needles he received from doctors as a child, the enormous babysitter that used to sit on him to pass gas — King’s journey through his early years reads in some places, perhaps not surprisingly, like a Stephen King novel. It’s an effecting and interesting look at his life, a rags-to-riches story that gives an idea of how, in King’s words, one writer was formed.

King also deals frankly with his addictions in this section, recounting disturbing details of his drinking and drug use. Disturbing not because they are of the ‘falling to pieces, waking up in a strange city’ variety of druggie adventures, but because they are the insidious, everyday struggles of a family man who continued to work hard at maintaining his enormous success but could not get away from his own demons. King tackles the mythic stature of the addicted writer squarely, in a warning to anyone that thinks art must be fueled by self-destruction.

In the next two sections, “Toolbox” and “On Writing,” King talks of his practical approaches to the craft. Strictly speaking, there is nothing new here, no great insights that haven’t been covered in other books on the topic. But, as King states, On Writing is short because most books about writing are stuffed full of bullshit. King doesn’t bullshit the reader, and if he does repeat things that have been said in many places and in many ways, that’s because those things are fundamentally true. So when he rails against passive voice, says the adverb is not your friend, and speaks of good description as being as much about what is left out as what is said, he is reframing basic truths that have to be absorbed by every writer. If reading about them again gets the message across, then it doesn’t hurt to repeat the information.

And that is at the essence of the book — while other writing books may contain much of the same injunctions, they are not written by Stephen King. Like his work or not, one cannot deny his depth of experience and success at crafting effective stories. He writes with an easy confidence and casual familiarity that render his memoir into a conversation between friends — or between mentor and student. What On Writing succeeds at so well, what so many other books lack, is the infusing of the author’s personality into the work to the point that the reader becomes emotionally invested in the message — and is inspired by it. While it contains a fair amount of practical advice, like cutting ten percent between the first or second draft, or letting a manuscript go cold before doing a final edit, On Writing is really about inspiring by example. And when King finally does recount his accident, and the slow, painful journey back to health after his near-death experience — a recovery made in large part because of his love of writing — we are presented with an undeniable example of the power of art to transform lives.

As should be obvious, this book is a must for fledgling writers who are fans of King. But its appeal goes far beyond that, and I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone interested in the craft of writing. It is part absorbing first-hand account of the writer’s life, and part no-nonsense primer, but the whole ads up to an inspiring look at art and life.

• On Writing at Amazon
• Stephen King’s website

Jordan Lapp, co-editor of one of my favorite markets Every Day Fiction, just rebooted his fallow blog with a post that got some people talking. Jordan has recently won the top spot in one of the quarterly rounds of The Writers of the Future Contest, so he’s come back to blogging now that he has found a theme, or ‘hook,’ to blog about. As he remarks in his first post, and elaborates further in a follow-up, his blogging originally fell by the wayside because he didn’t see the point in it — that beginning writers without a product, or without a hook, would be better off spending their time writing than blogging. I essentially agree with that and, after yet further discussion on this topic at SFReader and at Susanne Warr’s blog, it seems even new writers who are blogging without a hook that disagree with Jordan’s statement have no trouble acknowledging the basic truth at its heart — that what is essentially being said is not ‘new writers must not blog’ but that ‘new writers must not expect their blogs to substitute for the real work they have to do to establish themselves as writers.’

A strong comparison can be made between the role of blogging and the role of short fiction in a contemporary writer’s career — namely, the question of whether or not pursuing either is worth it for the beginner is one that cannot be answered as a simple yes or no. Yes, both can be worth it if you go into them with your eyes open. No, neither is going to be if you expect them to do what they cannot.

For the beginning writer, a writer essentially without a product because he has no novels to sell, writing a personal diary-style blog is probably not going to do a whole lot for his career. That is not to say he shouldn’t do it because, let’s face it, plenty of non-writers do the same and for reasons that have nothing to do with selling fiction, it’s just that he should not expect a blog to actually generate a following for his fiction. This is not an argument about having a web presence — I think it is inarguable that every writer must have at least a page with basic information and a contact email — this argument is about time vs. reward. If you, the beginning writer, do not want to invest the time in a blog, then don’t do so just because you believe you must have one. Reading about people’s personal lives is only interesting to a point, and it’s no wonder that it is the people that have already got the world’s attention with a book or other product that have blogs of this sort with legions of readers.

