On Submissions

The more I look at possible venues for my stories, the more conscious I am of genres - and what "sells." I use two different platforms to screen possible publishers and to keep track of what I've submitted, and where. The site Duotrope has been especially useful. They list literally thousands of journals and magazines, both online and print, as well as agents who might be open to reading works by unknown authors. It also provides tools to help you screen magazines for suitability, so you don't waste time and money sending off your stuff to a place that would never consider it.

One of the most important considerations is length, and as a teacher, I acknowledge the importance of word count. If I assign a major paper, I expect more than a couple of paragraphs. But in the literary magazine world, the opposite seems to hold true. Nearly every publication will accept "flash fiction": works of 1000 words or less. That may seem like a good deal to one of my students writing a paper on King Lear, for instance, but when writing for a publication, it is exactly that: a flash. No more.

To some degree, I understand the popularity of flash fiction. Nobody has any time (or so they claim). People have gotten used to bytes, which, I suspect, accounts for the unpopularity of print news. It's too long. And then, too, I realize that not all short-short fiction is necessarily inferior. I think in particular of two Hemingway stories I have taught: "The Old Man at the Bridge" and "The End of Something." Both of these are complex, profound, and moving. And it's a challenge, too, to write something that is both short and effective. Faulkner pointed out that unlike the novel, short fiction leaves no margin for error. Every word must be perfect. (Perhaps that's why Faulkner used so many of them: he wanted to be sure that the right word was in there, somewhere.)

But I'll always remember what my graduate school advisor once told me, when talking about the length of a particular assignment: "Brevity is the soul of wit, but nobody wants a half-wit." While little snippets of narrative might be momentarily entertaining, it doesn't seem to me that it would be particularly lasting. Like a small snack. Or cotton candy: you take a big mouthful, and it's kind of sweet, but dissolves into nothing. It's not filling. Let alone nourishing.

Most of my stories run 5000 to 6000 words. That's upwards of twenty pages, as submissions go. Several are longer. I find that too often I've given short shrift to something that needs to be developed. I may even be describing a scene that may be familiar to someone - a walk through the woods in early Summer, say - but it's important that my reader see those woods, and feel that Summer day, just as my character does. I can't skimp. Not to say that I need to go on forever, spending two or three pages on the significance of the raising of an eyebrow, as Henry James does at one point in The Golden Bowl. Or Faulkner describing the quality of the dust kicked up by a buckboard in Absalom, Absalom. But I owe it to my characters, and to my readers, too, to give them a really fulfilling experience. Something more than a quick snack. (Speaking of bytes).

Duotrope will also screen for style and genre. Does the magazine print science fiction? Fantasy? Gothic? Horror? Mystery? Western? Western mystery? Fantasy horror? Gothic western fantasy mystery? And style: Is your piece mainstream, or transgressive? Dark or quirky? Experimental, humorous, or literary? And that's before we get to the matter of length. Though I admit, it's pointless to submit your horror slasher thriller story to a place that leans towards painfully sincere reflections on the beauty of nature.

Why go into all this? Aside from just venting, it's made me consider my stories from an editor's viewpoint. I need at least 3000 words, usually more, to tell a story well, and that cuts me out of a large portion of the market. I don't do fantasy or sci-fi or horror, and that, too, is a conscious choice that limits me. Just as I don't do flash fiction. A couple of my pieces are about 10000 words or longer, which is actually out of the "short story" category. Those will have to wait, I guess, until a journal that specializes in long short fiction picks them up.

I sent a draft of one of my recent efforts to a friend of mine. It's a creepy story, based on an ancient Scots ballad, as if a story of murder and betrayal and forbidden lust was brought back to life. John didn't care for it. He doesn't like gothic romance.

I'd never seen the story quite that way, but I get his point. It's really dark, and there are gothic overtones. What do to? I could rewrite it, but I don't think I will. I'm not going to change my stories just to suit people's taste. I'm sure that my friend John understands that. So I've used Duotrope to search out magazines my strange cross-genre tale, in hopes that it'll find a home. It's called "The Rolling of the Stones," by the way.

I'll let everyone know when it appears.