Judging stories

I recently finished a stint as one of several first-readers for a literary journal's fiction contest. I had a stack of 50 stories to read, which I had to whittle down to a top five that were sent on to the final judge(s). This was my first time on the other side of a literary journal, reading submissions instead of writing them, and though I was initially alarmed at what I foresaw as an agonizing slog of painful decision-making, it turned out to be easier than I thought.

There were a number of stories I set aside right at the beginning:

Genre stories: types of stories not published by the magazine in question, e.g. fantasy, horror, science fiction ---- I was surprised by how many of these there were. Probably at least a fifth of the pile I had, maybe more. Many of these were well-written, but didn't establish any kind of specialness outside of the traditions they were working in.

Stories with almost nothing at stake, e.g. twenty pages of how to get a kid to eat his vegetables. Ones that were boring from the first page. Again, many were technically well-written.

I was also surprised by the number of stories about someone on his/her deathbed, looking back on a life (a potential variation of nothing at stake, in a way, if there's no present conflict or narrative line through the reminiscences) or set in 50s-style small towns (nothing wrong with this -- I was just taken aback by how many there were).

At the end of this process of removal, my pile of still-viable stories was significantly smaller, and finally there were a few hard decisions, after all. But not as hard as I expected.

I don't know if I'll ever get the opportunity to try this experiment, but I think I could have sorted the stories into three piles (Yes, Maybe, and No) based on the titles and first sentences alone ---- and the piles would not have looked very different from the ones I ended up with after reading all of the stories. Well, perhaps the Maybe pile would be bigger if my selections were based on just the first sentence. But the No pile would be the same, I'm sure of it.

All in all, it reminded me that the short story is a difficult animal. It is not enough to be a good writer to win a story contest. You need to read a lot of short stories and try to understand how they work. And it REALLY helps if you read previous issues of whatever magazine you're trying to publish in. (Until this experience, I could never understand why so many writing resources harped on this point.)

In the course of reading the submissions, I happened upon this blog post on How Not To Write a Story (written by a writer judging a story contest) and it was an eerie echo of many of the things I saw. Good advice.

The most exciting part of the process, though, was finding the gems and being surprised by where they took me. All the best stories were surprising.

Internet: dream research tool or bottomless pit of time-wasting?

When I was a kid and my favourite books were Anne of Green Gables and A Little Princess (published in 1908 and 1905 respectively, though written and likely set earlier), one of my main concerns about being a writer was how I was going to be able to find out all the necessary historical details to avoid glaring anachronisms in (what I assumed would be) my many thrilling orphan adventure tales. I imagined myself poring over piles of gigantic Encyclopedia Britannica volumes, looking up entries on "pavement" and "electric lighting" and copying down pertinent dates in a little notebook and generally finding the whole thing a big drag.

Thanks to the internet, my now-important fictional reference questions like, "What year did that Tanto Tempo album by Bebel Gilberto come out?" (2000) or "What does burning hair look like?" (see approximately 3,000 YouTube videos by drunk girls) are just a couple of joyous clicks away. But I'm starting to wonder if these little licensed surf-breaks aren't seriously cutting into my writing productivity after reading a short article by Cory Doctorow on "Writing in the Age of Distraction." He has lots of great tips (go read it), a number of which I already follow, but also this doozy:

Don't research

"...That way lies distraction — an endless click-trance that will turn your 20 minutes of composing into a half-day's idyll through the web. Instead, do what journalists do: type "TK" where your fact should go, as in "The Brooklyn bridge, all TK feet of it, sailed into the air like a kite." "TK" appears in very few English words (the one I get tripped up on is "Atkins") so a quick search through your document for "TK" will tell you whether you have any fact-checking to do afterwards. And your editor and copyeditor will recognize it if you miss it and bring it to your attention...."

So there you have it. Just TK. No writing-mandated surf sessions. I think I'm going to try it soon and see how it goes. I do sometimes use blanks for fact-checking if I'm on a roll, but I've never tried avoiding research with any kind of rigour. I know that I could just (*gasp*) turn the internet off, but that seems horribly extreme, doesn't it?