A separate issue is the blogger-type blog writers — the ones for whom the book deals are not the primary motivation but the blog traffic and ads, etc. are. This is a different breed, playing by different rules, and not at all the beginning writer I am referring to. I’m discussing fiction writers, spec fic writers especially who, even when they find their niche, will be blogging on topics that probably aren’t going to set the internet on fire — unless something like a book review of A Clockwork Orange written partially in nadsat in your idea of a thunderclap reverberating across the world wide web.

So for us stodgy, bookish, writer-types with our content blogs covering reviews, or writing advice, or information on agent searches and the like, what can a blog do for us? As someone who has made some great contacts through my blog, I can tell you it can pay dividends, so long as you put in the work. Over on the SFReader thread Cindy Pon mentioned that an agent actually found her from her blog — but, keep in mind, that was after she had a novel ready to go, and was blogging about her experiences looking to get it published. For those of us without that sort of product, what is it we are selling?

The obvious answer is that we are selling ourselves. I don’t think that can be done solely with a blog, either, but only in conjunction with other networking. For example, I will have six book reviews in the next issue of Black Gate magazine, and have been invited to contribute to the BG blog once a week — both of which I’m extremely pleased with, and neither of which would have happened if the reviews on this site didn’t impress BG’s Managing Editor. However, he didn’t just come out of the blue looking for me, either, rather we became acquainted with one another just as any other people that move in the same circles and have similar interests might do — so if you aren’t committed to being ‘out there’ online in as many ways as you can be, blogging is only ever going to be a minor trick in your arsenal of self-promotional tools.

Blogging, then, is a useful adjunct to an online lifestyle. If the editors, publishers, readers, and potential employers you come into contact with overwhelmingly originate from your time spent online, having a website that showcases what you can do for them is a good idea. Again, it doesn’t have to be a blog, but if you want to approach your site with the same discipline as you do writing, there are rewards you can reap in the short term. Here is where I have to disagree somewhat with the sentiment that a beginning writer ought to be writing instead of blogging, not because it isn’t true — because it basically is — but because it implies these two types of writing are interchangeable. From what I can tell, they aren’t.

So, this is where my experience may be different from many others, because I’ve never once felt my blogging time took away from my ‘real’ writing time.  Firstly, this is because I generally have the luxury of having time to do both, I’m not fighting to squeeze either into the day — if that is the case for you, then ignore what I say because you really should concentrate on your fiction and leave the blogging for when you’ve got some novels to push. However if, like me, you have the time or can make the time, you might notice that blogging and writing can be mutually reinforcing, rather than interfere with one another.

When I don’t write — when I don’t sit down to finish a difficult story, or start a new one I think will be hard, or go read a book instead of making notes or plotting or doing any of the other brain-work you need to do to keep the short fiction gears turning — it’s for a hundred reasons that have nothing to do with time. There may be occasions when I blog to distract myself from not writing, or to feel as if I have accomplished something writing-related while, in reality, the work I should be doing sits untouched — but most of the time this isn’t the case. Sometimes, there is no way I’m going to convince myself to work on a story that day, but I will blog something — in which case I’ve done more writing that day than I normally would have. And sometimes, quite often in fact, blogging acts as the perfect warm-up for the work I know I have to do but try to avoid — limbering up the fingers and the mind with a looser, freer, less consequential piece of writing that puts me in the mental state I need to achieve to tackle the serious business of crafting fiction. On those days, the work I put into my blog directly translates into the real writing I need to do as a writer.

There is a baseline perception of writing success that realizes that novels are the alpha and omega of the professional fiction game — they are both the source of income, and of readers. It’s absolutely true, and if you could program a writer to pursue only the novelist’s path without any extraneous detours he’d probably carve out the most efficient path to potential success. But writers are people, too, bags of weird psychology and strange chemical humors, and sometimes the things in life that aren’t strictly necessary become the most vital — like the affirmation produced by a short fiction sale to a small press magazine, or the conversation started on a blog that means someone actually does read your work. It’s been said that writers are always working, because writing is as mush a lifestyle as a vocation. By the same token I think we can look at a beginning writer’s blog as not only an implement of his career, but an appendage of his life — cast in those terms and when viewed with at least a healthy level of practical detachment, it may not really be that the beginning writer should ask himself “should I blog” but “if I do blog, will I do it well?”

