A Good Rant is a Wonderful Thing

Amber Sparks unleashes.

She's writing about the frustrations of the submission process. Namely the long response times that too often end in form rejections.

One thing Amber doesn't really get into: if you allow simultaneous submissions, how in the world are you finding the best stuff if it takes nine or more months to reply? Every story I've published has been accepted within four months of submission (with the exception of one unique circumstance). By taking so long to reply, aren't you asking for the best stories to be withdrawn before you get to them? I mean, if I've never withdrawn the story and you reject me after a year, you can be pretty sure the story has either been shoved into a drawer out of disgust with its quality or it's been seriously revised.

I totally understand the difficulty of reading huge numbers of submissions for no or nearly no pay. But Amber's post expresses the frustrations most of us feel at some point or another. Good stuff.

The Invasion of the Realists!!

Via Matt Bell, I came across this article from Context that claims neorealism has a stranglehold on major American literary journals and that experimentation, while often given lip-service, is fundamentally discouraged.

The author, Daniel Green, does note that things might be better on the web, so I won’t call him to task for missing such places of invention like Diagram or 5_trope or many of the other online journals publishing stories with voices a good deal outside traditional realism. I’ll even give him a pass for overlooking Unsaid and Monkeybicycle et. al. because his focus is so specifically on journals like Ploughshares and Gettysburg Review and others known for having stories regularly selected in the prominent yearly anthologies.

Given Green’s narrow focus, the question isn’t whether or not he’s right (he is right that those journals prefer realism and anthologies/awards like Pushcart fill their pages with predominantly traditional stories – although not always). The real question is: does it matter? While journals such as Paris Review may help a writer land an agent, how influential and representative are they really? Most successful writers I know don’t pick their style based on what’s winning awards. They come to their style based on their own peculiarities. And that style is often hard to categorize with easy labels like realism or experimentalism.

If realist-leaning prose is popular with many journal editors, I suppose that’s because realist writers have something vital to say about our current world. And if less realist writing is bubbling up from the Internet and newer journals, maybe that’s because, in our incredibly confusing world, those styles have something vital to say too.

I know I’m being all accepting here. But, generally, I reject the assumption that literature is stagnant if it’s not being wildly inventive. A good story is a good story. Maybe I’m missing the point. But despite the fact that none of us can make a living writing short fiction, it seems to me there are more venues available for publication than ever before. That should mean more opportunity for all kinds of fiction to find its audience.

Deep Sea Reading

Came across Squid Quarterly today. Their first issue was this summer and it’s great. All short shorts and prose poetry ranging from the more experimental to the more traditional. Lots of very lush writing. I particularly liked Michelle Nichols The Lament of the Fire Baton Twirler. But I read the whole journal in one sitting and am already looking forward to their next installment.

Check it out.

Editors Vs. Writers

Via PANK, The Review Review as a great post up by Don Lee, former editor of Ploughshares. He’s talking about the animosity that exists between writers and editors. One part that caught my eye:

What makes [editors] dispirited is the us-versus-them mentality that has developed between writers and editors, linked to accusations that they aren’t open to new writers or that the system is somehow rigged … a hard truth: a submission might be good, but not good enough. This is what writers have problems swallowing. After getting a rejection, instead of taking another look at the story or poem and perhaps revising it or spending a little more time thinking about the most suitable venue for it, it’s much easier to rail against these editors

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Good but not good enough. That’s a tough one for any writer to swallow. Obviously, in any good journal, good work will have to be rejected to make room for the really good work. But, as a lowly submitter, it’s so hard to know where that line is or even what criteria make up that line. It’s not like we sit down to write a story that’s just “good enough”. We try to write great stories. When they get tossed back, it’s hard to know exactly why.

I get the frustration. Hell, I feel the frustration. But what I don’t get is why some writers hate on editors (Lee describes some truly terrible behavior on the part of rejected writers). Sure, as Lee readily admits, some editors are idiots. But most aren’t. If a journal is good, the editors are probably good. And if the journal isn’t good, why do you want your work in there anyway?