things i’ve learned as a slush reader

bettydays

in the past month, i’ve read over 200 submissions for the literary organizations i volunteer with, and i want to share some of the stuff i’ve learned about writing as a slush reader.

(a slush reader is someone who reads submissions, and either declines them or pushes them through for editors/judges to make a final decision on whether or not a story will be published.)

a rejection does not mean you are a bad writer or that you’ve written a bad story. it’s all chaos. there’s no rhyme or reason to any of it. i was chosen as a reader for these publications because my personal taste in literature jived with the editors. that’s all it comes down to – personal taste. if your taste doesn’t match the taste of the slush readers, you’re not going to get published. there is no way you can predict that, so all you can do is keep writing and keep submitting and hope your work aligns with someone who gets what you’re trying to do. that said, there are some across-the-board things that are worth noting:
your story should be doing some kind of Work. what is the intention of your piece? what are you trying to comment on, explore, or do? it doesn’t have to be concise or obvious or complex, it can be literally anything in any way, but if you’re writing something just for the sake of getting published, or to validate yourself, it’s going to be pretty obvious to readers. that is not to say that self-validating work is not valuable, or that a story cannot be both Doing Something and self-validating, but readers want to see that you have something to say, some work to do other than, “i want to be a good writer.”
readers will probably have made their decision by page 4. probably sooner than that depending on the quality of the writing. that means you have (if you’ve written in 12pt serif font and double-spaced, and please dear god, do these things unless you’re intentionally playing with form) about a thousand words to engage a reader. if you’ve written a short story, personal essay, or novel excerpt (sorry, cannot speak for poetry), this means your core conflict needs to have been introduced by this point and headed in some kind of direction. to put it more clearly: i need to know what’s going on. elusiveness is not your friend. i want to know: 1) who is the main character, and 2) what do they want? if you do not have these things established by page 4, your work might still be an early draft.

caveat being, of course, if you’re writing experimentally, in which case i hope you’ve submitted to an experimental publication. but there’s a big difference in good experimental vs bad experimental writing, and that is:

write with intention. intention is the difference between dancing alone in your bedroom and becoming a ballerina. both forms of dance might be good, you might be an innately talented dancer alone in your bedroom, but choreographed dancing takes discipline and practice. when it comes to writing, every sentence needs to be chosen to determine if it works for the piece. this is unfortunately one of the hardest parts about writing.
take risks. my least favorite stories are the ones that make me think, this has been done before. having to read hundreds of stories means repetition – i see the same themes over and over (white man feeling conflicted about cheating on his wife), the same writing styles (purple prose run-on sentences), the same characters (middle-class english teachers). i want to read words i don’t expect about stories i’ve never thought of. i want to see confidence in creativity. i want to see writing that acknowledges convention and destroys it for something better. show me newness, ingenuity, artistic expression. show me the stuff you’re afraid to write for fear of ridicule – that’s the stuff that gets published.
THE WORLD WANTS TO HEAR FROM FANFIC WRITERS. when i volunteered with one publication, the application involved a list of the last 15 novels i’d read. and i thought, i don’t want this gig if i can’t be brutally honest, so you bet your ass i put fanfic on there. i was accepted within a day. when i’ve told my writing mentors that i write fanfic, their faces have all lit up in excitement and they have a ton of questions. i cannot tell you how many submissions i’ve read where the interactions between characters feel stilted and normative, and all i’m looking for is the kind of dynamic tension and chemistry that fanfic authors have mastered. so if you write fanfic and don’t think you’re good enough to write “literature” i’m here to tell you, you absolutely are.