In part one of the article I talked about what a slush pile was, and how attaining a position as a slush reader for a small or amateur press editor can be a great learning experience for a writer; helping him understand the submission game from both ends of the process. In part two I presented a few ideas at how to network yourself to editors and publishers, and how to gain some useful experience outside the slush pile that might help you once you get there. For this article, the last of the series, I want to talk about just what it is you will be doing with all that slush, and offer a few tips I learned the hard way that might make your experience a bit easier and more rewarding.

Do What They Tell You to Do

So you’ve been put in charge of all those manuscripts, maybe after a stint as a proofreader, maybe right off the bat. Now what do you do? The easiest thing in the world would be to answer that question with “whatever your boss tells you to do,” because that is at the heart of your new role. Different editors will have different needs, and follow different procedures, so it is important to tailor your work processes to meet the needs of the people you are volunteering to help.

Also, keep in mind, as a new slush reader you will more than likely have less latitude for independent action than you may some day achieve. If your new boss (with so many titles for various editorial positions, it’s hard to use anything beyond a catch-all term like ‘boss’) wants to see every submission that comes over the transom and just expects you to rate each one, then that’s what you’ll be doing. If he trusts your judgment enough to get rid of the obviously unsuitable stuff as soon as you see it, then you’ll do it that way instead. With every editorial team you’ll find a slightly different process, and it’s important that you realize immediately that your role is to give your editor exactly what he asks for.

The Good, the Bad, and the Absolutely Flippin’ Insane

You’ll learn a lot about your fellow man wading through the slush pile — or, at least, about that strange sub-species calling itself ‘writer.’ For every great story there are twenty good ones, for every good one there are a hundred mediocre ones . . . and the mediocre ones are far outnumbered by the bad ones. And then there is a special category all to itself — the manuscripts from crazy people — a segment for whom I hesitate to brandish any statistical estimates, as they tend to be far more memorable than they are common. But they are out there in abundance, so brace yourself to be amused, exasperated, and not, perhaps, more than a little bit scared, when you finally run across one.

The usefulness of thinking of all these stories as falling into broad categories is to get into the slush readers’ mindset of rapid assessment. Not every story is worth your time. I’ll say that again — not every story is worth your time. There is an old and rather pathetic trick dating from the time of purely hardcopy submissions that has the submitter turn a page in his manuscript upside down, or in some other way mark it, the idea being, of course, that in that way the submitter will be able to tell if an editor bothered to read that far in his manuscript. If you are under the mistaken impression that editors are supposed to be doing just that, then slap yourself hard across the face and come to your senses. Better now?

Give ‘Em a Page

You should be able to tell a lot about a manuscript in one paragraph, and certainly in one page. But if you tell most writers you give their submissions one page to catch your interest, they shudder in horror, wrongly assuming that they are being evaluated only on that page. But that isn’t how it works. With one page you can tell what sort of category your submission fits into — is it a possible great story, a mediocre story that could work with help, or the work of a possibly incarcerated lunatic? The point of such quick judgments is always a negative one — you don’t go ahead and declare your winners after one page, but the losers will stick out big time.

A good slush editor should be able to thin the slush pile in just this way, by separating manuscripts in minutes into the very broad categories of ‘maybe’ and ‘no way.’ You’d be surprised at just how many submissions — whether completely off-topic or badly written or offensive or crazy — can be culled with an efficient read-through of the first page, or even just the first paragraph. The test here is the search for basic competence — if the manuscript fails, move on.

Appropriateness, Prose, Narrative, Spark

That’s the easy part of evaluation, and can almost be done mechanically. The hard part is telling a great story from a good one, or deciding if a borderline story fits the theme you are looking for, or whether it’s worth working with a particular author on a rewrite. It’s quite likely that a beginning slush reader will not be making all these decisions, but often they are expected to pass on their recommendations to a higher-up, and should be able to judge for themselves what stories are worth investing in, and which ones are best cut lose.

Appropriateness is one of those things writers don’t think about enough, but that editors think about all the time. The truth is, sometimes it’s just bad luck that a good story does not make the cut because of factors completely outside the submitter’s control. A slush reader has to be aware of these factors, has to not only be able to judge if a story broadly meets the guidelines for their publication (such as those for genre, world count, theme, etc.) but also how well the story fits in the overall shape of the publication. Has a glut of one kind of story meant you are hungry for something different? Has an accidental theme for an issue developed that you now want to take advantage of by accepting similar stories? Has a trend in popular entertainment pointed you in an unexpected direction? Always the needs of the publication are of paramount importance, moreso than the quality of the story.

