Hello, everyone. I’m Nancy Zafris, the fiction editor of The Kenyon Review. I’ve been invited to say a few words now and then, preferably words of wisdom regarding submission -> acceptance –> publication.
Well, I’m sure you are already acquainted with how it usually goes: submission –> rejection, submission –> rejection. This happens a lot. It can happen for years. When I first started sending out myself, I had to deal with the infamous slush pile. it took me four years and 116 submissions before Black Warrior Review (bless them) finally took a piece. I love Black Warrior Review. I will always love Black Warrior Review. Anyway, this was back when everything was snail-mailed, and things went slower. I remember how encouraged I felt when I got a handwritten line or two under the photocopied rejection notes.
I started to develop a few strategies of my own to make my stories stand out. One was to NOT make my stories stand out with funny fonts or big titles, etc. I was a technical writer for a computer company at the time, and one of the things we had meetings about was “white space.” White space made the user guides we were writing look friendly and easy to read. I applied the same principle to my stories: the text of my first page started halfway down the page. The opening paragraph was a fairly short affair of three to four lines. One or two lines looked too abrupt to me. Three or four lines looked just about right. Whether or not this paragraph was good or not, I can’t say for sure, but I can say this: the first page looked painless and easy to read.
I worked a lot of getting a good first paragraph featuring sentences that weren’t too long, that didn’t have a lot of prepositional phrases, etc. I didn’t try to impress; I just tried to reel the reader in long enough to get him or her to the second page, and then to the third.
One of the things I did was have my husband read my stories and mark every sentence that he had to read more than once — for whatever reason. He’s the best reader there is (I met him in grad school) and if he had to reread a sentence, then there was something there that needed to be addressed. Sometimes it was something tangible, sometimes intangible (the rhythm, say, or an unintentional internal rhyme). So no matter what, I rewrote that sentence.
I was in Municipal Court this morning, and as I stood around for 45 minutes looking for this same husband, plenty of defeated first paragraphs slogged by, heads drooping. The majority of people filing into Municipal Court in Columbus, Ohio (a frightening amount of people — what were their stories, what did they do wrong? I was TOTALLY INNOCENT of course, having plowed into the person turning left in front of me) made the same first impression over and over: not wealthy, not educated, poorly dressed, poorly nourished, with too many of them smokers. First impressions can be wrong, of course, but they can also be right. Sometimes you don’t want them to be right. Sometimes when friends submit stories and I read the first paragraph, my heart sinks, and I want my first impression to be proven wrong. More often it’s not.
You can tell a lot from a first paragraph, and it’s not because you’re being unfair or jaded. It’s because you have a lot of experience doing this. However, sometimes you’re wrong. Being wrong in this kind of instance is a good thing. I’d like to be wrong like that more often. For example, as I stood in the lobby of the courthouse this morning, watching this sea of drabness stream by with the rain pouring down outside and the sky still dark at 9 a.m., the young black guy next to me turned and said, “Are you waiting for your lawyer, too?” We talked a bit, and I could quickly see that he was well-spoken. Suddenly, the baggy jeans hanging down and big sloppy jacket and the side-turned hat covering most of his face made a different sort of impression on me. The fact that I in turn looked like someone who needed a lawyer was also amusing. Perhaps I shouldn’t have worn the big boots and my husband’s wool sweater and hunting vest, but it was raining hard and better to ruin his clothes than mine (besides, I had innocence on my side). I waited around a little bit longer, curious to see what kind of impression this fellow’s municipal court lawyer would make on me. Like it or not, we’re always gathering impressions. My husband is a lawyer, by the way. I’m sure you already are forming an impression.
Each week, I’ll try to isolate a story issue to talk about. Things that stop a story for me. I’ll try to keep it technical and neutral, and I’ll try to be as honest as possible without being adversarial. Remember, most editors are also writers. We’re poorly paid at both, so there has to be some reason we do this. In the end we’re all on the same side, the side of literature and culture.