The Creative Writer's Survival Guide: Advice from an Unrepentant Novelist

The Slush Pile

92 The Slush Pile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anyone who wants to publish fiction should, if at all possible, intern at a magazine and read the slush pile. The slush pile refers to those stories/poems/essays sent to the magazine directly by the author and not through an agent; the author is usually unknown to the editors of the magazine, and the work itself hasn’t been requested. Nearly all of the work that a magazine receives constitutes the slush pile. It’s impossible to read a dozen or more short stories a day from a slush pile and not begin noticing flaws in your own work. I see this same phenomenon in the undergraduate workshops I teach. At the beginning of the semester, before students have read very much of their peers’ work, they will defend shoddy technique or express pleasure at heavy-​ handed plots, but by the end of the semester, after they’ve seen the shoddy techniques and heavy-​ handedness ad nauseam , they’ve grown both tired and suspicious of them. What happens , whenever you read fiction of varying quality in bulk, is that you begin to spot what I call default problems. By this, I mean that almost all writers utilize lazy language/techniques/structures at one point or another. The more experienced writers know it’s the default mode they’re writing in, and they’ll fix it during a revision. The inexperienced writers, even those who are otherwise well read, often don’t realize this because they haven’t been exposed to enough writing by inexperienced writers to realize the difference between what’s default mode and what’s original. For instance, cutting to a flashback too soon after the start of a story is a default structure. Some semesters , I’ll see this in 85 percent of the stories that are turned in. But how would you know this unless you’ve been reading hundreds of student stories or magazine submissions? When you read stories in bulk, it becomes clear that 50 percent or more of the work received is unpublishable. When I interned for a magazine, I read the manuscripts blind, meaning that I wouldn’t look at cover letters. Out of a hundred stories, half were either incompetent or entirely wrong for the magazine; the other half, with a fewexceptions, were competent but dull, familiar, or not quite ready. And then therewere two or three that stood out almost immediately. Those were the ones that made you sit up straight. Those were the Getting Published 93 ones that made you forget you were reading stories. Those were the onewhereyou’d find yourself on page twenty-​ fivewhen you thought you were on only page five or six. These are stories that weren’t written in default mode. However you slice it, interning for a magazine is useful. Sylvia Plath read the slush pile for Mademoiselle, as did Diane Johnson, who, in addition to her novels, co-​ wrote the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. As Sam Weller documents in The Bradbury Chronicles, an early Ray Bradbury story titled “Homecoming” was plucked out of the slush pile of Mademoiselle by a young office assistant . The magazine’s editor, unable to work the curious story into a regular issue, decided to build an entire October issue around the story and its “Halloween vampire family” theme. The publication of “Homecoming” was a milestone for Ray Bradbury, giving him that much-​ needed acceptance into the world of New York publishing. And who was the office assistant who had discovered the story in the first place? A young man named Truman Capote. So, you could do far worse things for your own writing, like sitting in a bar all day and talking about writing the Great American Novel, than interning for a magazine. The most common internships tend to be for college students. Graduate students frequently intern with literary journals housed by their English departments. Undergraduates are often eligible for magazine internships; information for these can usually be found on the magazine’s website. More and more frequently, magazines and journals like Zoetrope: All Story, which aren’t affiliated with a university, are using volunteer readers to sift through their slush piles. If you can’t find an internship, start your own magazine. Reading dozens of unsolicited manuscripts daily may prove to be the best education you can give yourself. ...