The way a story is written is often a quick give-away as to its overall competence, and it can also elevate a story above others in its class. While prose is never the sole basis of evaluating a piece (or, at least should not be) it is among the quickest to pick up. Poor grammar, constant misspelling, incorrect and imprecise word use are the hallmarks of a bad story — and the notion that these are purely mechanical surface characteristics and shouldn’t be held against the story itself is a false one. They are, in fact, indicators of an inability to write well and a lack of concern for the writer’s product — a clear red flag to an editor to expect little from the story itself.

Prose is like appropriateness however as, while all bad prose is just plain bad, there are lots of styles and textures of good (or merely competent, which in the world of slush reading can be considered ‘good’) writing. The goals of the publication dictate the style of the writing, and it is entirely likely that an editor may reject one of his best submissions if the prose does not match the overall aesthetic of the book or magazine he is assembling.

Narrative, in the way I am using it, is the story itself. It includes the bones of the piece, the setting, plot, and characterization, as well as theme and voice. This is the biggest, broadest, and most subjective category I’m using for this discussion — in fact it could quite easily be broken down and analyzed piece by piece, in a discussion of its own. I won’t be doing that, or even offering much in the way of concrete advice on just how to dissect narrative, but I will say that if you have what it takes to be a slush reader, and you take the time to read those submissions that have real potential attentively, then you should have no problem finding things like plot holes, unconvincing characterization, or inconsistencies of environment or usage. A big part of an editor’s job is in figuring out just how these story elements can be better, and it’s a skill that primarily comes from the broad experience of reading similar stories from published authors.

Finally, there’s the intangibles about a story that separate the truly great stuff from the ‘merely’ good or, more often than you might think, graduate a purely average story into the realms of the good. More instinctual than any of the above categories, finding spark in a story is a real clue that you, the editor, need to sit up and take notice. Such verisimilitude is genuinely described as rendering a story more than the sum of its parts, and it’s another area of ‘I’ll know it when I see it.’ Just make sure that, when you do see it, you pay utmost attention. Stories with an original and appealing voice or other persistent quality are the best of the best, the stories that get remembered by readers, and are worth whatever time investment you can make as an editor to get them in top shape — even if it means bending over backward to work closely with a writer in rewrites.

Business or Pleasure?

Volunteering to do the amateur press thing isn’t a business, and it isn’t a hobby, it’s in a nebulous gray area somewhere in between. Since it mirrors the actual world of publication, which is a real business, and can potentially morph into it, it’s expected that people act professionally when conducting their affairs. But, since it is staffed by volunteers, paid for with personal money, and primarily of interest to writers who do not make a living writing and of certain highly dedicated fans of a particular genre or style, the whole feels more like a hobby at times. And, like a hobby, it’s often the first thing set aside when real world issues of work and family interfere — only, unlike a hobby, it also feels a good deal like work, so much so that it isn’t the sort of thing one eagerly jumps into on the weekends to blow off some steam. What it comes down to, at the volunteer level, is a shared discipline of craft, and ‘discipline’ needs to be the byword in all your dealings.

In this case, when we talk about the need to be professional and the importance of professionalism, we are not talking about money. It’s about respect, about respecting the craft, the writer, and the work being done. Just as some beginning writers make the mistake of throwing temper-tantrum responses to an editor’s rejection email, so some editors make similar mistakes dealing with writers. At the end of the day, it isn’t about the person you are corresponding with or the issue being debated, but about the work. Respect the work — it is the only way anyone will ever take you seriously.

Stay on Top of the Pile

The real key to the actual process of reading and evaluating slush is organization. The slush pile is like a perpetually dripping tap poised over a bucket — with time the bucket steadily gets heavier and harder to pick up, and will eventually overflow and cause a mess. But if you empty the thing regularly, once a month, once a week, even once a day (!) you’ll find it only takes a little bit of your effort spread out over time. Staying on top of slush is the secret to having a successful stint as a slush reader — something that reflects well not only on you, but on the publication itself. Does anyone really think it takes nine months or a year to evaluate a submission? Or is it more likely that publications with these kinds of lengthy replies are ignoring their slush piles for long chunks of time — whether for reasons of overwork, or disinterest, or pure laziness it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the job isn’t being done, and no one is bothering to admit it and call for a temporary halt to submissions so they can tackle the problem. Their neglect has turned a hobby-level commitment into a major job of work, and it is no wonder they do not want to do it and keep putting it off for ‘one more week.’

