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Just for a moment, imagine that you're an editor at a literary magazine. You've gone through almost 400 stories, essays, memoirs and poems in two months. Several stand out on the first read through. Quite a few are impressive, but have one or more flaws. There are some that are simply not a good fit with the type of writing flashquake is looking for.
Out of those nearly 400 stories, let's consider two.
A fiction submission about a pregnant woman being accosted by a man is a dramatic situation, but the writing is so bloated that it's difficult to tell if this is supposed to be a dream or reality. Poor spelling and errors of grammar and usage spoiled every paragraph.
A nonfiction submission about a woman who watches the evolution of graffiti on a wall as she takes her baby out for walks — you know the old cliché about watching paint dry? But the writing is smooth and elegant, and the story becomes more than what happens on that wall, it's about what can be inferred from it, how the imagination fills in the back story until the narrator is personally invested in the lives of those who paint the graffiti.
Which story do you go with? If you've read Jamie Pearson's lovely Love Writ Large, then you know the answer.
The writer of the fiction submission wrote a response to my rejection message — full of grammar and spelling errors — to tell me that what she'd written was true. She'd been attacked and stabbed and her attacker had never been found.
Her submission was not rejected because of the story. The problem was in the telling. She could not communicate a story she had lived — and obviously knew — in a coherent way.
This is one of the reasons that our guidelines place such importance upon grammar and spelling, and it's why we reject submissions that contain multiple errors. An exchange of information must be communicated in a common language that both the teller and the reader can understand. The common language is English.
But literature requires more than simple understanding. A well-told tale connects with something deeper in the reader. It's an emotional experience that appeals to the soul as well as the intellect. When a writer's work can evoke that, it's a beautiful thing.
A well-told story gets under the reader's skin, until the act of reading is as effortless and as automatic as breathing. The reader doesn't have to puzzle out what the writer is trying to say. Each sentence builds on the one before it, until it's built a home for its characters.
That's what elevates good stories to greatness. And those are the stories we want to publish.
I can't give you a formula for writing a well-told story. But I can tell you that the first step is to build a solid foundation by mastering the mechanics — grammar and spelling, tense, punctuation and subject/verb agreement.
Call it an investment. Every good writer seeks ways to improve. And it's a small price to pay for a chance at holding readers in the palm of your hand.
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