Fungible Convictions

Last Sunday I took over as fiction editor for one of the best sites for new literary writing, identitytheory.com. It’s a wonderful site, full of good political writing, book reviews, and its biggest draw, an enormous collection of interviews with the likes of Roger Angell, Barbara Erhenreich, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jake Halpern, Christopher Hitchens—and Susan Orlean, Sarah Vowell, and Howard Zinn twice each.

The fiction section will be a challenge, if only because there remains a bias among creative writers against publishing fiction online rather than in print. But except for readability issues–which we address by publishing only the shorter pieces of the short-fiction spectrum–publishing online, particularly on Identity Theory, makes a lot of sense:

• IDT is read by thousands of people a day rather than thousands per issue.
• Readers—lay, and, you know, agents, alike—have far easier methods of contacting you and calling attention to your work.
• The online submission/review process guarantees faster turnaround with more eyes reading each submission (anything we like, we editors e-mail to each other, rather than waiting for another editor to visit the office). There’s also no summer vacation: we read submissions all year ’round.

In four short days I’ve already read some very good pieces. I’m looking forward, in tandem with my fellow-editors, to soliciting pieces, but it’s very exciting to see quality fiction arriving unsolicited from up-and-coming writers. (fyi, here are our fiction guidelines.)

For anyone tracking back to Fungible Convictions from IDT and looking for some tips, here are some that apply to all publishers of short fiction, not just IDT:

• Follow the submission guidelines to the letter. For example, I’ve already had to return, unread, stories that were attached to an e-mail rather than pasted as plain text. As McSweeney’s guidelines say:
  

  PLEASE PASTE
  The entire document into the e-mail message. Do not send us attachments. We are afraid of what these attachments may be carrying.

• Your story must stand on its own. Not only does this mean it should be a complete story (unless a magazine/site explicitly states they publish excerpts, don’t send excerpts), but it is particularly unprofessional to describe your story in any way other than saying “Below please find my story ‘Name of Story’.” “Here is my great/quirky/heart-rending story” or “I wrote this story during a break-up” is a big negative—not necessarily because an editor won’t agree or appreciate it or be happy that they can have an idea of what you’re like, but because the publication’s readers won’t have that information. Again, the story must stand on its own.
• A point about treating your writing as a profession: Even though it’s the first thing discussed in writing classes and books, the hardest but most essential quality to develop in your writing is a strong voice, which comes from writing a lot and for a long time, i.e., an established writing work ethic. Having a story that “works” is rarely enough to get it published. Journals want to nurture professional relationships with writers. Editors have interests beyond being “gatekeepers” . . . they want to know that the people whose writing they publish are talented and committed enough to get published elsewhere. And the surest sign is when the writer has a strong, consistent, memorable, identifiable voice. It’s evidence that that writer takes herself seriously, that she wants to write for reasons beyond the writerly fetish.

A last observation about my first four days’ editing. Many blogs have noted the spam phenomenon of spammers sending linkless messages that only feature passages from classic (usually public domain) literature. As a fiction editor, this is high-larious. Peppered in genuine fiction submissions are excerpts from Willa Cather (subject line: “yawn carbohydrate”) and Sinclair Lewis (subject line: “reappearance”). The running theory is that spammers are trying to circumvent filters that function on the percentage of questionable terms contained in a message. But I think it’s terribly entertaining.