How to get published: an insider's guide

The question most asked by writers in query letters or in public forums about writing (such as at the recent Small Press Fair in New York) is: "What kind of material are you looking for?" When we respond with a simple answer--"The best we can find," or "Your best story," or "We like to be surprised"--those answers are often met with incredulous silence or, as recently happened, with an aggressive list of twenty "storylines" and the suggestion that we come clean and pick the one we were really after (such as a topical story about the 9/11 terrorist attack in New York).

Like most magazines, we receive more stories than we can handle from all kinds of writers (including agented and well-published authors) and the volume of submissions has threatened to swamp us. To be honest it has swamped us, but we are being rescued at the moment by a fresh group of volunteer readers who read the "slush" (unsolicited manuscripts).

Numerous "how to write" books detail the basic elements of the short story (plot, language, pace) and few towns in our land fail to offer courses on "creative writing" under various rubrics. There is no shortage of advice around and our lead story, "How to Write A Successful Short Story" by Leon Rooke, is a good place to begin. Beyond that, however, we offer up--free of charge--our insider's guide on what we look for by printing our secret recipe written many years ago by our long time associate editor, Nolan Miller, and given to our slush readers. Armed with this powerful tool and a copy of the Review you too can get published somewhere. What follows is the Antioch Review family recipe handed down over the generations:

What we're looking for is what is intriguing--difficult as it is to pin down just what that means. First of all, I think it's what I call "a voice." The writer has a way of getting to the reader without getting in the way of his/her characters or story. The manner as well as the method is appealing, as interesting and appealing as a person is who attracts our attention when met for the first time. That is, some people are immediately likable; we want to know them better, to enjoy their company more. They hold promise of delights to come. They make us anticipate pleasure to come. An element of surprise hovers. We don't know what to expect (what's predictable) but we like expecting. This produces a state of suspense, not only in the possible outcome of the story but in the continuing "surprise" of the writing, the fresh imagery, the variations of the sentences which, like dance steps, "lead" us into patterns and rhythm we follow in time to persuasive and melodious music. In the best sense, good writing is very much like music--the music the writer makes and the reader hears, not too predominantly, but subtly effecting guidance.

Too many of the stories we get are "told" rather than "made." By this I mean that in the telling (too much expository writing, too much descriptive writing) we are too aware of the writer at work. Like a stage hand, setting the scene. Like a lecturer instructing an audience. As a result, the reader is given no active role. No imagination leap is made into the "surrounds" of the story. The reader does not find himself/herself at the center but is "outside" simply listening to the writer, simply looking at what the writer is looking at.

We no longer live in the nineteenth century. We no longer "know" the world as George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackery knew it. We no longer "see" what they saw as they saw it--or even feel what they felt. Above all, we don't write as they wrote.

For almost all of the last century we have become more aware of the "individuation" of others. As few people look alike, it is quite possible to conjecture that few think alike, see the same reality we see. Paradoxically, the more we know about people (psychology, sociology, and other "new "sciences being still at work), the more we realize how enigmatic others are--even those we love, marry, give birth to if we are parents.

It would seem to me that fiction is always an exploration of this enigma. We may be seldom satisfied by whatever knowledge we have of others, but in fiction, most of all, that is essential--that we are satisfied in a short story or a novel that we have learned all there is to learn. We so easily gain comprehension in fiction because we are persuaded by the skillful writer that what they write is believed believed because they have made what they write believable. Not flatly what is but what could be, what might be, is the imagined; thus fiction stirs--and should stimulate--the imagination as nothing else does.

So be stirred and stirring.

Robert S. Fogarty

COPYRIGHT 2002 Antioch Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning