The fourth-floor office looked like a hospice for outdated computers and fax machines. Its furnishings included one good office chair, some gum-colored metal folding chairs, and a long, scarred wooden table. But what made the room cramped, and what made it exciting, was four cardboard containers, each three feet wide and four feet high, placed wherever they fit. On one afternoon each week, I chose a container and scooped out an armful of envelopes. They held poetry, fiction, or essays, all mailed in by writers who hoped to get published.
This was the office of a literary magazine, founded 20 years before. A small independent operation, it got through every crisis by improvising. Unlike many literary or “little” magazines, it was not funded or staffed by a college. It scraped along, a nonprofit organization, supporting and staffing itself. Let’s call it Spelvin Magazine. Spelvin received only enough arts-council funding to pay for printing and mailing its four issues per year, and somehow its editor-in-chief got paid the equivalent of half the minimum wage. His most pressing task was not editing the magazine, attracting new subscribers, or working at his other paying job, but fundraising. On one desperate occasion, by begging and borrowing he raised six thousand dollars overnight to keep creditors, mostly printers, from shutting down the whole enterprise.
It was in this heroic, war-room atmosphere that submissions to Spelvin got read. Because all its resources were so limited, Spelvin took submissions only from September 1 to December 1. During this annual reading period, Spelvin received about 3,000 manuscripts. As they arrived, an intern – an unpaid college English major – slit each envelope, logged its contents and its author’s name and address, and then tossed the envelope into any container that had room. The September submissions got buried beneath October’s and November’s. Together the manuscripts were called “the slush pile.” Spelvin’s editorial assistants, also called screeners or first readers, would eventually read through the slush and help select about 150 submissions to fill the next four issues.
The first readers, all unpaid, included recent graduates from master’s-degree programs in English or creative writing, any writer friends or acquaintances the editor could persuade to volunteer (I was one of those), and some mature, unpublished writers who offered to read manuscripts and were judged to be responsible and highly literate. All of us were trying to publish our own writing, but it was a rule – and a good one -- that our own work could not appear in Spelvin.
Reading and sifting the manuscripts was a great education for everyone; all writers should try it. I’m here to tell you how it really works and how to improve the odds – always a long shot -- that your creative work will be chosen for publication.
After reading the manuscripts, 90 percent of the time the readers tucked them into their self-addressed stamped envelopes along with a polite, pre-printed rejection slip, and sealed them. The intern bagged these and hauled them to the post office. The remaining 10 percent of manuscripts went into what we called the “Maybe Pile.” Each submission that reached the “Maybe Pile” got read by three different people, one of whom was always Spelvin’s editor-in-chief. All three read the submission with great care, wrote their opinions on its envelope, and later met around the table to discuss each work’s merits or flaws, and whether it was right for Spelvin.
Sometimes I’d re-read things I’d put in the Maybe Pile, and then wonder, “What was I thinking?”
Sometimes I felt sure I’d dug up a gem, or what we called “A Definite Yes,” but another reader’s opinion or interpretation convinced me otherwise. Three heads are better than one.
Most literary magazines operate pretty much on this same model. A few are more democratic: Every reader reads everything and votes on whether to accept or reject, and the majority rules. A few are totalitarian, and what the editor likes, or what the members of the magazine’s Board of Trustees like, is what gets published.
At Spelvin, three people voted on the “Maybes” and the majority ruled. But – and this is unusually generous -- each of us was allowed one “wild card” that let us override the final vote and have published one manuscript we loved but couldn’t convince the others to like.
Why did we devote ourselves to doing this? It wasn’t because we wanted to be at the nerve center of literature. We did it because we knew that we were the nerve center of literature. We discovered great new writers and writings and introduced them to our readership. Several works published in Spelvin won Best American Short Story or poetry honors, or Pushcart Prizes, given annually for the best work published in literary or “little” magazines. We, and others like us, were the first to sense cultural changes and ride cultural waves. Every envelope might hold something exciting, and we always hoped it did. Rejecting submissions gave us no pleasure, because we knew from experience how awful we felt when we got rejections of our own. Of course, reading through the slush pile could also be tiring, and tempt one to make cynical remarks. I honestly can’t remember any such remarks to tell you. However, ludicrous cover letters full of misspellings still get tacked up on what we christened “the wall of shame.”
But you writers want to know how to get your manuscript into the Maybe Pile and ultimately into the “Definite Yes” elite. I will cut to the chase.
To better your chances of making it into a literary magazine’s Maybe Pile:
- Above all things, know and profess that no one can become a good or successful writer all alone. Find someone intelligent, preferably another writer, to read and give an honest opinion of your final draft before submitting it to a magazine. A writing group or writing workshop is an ideal source of this kind of commentary.
- Writing is an art, and publishing is a business. You can’t change that reality by resisting it, so make your writing look as if you mean business. A professional-looking manuscript will stand out, because about two-thirds of all submissions to Spelvin, and other magazines I have worked for, were dirty or thumbed or coffee-stained, or had been folded and creased multiple times in multiple ways so the paper flaked like oatmeal. Some were printed on letterhead obviously snitched from an employer, or on pink or yellow stationery decorated with cheery (and distracting) rainbows or unicorns. I saw ancient photocopies, and submissions written by hand or in fancy calligraphy, and homework with the teacher’s comments and grade still on it, and long prose pieces typed single-spaced. These submissions, just by their appearance, announced that what followed was the work of a person lacking common sense and, more importantly, respect for his or her own creations.
