For someone with such a slim publication history*, I sure have a lot of suggestions about what new writers should do. Most of them are probably either wrong or impossible to articulate, but there’s one I’ll live or die by: start working at a literary magazine. It would be best to nail down a position at a small but up-and-coming online literary journal with a young, committed staff based out of a literary club in Bophal, India, but Inklette’s not hiring right now and I’m sure as hell not giving up my position.
I had no idea what I was getting into when I applied as a prose editor for Inklette. I was high off the writerly rush of attending the Iowa Young Writer’s Studio (one of the highlights of my life, by the way), so when I saw on Facebook that some girl from India I’d only met in passing at the IYWS was starting a literary magazine, I shot off an application for the prose editor position with unqualified arrogance. Hopefully they deleted the staff applications, because I can remember just enough of mine to know that it was something I’d want wiped from the earth. To the question “What makes good writing?” I replied with something in the vein of, “You know, do whatever you want, just so long as you have a good time.”
By some clerical error or fluke, they let me on their supremely talented staff. And, with little preparation, I was hit with a flood of submissions and tasked with voicing my opinion on what was good writing and what was bad (a situation in which having a working definition of what made writing good would really have helped).
Most people, myself included, only read from the tiny selection of books that have made it to the top despite all odds, the ones from big name authors signed on with major publishing houses or with enough historical merit to be reprinted through the ages. You read so much that’s polished so everything flows together and makes logical sense that it seems like high quality writing is some infinite resource. Wading into the strange, messy world of what people who aren’t the handful of popular authors write was a real shock to the system. It was hard enough to kill my instinct to cringe at every grammar mistake, and even after I got over that there was the matter of parsing out unfamiliar cultural references (with many of our submitters being from India, I googled enough new terms that I eventually developed a small and hyper-specific vocabulary in Hindi). Over seven issues and three years, I’ve read 643 submission. In doing so, I realized how the diverse the writing world is, not only geographically (we’ve gotten submissions from every continent except Antarctica**, and I’m hoping we’ll fix that with issue seven), but in terms of genre too. People have submitted literary fiction, science fiction, fan fiction, fiction that I would be able to put in a category if I had any clue what it meant, hard journalism, scholarly essays, extended screeds against millennials, extended screeds against word limits in literary magazines, extended screeds against nothing in particular, some kind of writing I’d never heard of called a dervish essay, and an graciously minimal amount of pornography. Even though most of it ended up rejected, there was at least a thread of beauty in almost all of it (well, except for the screeds and porn).
Being faced with an onslaught of submissions forced me to make firm claims about what made fiction good or bad, and the other editors forced me to reconsider those claims over and over again. When our votes conflicted and I looked over the piece again, I almost always found the essential flaw or subtle nuance that they thought made the piece worth an up or down vote***. It forced me to constantly reconsider my opinions about writing, and inevitably that spilled over to my own work, where I started recognizing problems I didn’t know I’d been making or experimenting with styles I would have never considered.
A couple days ago we opened submissions for issue seven. If you want to submit, there’s no cost and you can do it easily and for free here. But if you want to really grow as a writer, I suggest you click around for literary magazines looking for editors or readers. Or go ahead and start your own, it takes maybe five minutes to get a website set up, and that’s really all you need. Throwing yourself into the bizarre collection of submissions most magazines get will be sort of like jumping into toxic waste in a comic book: it will be overwhelming and strange and totally immersive, but you’ll emerge with superpowers. Or at least some decent pretensions at having learned a thing or two about writing.
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*It’s basically just this blog, a couple short stories I can’t stand to look at, and thirty seven issues of an underground satirical newspaper (and that’s stretching the definition of “publication,” my distribution method was printing out a bunch of copies at Kinkos and handing them out at my high school).
** Quick generalizations about the writing styles of each country based on their submissions: United States: angsty and entirely centered on young couples; India: more sentimental that most things I read, but in a good way; England: incoherent; Ireland: quirky, usually in a good way but sometimes cutting it a little close to their fellows in the British Isles.
*** Small side note here: I’m generally opposed to the idea that internet friends count as real friends, but I make an exception for people I meet through Inklette, mostly because I think you reveal yourself to the level of friendship in discussing literature. Then again, it’s probably because that’s the only online medium I interact with much anyway.
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