Three things you must have for a quality dinner party: a working stove, a frying pan, and curry powder. The difference between real life and a good story is that in real life when the dinner guests start talking politics or the elegance of the lyrics of Taylor Swift the prepared host turns the big burner on, sets the frying pan on the heating burner, and pours the curry powder into the pan. In a few moments your place will fill with the smell of a porch sofa two days after a thunderstorm and it will cause your caustic guests to remove themselves. In a story you still burn the curry, but the guest you despise the most, the one talking up the benefits of a Trump presidency or christening Taylor Swift the Joni Mitchell of today’s generation, is the one who rushes to the kitchen to save you from your passive-aggressive plan.
In considering the answer to the question of what I’m looking for when I’m looking at submissions, I’ve had to accept that the most honest answer is that I don’t know. I could make appeals to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart and his famous characterization of pornography: “I know it when I see it,” but what I’m looking for is more than that.
I view each sentence in a story as a promise made by writers to their readers: this matters. Whether the story is high literary (whatever that actually means) or genre (which is easier to characterize, but equally nonsensical), everything in it should matter, even if how it matters isn’t obvious or immediately discernible. We read so that we may better know each other. At the same time, reading takes time, and time is something that most people have in shorter and shorter supply today.
People work longer hours for less pay. They carry cell phones which field not just calls and texts, but also emails, SnapChats, Tinders, Grindrs, Tweets, Instagrams, Facebooks not to mention the calls from student loan collection companies.
If I’m going to publish a story, that means that I believe that the story can cut through all that—we do, after all, publish online.
Don’t tell me about the color of a person’s hair unless it means something. A lot of people have pink hair. Pink hair does not help a story by being there, it can only help your story if it helps your story. What does it matter if it’s raining outside if nobody gets wet? Cut through the noise. Cut through the chatter. Introduce me to someone interesting.
I had a friend in my first fiction workshop who told me that she didn’t get plot, she only wanted to write characters. I suggested to her that maybe she didn’t need to worry so much, that maybe the core of every plot is the consequences of the characters behaving like themselves.
So go out there and host a dinner party and invite the people who’ll not get along and throw curry powder in the frying pan and fight and care maybe even learn something even if it’s the wrong something. It’s not enough to have the characters behave in a certain way peculiar to them, and have a set of consequences peculiar to them, it also needs to mean something.
I think I’m finally getting to what I’ve meant to say all along: what I’m looking for when I’m reading submissions is a story that makes me care about as much as the characters care about themselves, a story that follows them to an uncomfortable space, and one that is there with them when they get out.
-Andrew Marlowe Bergman