Wednesday
I recently had the very fun job of participating in the Philadelphia Stories' Push To Publish Conference at Rosemont College as part of a panel on "submissions." At the end of that panel, a new thought came to me, one that I thought others might find (somewhat) interesting:
Editors aren't deciding if your submission is good or not; they are deciding instead if they want to publish it or not.
What does that mean exactly? I'm so glad you asked. Well, if that thought is indeed indicative of some kind of truth, then I believe it means that a "no" isn't necessarily an indication of whether the piece is "good" or not. In fact, I'm not exactly sure when the judgments of "good" and "not-good" and "great" and so on matter. Even when work is up for awards and anthology-inclusion, I imagine that the editors are choosing stories that they want to publish—and the thought process has less to do with "Is it good?" and more to do with "Do I love it?"
Of course, there is a market to consider, right? Well, yes, but the market for literary submissions to print and online journals is pretty static. In other words, I doubt that an editor is deciding if the journal's readers would "buy" the journal for that story, because I don't think the readers "buy" the journal based on the stories that appear in a particular issue. That being said, even if the readers' interests/tastes come into play, it is still about what a person/group likes/loves, and not about figuring out if something is good or not good.
So from where does this sense of "good" and "not-good" originate? Well, I believe that workshops are where the judgment of "good" and "not-good" are placed on stories, and I think that experience—an experience that for many writers and submissions is the beginning process of entering the writing community—creates in writers the sense that submission readers are also determining if a piece is "good." I also think that there's a sense in workshop of the group deciding not only if that particular piece of writing is good but also if a particular writer is good or not-good. It's possible that writers leave workshop and enter the submission process with that belief that editors/submission readers are figuring out what story is good/great and, by extension, what writers are great/good/not-so-good. Thinking such a thing is one way to raise the stakes of each submission, so that each rejection becomes evidence that your writing isn't good enough and you aren't good enough either.
In short, as an editor/submission reader who has probably read about 15,000 flash fiction submissions, I can't ever recall wondering if a particular submission is "good." So, when editors say "no," it's likely that they are saying "no" to publishing the piece and nothing more. Of course, connected to that decision are other considerations (we just published a clown encounters goat story), but imagine that none of them have to do with this particular piece, your writing in general, or you as a writer being or not being "good." Feel better now? I hope so.
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