I’ve read a lot of manuscripts over the years. At Clarion I read 4 or 5 stories a day for six weeks, and did a critique on each one. Before and after that I’ve read and critiqued stories for friends, for relations, and for members of critique groups. Reading as an editor is a completely different thing.
Reading for critique means reading to figure out how to make the story better. Part of it is looking for mistakes, but not just any mistakes.
I mean, many writers are happy to get a line-edit of a story. (I mentioned to one of the other people at Clarion that I appreciated the line-edit he had provided. He said, “Oh, if that was useful, I’ll do more of it on your future stories.” And he did, which over the course of the next six weeks meant I learned most of what I should have learned in 12 years of school, about what errors I was prone to in grammar, punctuation, spelling, sentence construction, etc.) But a line-edit is primarily useful as part of a critique if the story is nearly perfect except for a few typos. (Or if, like me, you didn’t pay attention in high school and need to back up and learn some of that stuff.)
James Patrick Kelly talked about about the three kinds of critiques that are useful. It depends on the kind of story you have in your hand.
Jim’s talk at the beginning today was about the kinds of stories that get workshopped. He said you can workshop a story that is:
- broken
- finished
- ready to submit
His point was that the critique needs to be done differently, depending on where the story is. For a broken story, you might suggest major changes to the story structure, major cuts or expansions, changes in direction, etc. For a finished story you wouldn’t suggest those things, but you might suggest a way to improve the twist at the ending or to raise the stakes a bit before the climax or a way to bring out the subtext a bit better. For a ready-to-submit story you might just suggest a bit of polish and point out things like awkward sentences or bits that were unintentionally funny.
— my Clarion journal: https://www.philipbrewer.net/Journal/2001/2001-06-19.php.)
What I (and my brother) have been doing for the past five or six weeks is reading as slush readers. It’s a completely different exercise. The question is not “How to make the story better.” For me, the question is more like, “Will this story, with minimal editing, delight the readers of Elegant Lich magazine?”
Of course, there’s a lot of territory beyond that question. Our first issue isn’t out yet. We’ve talked about what we want to produce, but we haven’t been doing this long enough to have much of a joint vision at all—neither of the magazine, nor of the slush reading process.
I started this post several weeks ago, wanting to say, “Well, the first week or two it was taking me forever to read a story, but now I think I’ve got it,” but that turned out to be premature, which is part of the reason this post is only going up now.
I do think I’ll be able to do the slush-reading part more quickly, next time we open to submissions. My brother will be at least as happy about that as I am.