- So – what does look professional? Print or type your manuscript on clean, white, blank eight-and-a-half-by-eleven paper in black ink, in the Times New Roman font, size 12. Set a one-inch margin all around. Poets, please title every poem, put only one poem on a page, and send a sample of four to six poems. Staple poems that have two or more pages. Prose writers, double-space your work. Please submit only one story or essay at a time, and if you can’t make your computer number the pages, do it neatly and discreetly by hand in the upper right-hand corner. The editor will then have a much easier time telling you that he wants to publish your story but has a question about what happens on page 9. Print your work on only one side of the paper. Why? Double-sided printing requires readers and editors to clear more table space and use both hands to flip and position the pages for reading. This effort distracts them from your manuscript. Buy recycled paper if you are concerned about trees. Furthermore, put your name, postal address and e-mail address in the top right-hand corner of the first page of each piece. Secure multi-page manuscripts with a spring-clip or a staple. Before mailing, check the manuscript one last time to ensure that its pages are in order and none are missing.
- Now you know what the proper format is for submissions through the mail. Format, do your proofreading, and automatically advance to the top 33 percent of the class. Does your target magazine consider e-mail submissions? Read its instructions and do not deviate from them.
- Check the magazine’s website for the “writer’s guidelines” to find out what they like to publish. Often the site will have selections from recent issues. Spelvin published poetry, fiction and essays. It never published pornography, journalism, children’s literature, opinion pieces, scholarly or technical papers, plays or screenplays, genre fiction, or previously published works -- and all these were rejected outright, regardless of quality.
When a story or essay started out badly – showing many misspellings, the use of clichés, gratuitous sex or excessive profanity, inconsistencies or peculiarities (for example, if “Red” was suddenly renamed “Ray”, or if he started hitchhiking in West Virginia at nightfall and made Oklahoma by dawn), I then read the next four pages to see if it got any better. If not, I read no farther and gave it a rejection slip. If you haven’t got a reader interested by page 4, you won’t get a reader at all. Because I don’t know anything about sports, fiction about athletes and memoirs about the St. Louis Cardinals’ 1957 summer season got passed to a reader more familiar with the subject. I have never cared for “prose poems” and “short-short stories,” but if I found some I sincerely tried to be objective, and if I couldn’t decide, and they were professionally presented, I put them in the Maybe Pile where it would elicit someone else’s opinion.
Those afternoons, I read 30 to 40 manuscripts before having to quit for the day. Occasionally I found a submission from a friend, or a former classmate, teacher, or student. I don’t think any of them knew I was volunteering at Spelvin, but if they did, having known me didn’t help their cause. If the work wasn’t good, or if it was good but not right for Spelvin, it was rejected. Regarding cover letters, I tossed aside all cover letters, unread, consulting them only after I had read a submission and liked it. The magazine cares about your work, not its cover letter. Do not send work that has to be explained in your cover letter. Do not waste your time crafting lengthy or personal cover letters. You and the editors do not have a personal relationship. They can’t be badgered or shamed into publishing your work or answering pleas for guidance. Use your intelligence to improve your creative work, which is what will get you published – or not. Merely competent writing is not enough. Spelvin’s editor once said, and I quote it all the time: “Most things aren’t rejected because they are bad. They are rejected because they are mediocre.” Getting a lot of rejections? Enroll in a creative-writing course or find a writing group or club, either in town or online. All successful professionals seek advice and moral support and fresh perspectives from their peers. Writers do too. Famous historical examples include the Bloomsbury circle, the Algonquin Round Table, Paris in the 1920s, The Harlem Renaissance writers, and the Beats.
I found in reading manuscripts that some themes and subjects were so frequently addressed that they amounted to contemporary cliches. Editors of literary mags see these subjects too often and will reject even the work of highly skilled or famous writers who can’t make these subjects new or fresh. Editors see a lot of work about physical and mental illness, alcoholism, sick or aging parents, bereavement, dysfunctional families or relationships (so common a theme in fiction that editors call it “dysfiction”), struggles with one’s personal appearance, wildflowers, famous paintings, and being a writer. If you write about one or more of these subjects – and most everyone does -- be aware that even if it’s very well written and as professional-looking as can be, that may not be enough to get the work published. On the other hand, editors would like to see more essays, stories, and poems about jobs, money, culture, friendship, entertainment, possessions, politics, and education. But I got very impatient reading poem after poem about wildflowers (although I’ll admit to having written some).
Regarding the tone of submissions to literary magazines, there is a glut of wistfulness, or light regret. Delight a reader by using another tone.
The rewards of publication in a literary magazine are few but fine. Forget about money. Some years Spelvin paid its authors eight dollars per printed page, and in leaner years authors got paid in copies of the magazine, or free one-year subscriptions. Your reward is being able to say, “I was published in Spelvin.” Even the toniest literary magazines circulate at most to a few thousand subscribers, so ultimately your readers will be relatively few, but they are likely to be well-placed in cultural circles and very attentive. Spelvin once published an informative and entertaining essay on – of all things – Italian sausage. A New York agent telephoned the Spelvin office and wanted to know how to get in touch with the Italian-sausage writer. That doesn’t happen every day, or even every year, but it happened.
To break into the literary world, begin by submitting your work to the magazines where your chances are best: the smallest, the newest, the nearest. Don’t disdain your local literary magazine; it’s the one most likely to want your work. Volunteer, if you can, to read through the submissions it receives, if just for one issue. Or simply visit its office for a brief look behind the scenes. You will feel more confident about your own work, and about how editors read and judge it, and why. It will be a priceless learning experience.
