EDITOR'S CORNER
Summertime, and the Readin' Is Easy
by Sharon Hurlbut
As a writer, the opportunity to serve as guest editor for flashquake's summer issue was a dream come true for me. Here was a chance to step behind the scenes and see the submission process from the other side. Even better, I would get a chance to be a part of that process. I set aside my own work and eagerly prepared to read each submission with care. I didn't realize my view of writing — and reading — would be profoundly affected.
Like most writers, I am a reader. I have been since childhood, when I sometimes avoided chores simply by being too engrossed in a book to put it down. Luckily, I had a library card and parents who thought reading was a perfectly legitimate excuse. Back then, I read anything and everything: from Ray Bradbury to Louisa May Alcott, from archaeology textbooks to Agatha Christie mysteries, from J.R.R. Tolkien to Leo Tolstoy. I read for the sheer pleasure of finding things out, or to journey to another world. I read because there were characters I recognized or creatures I could never have dreamed. I couldn't read fast enough to keep up with the line of books that beckoned from the library shelves, but I sure tried.
When I started writing my own fiction and poetry, I began to read in a different way. I waded through anthologies to see what was considered the current 'best' writing. I gathered literary magazines and stacked them by my bed, slogging through them cover to cover and taking notes on what kinds of stories they published, what types of poetry they favored, the length of work they preferred. I marveled at poems with perfect diction and rhythm. I lingered over prose that used language in wonderfully concise and breathtaking ways. All the while, I scribbled in margins and on post-it notes. I was studying how other writers write. But was I really reading?
Working on this issue of flashquake has given me an unexpected answer to that question. As an editor, I was certainly looking for good writing. It's never easy to reject a submission, but a piece riddled with grammatical errors, shoddy use of language, poor characterization, or a trite plot, is an automatic no. It's not hard to distinguish good writing from bad. The tricky part is in choosing a handful from among the good stories, poems, and essays.
And that is where I realized something I had almost forgotten in my drive to become a better writer: great writing is more than finely crafted words. It's storytelling. It's the sense of beauty and truth portrayed in "A Memory of Her Artist-Self" by Francis Masat. Or the bittersweet recognition of mortality in "Wild Berries" by Lisa Ohlen Harris. It's love — simple and complex, breaking the heart and filling it at the same time — in Deborah L. Siegel's "Streetlights or the Moon."
Good writing forges a connection between the reader and the writer. For a moment, our real world is suspended and replaced with the vision of another's eyes. I hadn't really forgotten this, just lost sight of it for a while. To be a reader is to let the story take you with it. I thank flashquake and all the wonderful writers featured in this issue for reminding me to be a reader. This issue is packed with terrific stories. Delve in, and see where they take you.
Sharon Hurlbut writes flash fiction and poetry because she loves the attention to language and conciseness that they require. The fact that she has two small children and rarely gets more than twenty minutes of uninterrupted writing time may also have something to do with it. Her work has appeared both online and in print under the pen-name Ann Walters.
Copyright 2006, Sharon Hurlbut