'How do I get my stories to the so-good-they-can't-ignore-you stage?'
When you believe in your stories, but the magazines you love don't seem to
Hello friends! 🍵🧥
Are you keeping safe? For those in non-tropical countries: are you keeping warm? The weather suddenly dropped here in the Bay Area; in a few days I went from wearing shorts to wearing a beanie and jeans while walking my dog in the park. I am not malamigin (“one who gets cold easily”), so this is slightly concerning.
Much more concerning, though, are the typhoons currently affecting the Philippines. My friend Ken shared the following:
Twitter has pretty good translations, but I want to highlight that last section: Many will say we are “waterproof” and “resilient.” Let’s open our eyes: this isn’t normal. This isn’t just. This is due to our climate crisis.
The climate crisis is driven in a massive way by the actions of larger, wealthier countries, including the US—so when voting for government officials here, please choose those who take environmental and climate issues seriously. And thank you to everyone who voted in the presidential election! I’m happy and relieved with the results, but still feel like I’m reassembling my brain after last week. Of course, there’s still plenty of work to be done.
For those of you who want to help the Philippines directly:
Thank you, as always, for hearing me out.
Moving onto the newsletter proper…today is our first ✨ reader letter! ✨ I’m unduly excited. It was a response to my request for short-fiction related questions. I asked the writer’s permission to share it, because I think the answer might help others. If you have a question yourself, you can submit anonymously here.
I have written a handful of short stories that I think are good, that have gotten me into prestigious workshops, and that successful writers think are good. I have no publications and I mostly get form rejections. I know that the market is tough across the board, but I also get the feeling that my stories are weird in the wrong way for genre mags. (They're driven by theme and form, rather than plot and character.) I really BELIEVE in my short-story instincts but I'm starting to get the feeling that genre mags never will. I want to get my stories to the so-good-they-can't-ignore-you stage, but I'm struggling to figure out how, because most revision advice is geared towards plot/character oriented stories. So.... how do you figure out how to write in the best version of your own voice, when your own voice is weird?
(I am definitely going to keep at it, btw, and will of course go to lit mags next. But I LOVE genre, and I want to be published in genre mags.)
Dear 🍵,
I’m reading a number of different questions in this, and I’ll be answering them separately as they have implications for your approach, going forward.
One of the questions is about where your stories fit, in terms of publication. You’ve been submitting to genre magazines because you love genre, so you want your stories to appear in those same pages. At the same time, you feel that your stories “are weird in the wrong way for genre mags;” you have a lot of faith in your own work, but are starting to feel that the genre mags may never “get” your stories.
My kneejerk reaction upon reading this was: don’t self reject! It’s the editor’s job to do that! Generally this is my key submission advice. I’ve given a lecture at the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers on short story subs three times now, and I always share how I once read more than a hundred stories for Interfictions slush in one month. The slush was very strong; I picked about ten that I thought were great, and four of them I advocated really hard for.
Guess how many of those four ultimately got published?
Zero. There were several other slush readers too, and it just so happened that the stories they advanced where the ones the editors liked better. (We only had about four slots, too, if I remember right.) I was gutted, of course, but one thing I emphasize in this story is that over the next several years I did see most of the stories I loved end up in other publications.
But you already know this. As you say, the market is tough across the board. So I know you’re not self-rejecting, and in fact are submitting to these dream markets. But it feels like a brick wall, and the form rejections don’t give you any helpful clues. What can you do differently? Your stories are strong, and readers respond to them, as evidenced by the workshop acceptances and approval from other writers. So could this be a case where your stories really don’t fit the publications you love?
One way to answer this is to ask, as objectively as you can: does this magazine publish any stories that are like yours? Do they have stories that are more theme-driven? Do they allow for formal experiments? Does the editor indicate, through their publication choices, that they’re open to the kind of work you’re writing?
It’s prudent to study where your work might be a better fit. When I started out submitting short fiction, I read a few issues from each genre market I was interested in. I developed a hypothesis around certain editors’ tastes. It’s tough with some markets—Tor.com has multiple editors and thus can’t easily be classified—but for most, you can get a sense of what they prefer. A Clarkesworld story is different than a Shimmer story; when CC Finlay took over F&SF, the stories he accepted differed from what Gordon van Gelder published. (And F&SF is now getting a new editor—so I’m not sure how that change will be reflected, editorially. But certainly I’m excited for it!) I kept this in mind when deciding where to send my work. Of course, because there are so few genre magazines, I did have some stories that I sent out nearly everywhere, sometimes even if I suspected they didn’t match the editor’s tastes. Unsurprisingly, that almost never worked.
Not self rejecting is important, but the truth is, there is diligence you have to do as a writer: finding the right home for your work, the places where it can have the best shot. I don’t want you to compromise what you love about your stories, and the elements you believe in, to “fit” genre magazines. If literary publications publish more of what you’re writing, then maybe that is the right home for them.