Figure out what sort of commitment you can give your job as a slush editor, but realize it is easier to do in little pieces than to save up for big sessions. Reading a manuscript a day, or all your manuscripts over the weekend, will keep the pile in manageable portions.

Make a List, Check it Twice

Another part of being organized is having a master list. This is indispensable, and you shouldn’t try to approach the pile without one. As soon as you receive your submission take down the cogent details — author name, email and website address, story title, and the date. Have an area on your list that denotes whether the submission was rejected, or passed to your boss (or accepted, depending on how much control you have). Not only will this cut down on embarrassing mistakes such as lost manuscripts, it is invaluable in building contacts. Part of your job as editor is to spot and cultivate new talent — a list like this lets you remember potential authors and their stories, and will assist you in contacting them and keeping tabs on their career. You never know when you may wish to solicit someone for a story, or even ask to see a story you’ve rejected in the past if a new opportunity for that piece opens up.

Finally, having a list is a visual representation of your workload, and you can tell at a glance if your slush pile duties are getting away from you.

Naughty or Nice?

No one other than a sociopath actually enjoys giving rejections. However, dealing with writers can be tricky. Depending on your personality, you may be tempted to oversell your own enthusiasm for a story by sweetening a rejection too much — by taking great pains to point out this or that in the story to prove you read it, or lamenting the closeness of the decision for selection when this was not so. The two things you want to be are honest and tactful — if it is true that you found the story fantastic and were hopeful it would be accepted, then say it, but never lie about something like this to assuage your own sense of discomfort. If you cannot articulate with some precision your reasons for liking or disliking a piece it’s better to say nothing — for quite often an editor seizes on whatever reason seems plausible for rejecting a piece, where in fact the real reason is something more vague or fundamentally difficult to express (or for the writer to hear).

I am not, however, in the camp that thinks ‘brutally honest’ — generally a term that means deliberately rude — rejections are an editor’s right. While it may be true that many writers should not be wasting our time and theirs with incoherent and hopeless submissions, an editor that thinks it is somehow his duty to discourage them with ‘tough love’ is guilty of too much self-regard. It is not the editor’s role to judge a writer’s career on one submission, or presume for a moment that what they say will have any persuasive effect on the writer.

If you see talent, however, you should try to encourage it. While an editor’s power in this sphere is less than he would like to think, taking the time to give detailed personal critiques to writers that show genuine ability can lead to some of the greatest rewards of editing. It can also be frustrating when you take the time for a reasoned personal critique and are blown-off or argued with by the submitter. Pick your projects carefully, and don’t be surprised by whatever outcome. While it may seem a contradiction for me to say, on the one hand, that it isn’t an editor’s job to try to discourage writers and yet, on the other, to recommend that they encourage talent when they see it, it comes down to choice. If you choose to go beyond your editorial duties in an effort to help a writer that is commendable generosity — whether it blows up in your face or not. If you choose to go beyond your role as editor to deliver needlessly harsh or insulting criticism, that is an abuse of your position to gather ego-sacrifices to feed your own vanity. It’s only ‘tough love’ if neither party enjoys it, what some of the snarkier editors out there are really practicing is sadism.

Merry Christmas – You Suck

Rejections should be tactful and to the point — generally every press will have a form letter email you can use as the basis for yours. However much you decide to augment your rejection is up to you, though sending at least some form of a useful, personal response is a worthy goal. Getting a reputation for fairness and attentiveness by maintaining a good percentage of thoughtful personal responses will reflect well on the publication you are reading for, and it also means you are respecting the discipline of the craft. Often, time dictates that you cannot reply as fully as you wish, but resorting purely to form rejections, regardless of the quality of the submission, and at times when you can afford to invest in them but are too lazy to do so is, in my opinion, a sign that perhaps you should not be evaluating slush as your commitment to the task is on the wane.

Finally, don’t reject anyone on a holiday. Perhaps arbor day is acceptable, but most anything else is fairly inconsiderate. You may even decide certain days of the week are verboten — for example, I disliked sending rejections on Sunday or Monday, reasoning that the beginning of the week is hard enough without getting a big NO in the inbox. I was reluctant to ruin someone’s Friday for similar reasons. Obviously, these represent more my own quirks than some sort of rules of courtesy, but the important point is that you possessing the power of yea or nay over someone’s manuscript does not mean you are above showing them consideration and respect as human beings.

