[I wrote this reflective essay for a fiction class. The assignment was to read a batch of submissions for my campus’s literary journal–alias Journal–and write a thousand words about the experience.]
Reading fiction submissions for Journal this semester was substantially different work than I had done with a literary journal before. As an undergraduate, I once served as the editor for a tiny campus publication, which accepted poetry and fiction from students: my duties were to select the least worst and then to clean up the inevitable grammatical and typographical errors. The level of writing that Journal receives was much higher than I was accustomed to, thus I no longer needed to consider the mechanics of the writing but could focus on its significance, that is, according to the Journal criteria, “character-driven stories that present unerring truths.” In my struggle to decide between two apparently good stories which to mark for a second read, I turned to Peter Lamarque’s essay, “Literature,” which defines literature as “fine writing of an imaginative/creative kind imbued with moral seriousness.” Therefore I judged the stories on the bases of being first well-written, then creative, then significant in terms of morality—or unerring, universal truth.
Some stories I disqualified on the grounds of poor writing. For instance, one author wrote several pages of solid dialogue without clearly differentiating the voices; another wrote in flowery prose and cluttered the story with excessive description. A few had elementary narrative problems, such as internal contradiction, and even punctuation mistakes. In these cases, the errors eclipsed the meaning or effect of the story. In addition to poor writing, I found many stories with poor structure: most of the stories that I did not pass on lacked a clear conflict presented in the first tenth of the story. Because of the limited number of words in a short story compared to a novel, it is important for authors to establish quickly who is risking what; stating immediately what the struggle and stakes are is a valuable technique for me to adopt. A story I recently read which established the risks effectively in its beginning was Katherine Anne Porter’s “María Conceptíon.” In the first two or three pages, the reader is introduced to the conflict, a love triangle, as well as to all the principle characters and to several themes that add nuance to the struggle.
The factor of creativity, I think, shows most clearly in the author’s construction of the story’s end. Arranging the end of a story to be both surprising and a logical result from the given evidence is one of the most difficult aspects of short story writing. It can be as simple as presenting something familiar in a new or unexpected way. As our class read in Charles Baxter’s Burning Down the House, the achievement of surprise stands balanced against the threat of expectation. While I was reading the Journal submissions, I found that stories whose characters suffered a lack of risk were also deficient in effective endings. The young man stood up to his father and his uncle, or the abused child grew up to be a social worker—these conclusions were not intrinsically bad, but they meant nothing more than what they were. When I was most interested in a character, she stood to lose something of concrete significance, but which was also representative of something larger. In Jean Toomer’s hybrid short story and closet drama “Kabnis,” the main character Ralph Kabnis dreams of becoming the voice of the south, but at the end of the narrative, loses both his voice and his dream. The inventiveness, the creativity of the story came into play with the ambiguous ending, for while Kabnis is a tragic figure, the final paragraph is a description of a sunrise. The surprising hopeful turn is what gives “Kabnis” an enigmatic, engrossing conclusion.
The third qualification of moral significance is necessarily the most elusive. Because the author must consciously select the most important actions and details, good stories have elements performing more than one function, such as using plot events carrying thematic weight or descriptions suggesting mood. Along these lines, indirection and implication are the tools of experienced authors who can trust their audiences to supply connections and actively interpret the prose. The degree that a story lends itself to interpretation is a good measure of its portrayal of unerring truths—not that every story should be an allegory, but there should be room within a story to consider the way that it comments upon what every reader has in common: humanity. A short story about a fifty-nine year old widow taking her first solo vacation since her husband’s death should also be about something more; but the submission that I read on this subject simply was not. The story was written artfully enough, but the change in the character signified nothing greater; on the basis of lack of universality, I did not recommend it for a second reading. “About a Burning Girl,” by Daniyal Mueenuddin, is about the judicial system in Pakistan, its susceptibility to bribes and its indifference towards real justice. Of course, this theme is not stated so baldly but becomes evident through the corrupt actions of the characters and their apathy toward uncovering the truth behind one woman’s death by burning. The reader must interpret for herself the greater truth behind the story, that mankind manipulates justice to serve its self-interest. This happens in Pakistan and wherever there are humans. This is unerring truth, this is universality.
I decided to select two stories for a second reading. One was broken into two sections, but the earlier events were told second, which gave the reader a different perspective on the chronologically later events. Another had a surprising ending in that the protagonist did not have an affair, though he wanted to, and his attitudes affected the success of the restaurant he was starting with his wife. Both of these stories were well-written, inventive, and significant. My experience reading for Journal was extremely useful, because as I was reading and thinking about the way that the submissions did or did not meet my criteria, I discovered a pattern of mistakes to avoid in my own writing. Thinking too about whether a story was publishable rather than merely entertaining or merely well-constructed encouraged me to assume that attitude when assessing my completed stories. Everything I read should be a lesson in writing. I will certainly continue to read for Journal.
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