Which brings us back to your main question: how do you figure out how to write in the best version of your own voice, when your own voice is weird? How do you get your stories to the “so-good-they-can't-ignore-you stage?” How can you revise your stories to publication quality, when advice is often oriented towards plot and character, and that’s not what drives your stories?
I’m not sure I have a ready answer for this, but one idea came to mind, from the recent Garth Greenwell workshops that I attended. Towards the end of that first session, where we’d done a deep dive on how the elements of a sentence can evoke style, Garth said something akin to the following (I was taking notes as I went along, so this isn’t exact):
[When it comes to writing,] we can never know the value of what we’ve done. Is what we’ve done right, or wrong? The only meaningful value we have is answering: does this particular order of words, sentence, diction, image, give me pleasure? A very difficult, complicated, sense of pleasure…does it feel right?
What it means for a writer to be educated is to have done the work, to steep one’s self in various traditions of art-making…to develop a sensibility such that that pleasure is meaningful knowledge and points us in the right direction.
I’ve come back to this repeatedly as I work through my current draft. If you’re writing towards pleasure—your own, specific pleasure in what a story can do—that’s the most important thing. And it doesn’t need to be entirely a black box, either. You can study what creates that sense of pleasure for you, in your own writing, and the writing of others—including the stories in the genre magazines that you love.
From your letter, it seems clear that theme and form are drivers for you. These are the story-elements that give you an electric charge, that excite you. They’re what wakes you up as a storyteller. This might be true for you as a reader, too. Having this self-knowledge is incredibly useful. The next step, then, is to ask: how do your favorite stories achieve the effects you like? What are they doing on a sentence or story level that you’re drawn to? How are you doing this in your own work? To go back to Garth’s barometer: where, in the stories you’ve written, do you experience the most pleasure?
If you’re able to inspect these elements, then you can figure out what you need to revise towards, or play up more. For example, while considering these questions for my own writing, I realized that I love sharp, personal character observation. In their writing, my favorite authors achieve this through specific devices like dialogue, gesture, description, and telling (which I love). All of these contribute to the voice in a piece. Consider these examples:
Gesture (and interior thought)
I found myself grinning—the complete opposite of what I wanted my face to do. Scornful and stern, I told myself. Scornful and stern. Not sheepish…
from Mr. Fox, by Helen Oyeyemi
Dialogue (and simile)
“I’ll let you sleep now.” Spoken like an attentive nurse.
On his way out he said, “I’ll stick around,” the way people might say, I’ll leave the light on for you. “Be good.”
from Call Me By Your Name, by Andre Aciman
Description and telling (and again, simile)
This bandit did not look like anyone’s brother. His chief characteristic, and what made everyone fall silent for an unintended moment, was his extreme beauty. His skin was as pure as jade; his eyes and eyebrows were like ink; his dark hair, bound in a queue, was like silk; and his face was like the full moon among clouds.
from The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected In Water, by Zen Cho
Reading and learning from others is what I do when I’m stuck. (Not pictured here: the many, many fanfics I return to, that are utterly amazing at character work.) (Also not pictured here: my rage, self-loathing, and cloudy mood, when indeed I’m stuck.)
I don’t think you can (or should be) overly conscious of these things while writing, but if you deliberately observe how it’s done by others, you can bring some of that awareness to your own work. It might help dislodge this feeling of not being able to break past a wall or get to the next level. Be specific about what you can do to strengthen your work, and then make those attempts.
A unique voice, a weird voice, is something to embrace. And the things you love in writing likely won’t betray you. If your writing-heart doesn’t care that much about plot or character, that’s fine! Write what lights you on fire. Just keep in mind that as someone seeking publication, part of your job is to try and find the publications where the editor’s tastes and sensibilities seem to resonate with yours.
Good luck! The fact that you are definitely going to keep at it gives me great certainty that it will ultimately work out. ❤️
News and things
I’ll be joining a session of FutureTalk on November 29 (Sunday), on the theme of Future Currents: Philippines and Singapore. It’ll be 8pm Manila time, which is tough for US-based folks, but the panel should be available on YouTube after. I’ll share a link once it’s available. I’m super excited to speak with fellow Southeast Asian authors; in the meantime, you can check out FutureCon’s YouTube channel!
I do not have new book news, but now would be a very good time to support your local bookstores, ahead of the holiday rush! If you would like to pre-order my collection (it comes out February 9!) you can find it at a nearby indie on Indiebound; you can also get it on Bookshop.
Thanks as always for reading! If you liked this post, feel free to share it with others, or sign up if you haven’t yet. I hope you continue to embrace and nurture your unique writing voices!