What Is All This Really About?

Slush reading will help you as a writer, especially as a beginning writer, probably in more ways than I can quantify. But it is also worth doing in and of itself — at least for a while — and the ‘other side of the fence’ perspective you gain will be at least as valuable and the contacts you make and the practical skills you acquire. But more than that it’s about stretching yourself to do something more, to get away from the writer’s tendency to be locked-up in his own head, and to start seeing the publication game as a larger phenomenon, and not just one writer’s struggle against the world. It can be a lot of work but, after all, it’s only through work that we achieve anything. In the end, a stint as slush reader could lead to greater editorial duties or open completely unexpected new avenues for you to explore, bring you new friends and get your name in front of valuable contacts, teach you some of the realities of publishing and let you be a part of a collaborative project, and, if you are lucky, you might just get the chance to help a few other writers achieve their own goals and look as good as possible while doing it.

• Get Thee to a Slush Pile, Part One
• Get Thee to a Slush Pile, Part Two

In part one of this article I talked about why a writer, especially a beginning writer of short fiction, should seriously consider looking for a position reading slush with a small press magazine or ezine. In this article I’ll look at ways someone with no contacts can go about looking for a volunteer position as slush reader.

Do note I say ‘volunteer,’ because if you think those readers of slush and junior editors in the world of small press publications are getting paid even a token amount you are sadly mistaken — especially at the entry level positions a first-time reader can aspire to. As meager as payment tends to be for writers at this level, it’s not so much as a dewdrop in the desert for slush readers of small press publications. The rewards of these positions are in learning your craft, building your contacts, and in being part of something larger that you believe in and want to help succeed.

Also, be aware that my experience with this is purely as a writer who has dabbled in editing, not as someone seeking to attain the higher echelons of that vocation. My advice is colored by this, and someone who is serious about pursuing editing as an end in itself, or even as a profession, should look elsewhere for information on that path.

All Hail the Internet

It used to be that the plucky young writer who wanted to make a good impression on an editor could maybe arrange for a face-to-face, walk-in meeting with said editor — somewhere in downtown Manhattan. Fortunately, the internet has leveled the playing field (and also changed it in enumerable other ways — like making a lot of small press publications and ezines possible in the first place), and it is now possible to make that first impression with a private message, email, blog comment, or forum post. This means editors are probably receiving a lot more of this kind of ’static’ than they once did, but how else is a gal in Nebraska supposed to impress upon a guy in New Jersey that she’d be an asset to his editorial team? The internet provides a thousand ways for the proactive writer to make the contacts she needs to thrive.

Is there a small press publisher or magazine you like to read? Are they established pros, or start-ups? Do they look like they are short on personnel? There is a lot to be found out from a publisher’s web site, many of which you can find by following links from Ralan’s or Duotrope, and most of those sites proudly list their editorial team and publishing history. Clearly, you want a fit with your interests and experience level, but don’t be afraid to aim high in your initial queries — the old saw ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained’ didn’t get to to be an old saw for nothing!

Get Your Name Out

So you’ve found a crop of publishers you are interested in, but the guys running it don’t know you from Adam. What do you do? Well, while it may seem a bit stalkerish, you could always start by googling them to find their homepages and online hang-outs. Simply leaving comments on their blog and participating in the same forum can give you a reason to interact with them, and means that you will longer be a complete stranger.

Now, on the surface of things this sounds rather creepy, chasing someone around the internet to ‘be their friend,’ and I’ll have to admit I haven’t yet done it myself so I couldn’t tell you if it actually feels creepy; but it is essentially just taking the accidental process I (and a lot of people) followed in our own haphazard ways and making it deliberate and planned. My own journey went something like this: researching fiction markets lead me to publisher’s websites, following links from those sites or google searches lead me to online forums, and interacting on the forums put me in touch with various editors and publishers in the small press without me really realizing I was making valuable contacts. But whether it’s a serendipitous process or a deliberate one, the result should be the same — meeting people that are good for you.

What does that mean? Well, just remember that ambition and sincerity are not mutually exclusive, that you can like and respect someone for who they are as well as value them as a contact that can further you own interests. In today’s world of instant communications and virtual friendships, pursuing this kind of social capital is as natural as it is beneficial; it’s called ‘networking’ and business types have been doing it for decades. And don’t be at all surprised if it leads to genuine friendships over the years — after all the people you meet through writing and editing will share many of your same passions.

