What Editors Want

As we continue to push towards getting Sleeping With The Material World published, it’s worth exploring what publishers are looking for. I recently stumbled across this interesting piece from Room editor Rachel Thompson about what an editor is looking for when she’s sifting through a slush pile of submissions. While the article specifically pertains to Room and short story submissions as opposed to long-form, I think it’s worth exploring some of her points, because, ultimately, writing is writing, and catching an editor’s eye is the name of the game.

“Writing that doesn’t begin at a critical moment upon which everything else hinges, or with an opening line that raises more questions than answers, is unlikely to hold my attention for long. You never quite appreciate in media res until you’ve read hundreds of submissions that languish in the beginning. If you’re writing narrative work, and you don’t open with an action or decision point, you’re going to lose me.”

This is an interesting point that I think I inherently understood – I love nothing more than a story that smacks me in the face. Old, dusty books that open with three paragraphs describing a tree in the front yard and the general weather patterns of the region tend to lose my interest pretty quick. Part of this is due to the shift in our culture toward instant gratification as we become an internet-driven culture and shift away from books altogether, but part of it is just that that stuff is…boring. I think that no matter what era I’d been raised in, I wouldn’t have had all that much time for that type of navel-gazing. We read stories to find out what happens. If nothing’s happening, it’s boring.

But while I inherently tend to gravitate towards action, that doesn’t mean that I always succeed in grabbing the reader. Specifically, Thompson highlights the five Ws (who/what/when/where/why). Reading that was like a light bulb going off in my head – because, duh. If the reader starts out by asking those questions, they’re going to keep reading until you’ve got them good and hooked. Once I read that point, I found myself going back over my short fiction pieces that are struggling through that gruelling submission process right now. Did my opening lines do enough to grab the reader and get them asking fundamental questions? Just for fun, here are the openers for four of those short stories:

1. The young boy pulls in fifty bucks during the first week of harvest but there’s more to life than money.
2. I always judge by how they hold their coffees.
3. A couple of days after the party, I spotted Jinay buying smokes at the gas station beside Long and McQuade.
4. The drugstore had a sign out front that bragged it had been open for 57 years but the windows were dusted over and no one had been in the store portion since forever.

Looking back, whether intentionally or not, I think I’ve done a reasonably good job of raising questions off the bat here. My favourite is probably the first one, because it raises a couple of big ones: just how young is this boy, where is he harvesting and exactly what more is there to life than money? The middle two hint at something and make you ask “who” or “what,” but they don’t necessarily raise multiple world-building questions the way that first one does. And the last one is probably the weakest of the lot because it essentially just does the boring description thing that I bashed a couple of paragraphs ago. (Note: I’m trying to analyze my own writing here, so it’s entirely possible that I’m way off base. This is more a moment of self-reflection than real analysis.)

Sleeping With The Material World isn’t a short story, so the parameters are a little bit different – we might have a few pages or a chapter to pull in an editor who has prepared him/herself to read a full-length book. But a grabby opening line certainly wouldn’t hurt. Our current opening line (which is not at all finalized) is as follows:

5. “6000 yen,” the lady behind the counter said. I thought the shirt cost six bucks.

I’d say that line is okay, but not great. We’re definitely wondering why she’s buying a shirt. We have a sense of the what, the where and who (shirt, Tokyo and Sarah). The when is unclear but doesn’t seem vitally important. So on the whole, I think this opening could be improved - if we could really get the reader invested in what’s happening and who Sarah is from the jump, that would be ideal.

While discussing why stories get rejected, Rachel later touches on something that got hammered into us in writing school, but that I still have trouble entirely wrapping my head around:

New writers just don’t have the experience to know how many drafts professional writers go through before publishing. (It’s more than most think, likely by a factor of ten.)

Ten drafts? That’s crazy! I still feel that way – but maybe that offers some insight into why I’ve struggled to get much fiction published. As I’ve grown as a writer, I’ve certainly begun to learn the value of extensive editing and revision, but I can definitively say that I’ve never rewritten the same story ten times from scratch. But when I scratch the surface, I realize there is truth to the notion that a story improves the more you rewrite it. If we take Sarah’s original manuscript as draft 1 and my long-form outline and rewrite as draft 2 and 3, then the revisions quickly begin to pile up. I don’t think there’s any doubt that there will be another full rewrite before the final polished copy reaches the public at large. But whatever the expected final revision number, the most important point to take from this is that there will be a revision number.

Thompson also makes one last point I think is worth considering:

I’m totally over the idea that if my writing doesn’t make it into an issue of a magazine, it means they think my work is no good.

This is both good and bad – good because it means that all oft-rejected writers like me shouldn’t hang their heads too much, but bad because it drives home how hard it can be to really get some great work published. Even if we think Sleeping With the Material World is eminently publishable, finding a publisher that has the exact need for this type of book and the time to work on it is certain to present a major challenge. Fighting through the submission process is half the battle, it seems.

-Simon