Jeremiah Tolbert

At least in the sci­ence fic­tion com­mu­nity, there’s a lot of false com­mu­nity wis­dom float­ing around about the edi­to­r­ial process.  Some of them may have been true once.  Some were prob­a­bly invented to mess with the heads of noobs.   Some of them are care­fully nutured lies, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.   Well, no longer.  I’m here to tell you the truth, no mat­ter how ugly it may be.

LIE #1:   Editors give every story fair con­sid­er­a­tion. OR:  Editors reject sto­ries with­out read­ing them at all.

The truth is, the slush is deep, and it’s rarely an editor’s favorite part of the job.  Why do you think so many places have slush readers?

Every story doesn’t get fair con­sid­er­a­tion.  Not every story deserves it.  If you can’t be both­ered to read the sub­mis­sion guide­lines and fol­low them, it’s an easy rejec­tion.  If you have five gram­mar and spelling mis­takes in the first two para­graphs, it’s an easy rejec­tion.    If it’s a story about vam­pires, and I hate vam­pire sto­ries, it’s mostly an easy rejection.

Most sto­ries get at least a page out of me. Then I skip to the last 3 para­graphs, if I’m feel­ing gen­er­ous.   Some get less.   Some work is so obvi­ously bad that it’s star­tlingly easy to know it’s not going to work.  But every story gets looked at.  Nothing ever gets rejected with­out being par­tially read.  Honest.

LIE #2:  Editors never reject a good story.

I rejected plenty of really good sto­ries at the Fortean Bureau.   I’ve even rejected a cou­ple at Escape Pod.  The rea­son is pretty sim­ple: edi­to­r­ial vision or scope.   The Fortean Bureau was look­ing for a par­tic­u­lar kind of story.  Your space opera, no mat­ter how good, was never going to appear there.  Likewise, we don’t accept hor­ror or fan­tasy at Escape Pod.   If the story is good, and sucks me in, I will rec­om­mend send­ing it over to the other editors.

Stories get rejected for being too long, too short, too sim­il­iar to another story the edi­tor has already bought… there are as many rea­sons for rejec­tion as there are sto­ries.  And not all of them involve you mak­ing mis­takes.  There are aspects of the process that a writer can­not con­trol.  Best to just relax about it.

LIE #3:  Editors don’t fos­ter new writ­ers like they did in the old days, and don’t care about new talent.

John W. Campbell was a med­dle­some bas­tard who sent his writ­ers spe­cific ideas for sto­ries.  He was not what you call a “hands off” kind of edi­tor.  He wrote his fair share of sto­ries, and some of the tales I’ve heard about him make me think that he was often think­ing as a writer as much as he was an edi­tor.  He wasn’t afraid to rewrite some­one else’s story.

For what­ever biz­zare rea­son, some peo­ple wish edi­tors would take that level of inter­est in their work, and  they lament that edi­tors no longer fos­ter new writ­ers, giv­ing them the kind of con­struc­tive crit­i­cism that leads to their per­sonal growth.  Everything for writ­ers was just won­der­ful back then but these edi­tors today are jerks!

Not true.  Campbell may have had time to do this with a larger per­cent­age of his sub­mis­sions, but the field was smaller then.  Today, there are tens of thou­sands of writ­ers all try­ing to break in to the same pub­li­ca­tions.  We sim­ply don’t have time to give per­sonal feed­back to each sub­mis­sion.  These days, some­times the best you get is an encour­ag­ing rejec­tion.  My first came from Stanley Schmidt: “I like your writ­ing, so I hope you will send more in the future.”  Not very spe­cific, but it does the trick.  It tells you that you’re on the right track.

As much as I give Gordon van Gelder a hard time for his oppo­si­tion to online media, the man writes a very suc­cinct and help­ful rejec­tion let­ter.     Even the form let­ters have a sys­tem to them to help you fig­ure out why the story was rejected.  I always simul­ta­ne­ously feared and looked for­ward to his short notes.

Editors do build a sta­ble of writ­ers.  The rea­son most peo­ple don’t see it is because by the time you come along, the edi­tor has already estab­lished a group of authors he or she can count on.  But short story writ­ers in par­tic­u­lar are always going on to write nov­els, so open­ings do occur from time to time.

If you really want feed­back on your work, join a work­shop or cri­tique cir­cle.  It’s not the editor’s job to help you become a bet­ter writer.  Sometimes, we’re help­ful, but we can’t do it for everyone.

LIE #4:  Editors are peo­ple too.

“Editors are just like us.”  No, we’re not. You don’t have a nev­erend­ing stream of bad writ­ing com­ing at you day in, day out.    You get to read for plea­sure, select­ing mate­r­ial that has been through at least one fil­ter.  Whereas you turn on the tap and get a stream of nice drink­able water,  we put our mouths to a sewer pipe and hope to get at least one swal­low that won’t give us rag­ing diarrhea.

I know the sen­ti­ment of the phrase is meant to imply that we’re not god­like arbiters of taste, mak­ing and break­ing careers on a whim.    But edi­tors do wield power.  And it changes us.  Generally it makes us ill-​​tempered and eas­ily dis­tracted by shiny objects.    I’ve yet to feel god­like, but I’m not rul­ing out the pos­si­bil­ity.  Maybe when some­thing I’ve pub­lished wins a Hugo, I will ascend to Asgard.

LIE #5:  Editors (and crit­ics) are failed writers.

As a rule, no.  A lot of us are mod­er­ately suc­cess­ful writ­ers.   Some of us have never wanted to write and never will.  There are a few who have started out as writ­ers and given it up for the editing/​publishing game (Gordon, I think), but not all of us have.

We’re not dri­ven to become edi­tors out of bit­ter­ness.  We all come to the posi­tion for dif­fer­ent rea­sons, but I think most of us start out as opti­mistic and hope­ful.  We think that maybe we have a vision for a type of story that nobody else has seen before.  We day dream about find­ing writ­ers that amaze us and pub­lish­ing them before any­one else.

It takes a pecu­liar sort of ego to take up edit­ing.  And thank god.  If it wasn’t for edi­tors, we’d all have to sort through the kind of self-​​published garbage that made it pos­si­ble for Geocities to stay in busi­ness for so long.  I shud­der to think of a world with­out editors.

And finally, a well-​​known truth:

You can bribe an editor.

Most of us are broke and dri­ven to drink copi­ous amounts of alco­hol.  See the sewer pipe anal­ogy above.  That gives us a weak­ness you can exploit.  Next time you’re at a con­ven­tion, go to the bar, and buy a drink for your favorite edi­tor.  Make sure you do it early on, because seven or eight drinks in, we’ll never remem­ber your name.   We’ll be lucky to wake up in the right hotel room, or even the right state.  Who bought the drinks on a night like that will be the least of our con­cerns when we wake up naked atop a desert mesa cov­ered from head to toe in blue paint.

Putting a name to a face, along with a men­tal data­base note of “bought me a beer” doesn’t hurt.  One of the things that makes edit­ing eas­ier is pre­tend­ing that the sto­ries aren’t all writ­ten by human beings with heart.  Sometimes, we have to put that out of our minds.  And if you find a way to politely shat­ter that illu­sion, well, it can be good for you.  But only if you are likely to start sell­ing sto­ries anyway.

There are no great secrets to being pub­lished.  Read lots.   Write sto­ries.  Lots and lots of sto­ries.  Submit the work until the sto­ries are either accepted or rejected by every mar­ket you could bear to see your name asso­ci­ated with.  That’s pretty much all there is to it.  Everything else is basi­cally unimportant.