No Experience? No Problem

It’s all well and good to get your name out and schmooze with these editor types, but what will you tell them when you do make first contact and you have absolutely zero experience with editing? That you are enthusiastic? That you like to read the same things they do? Actually, that’s not a bad start, so don’t ever dismiss the importance of being a fan — in fact the more widely read you are in whatever genre they publish in, the more valuable you can be to them, especially if you keep current on recent pro and amateur fiction markets. But what else can you do? How else do you get some skills and set yourself apart from the herd?

Critique

In part one of this article I mentioned the benefits of joining a critique group to get experience with ‘raw,’ that is unedited and straight from the writer’s fevered brain, manuscripts. A variety of online critique groups exist, some catering specifically to genre fiction (Critters is a popular free group, Forward Motion is another), and participating in these groups actually comes closer to the experience of reading slush than perhaps anything else, and is also a good way to flex those proofreading muscles. And, unlike face-to-face critiquing, online workshops are carried out the same way most editors handle their communication, through email, with all the pitfalls of etiquette that can entail. So it turns out online groups can also be a good rehearsal for sending polite, professional correspondence as an editor.

When you are looking for that editing position, being able to claim some months experience in a critique group not only makes you more desirable, but it should have taught you a great deal about reading manuscripts with a critical eye, budgeting your reading time, and dealing with authors. You can read more about those aspects of slush reading in the third part of this article.

Review

If you didn’t like books you wouldn’t be reading this, and you’d never think about doing something crazy with your time like critiquing fiction manuscripts for no pay to get a perspective on the submissions game. So why not review some? Not only does writing a good book review require many of the same skills that evaluating slush does — analyzing narrative elements and making judgments about a piece’s effectiveness — but it is also a concrete addition to your portfolio in a way critiquing is not. You can’t very well show your emails from your online workshop to a prospective boss, but you can link to your reviews on the web or send him a manuscript of reviews you’ve had in print.

There are a lot of places on the web that need book reviews, and many will even send you the books they want reviewed if you like. If you don’t want to start a book review blog like I did, have a look at SFReader as a showcase for your reviews.

Publish

Maybe it’s obvious, maybe it isn’t, but actually having published short fiction sends a message to an editor that you might at least know something about effective storytelling. While having publication credits is also a way to get yourself known to other editors — in fact if you’re well known enough they might love to have you on board to get that name of yours on the cover of an anthology — it is also a signal that you can craft a manuscript capable of swimming free of the slush pile. ‘Being able to do it’ often translates into ‘being able to recognize it when you see it,’ so having some publication credits is a great way to distinguish yourself.

First Contact

All of these areas mutually reinforce one another, as does most anything writing- or reading-related that you can think to turn into a asset. Don’t overlook your job experience and other ‘real world’ pursuits, either, when thinking about how to sell yourself to a prospective publisher. But once you’ve considered your selling points, and you’ve gotten your name out and know who you’d love to work with, how do you do approach them?

Just ask. Yes, it can be, and often is, that simple — it was for me when I got my first editing gig. Sure, if the press happens to have an open call for readers, or advertises some other lack in their personnel, that’s a clear invitation to contact them then and there. But that’s usually pretty rare. What isn’t rare is that most of these small presses are always looking for talent — and help — and an extra set of eyes is guaranteed to make their life easier.

In your initial approach draw upon what you have in common with the editor you are speaking with, express enthusiasm for their products (genuine enthusiasm — you are reading their publications, right? if not, back up and do so before you embarrass yourself), outline your skillset and interests, and be completely honest in stating that you are interested in learning the editorial ropes. That’s really it right there, there isn’t any secret way to contact someone that you don’t already know and have a professional or personal relationship with for a position like this.

Offer your services for whatever the editor has in mind — proofreading and copyediting are places he may want you to start before you read slush. Expect an evaluation period in which you make few decisions while the editors you report to get to know your capabilities and talents. In the third and final part of this article I’ll talk more about just what a slush reader is expected to do, and offer some tips for people new to that position that will save them making some of the mistakes I did when I first started doing it myself.

Above all, remember this is a position that requires serious commitment from you, so do not enter lightly into it and do not expect to get away with less time investment than you would give to your own writing week in and week out. If you aren’t prepared to do that, or cannot, for at least six months, then looking for a slush position is probably not for you.

• Get Thee to a Slush Pile, Part One
• Get Thee to a Slush Pile, Part Three