By David Lynn.
This month, we launch an occasional series by the editors of The Kenyon Review and KROnline in response to questions we’re often asked: what are we looking for from hopeful writers? How do we recognize when a submission is special enough to warrant publishing?
As a matter of fact, we spend a lot of time with our KR Associates on these very questions, training them how to read. That may surprise you. Surely our remarkable students are all-but-expert readers already? Well, that’s true, of course. But what I mean is reading in a very different way than we do for pleasure or for a classroom assignment, where the concern is what a text “means.” Differently too from reading as a writer, where the challenge is to figure out how a piece works. Instead, our Associates must learn to read as an editor, evaluating the surprise and delight and mastery offered by a story or poem or essay.
In this series, my fellow editors and I will address these questions more publicly by looking at work we’ve chosen for publication. We will ask ourselves–and try to articulate for you–something of what leapt from a submission, catching our often-weary eye, making it impossible to say no, insisting on a place in the TOC.
Why not start with “Blue Bear” by Elizabeth Chandler, which will appear in the Winter 2011 issue of KR? Here’s how the story begins:
Mark takes his daughter to the lake because the sound of the waves calms her. He keeps her in the front room nearest to the water, where the walls are painted with a blue so pale, it’s almost white. No other room in the cabin is painted. The vaulted ceiling in the common area glows amber with unfinished wood, and the dark eyes of knots are crusted with sap. The smell of exposed pine is sometimes overwhelming, and on warm days, Mark spends his afternoons on the adjoining deck, reading magazines or e-mailing retailers until six-thirty, when he walks Cynthia to the beach. On the skinny boardwalk, he tells his daughter to lift her feet like a trooper so her toes don’t stick between the slats, and then, once clear of that gauntlet, he speaks to her softly as they wade through the coarse beach grass. Cynthia yells, slapping her itchy knees, and Mark goes on about whom to trust and whom to suspect in the boardroom. Anything, really, because Cynthia doesn’t mind what he says, only how. She’s very sensitive to mood, to aesthetics: the beach is deserted, but every evening she dresses for an audience. If Mark has his way, it’s the blue-moon one-piece; if she has hers, which is more often, it’s the striped bikini that he hates fitting over her breasts, but which she loves and asks for, even though she never wants to swim, only stand ankle-deep, her head wobbling on her neck as she looks toward, perhaps not really at, the expanse of Lake Huron: the stripes of blue that mark the various depths until the wide plane of deep water spreads out like a flat, hard lid.
My mantra with writing students is that beginnings are always the most important part of a story. (Not the hardest: that honor belongs without a doubt to endings.) But obviously if the opening doesn’t grab a reader, well, he or she won’t keep reading. “Blue Bear” grabbed me. Boy, did it. I vividly remember reading it the first time.
Look at the simplicity, the clarity of the first sentence. It reveals so much, but indirectly: that Mark cares for his daughter, probably by himself, and that she needs to be kept calm.
As the paragraph continues every step is precise, the images are evocative, the rhythms supple. “[T]he walls are painted with a blue so pale, it’s almost white.” And then: “On the skinny boardwalk, he tells his daughter to lift her feet like a trooper so her toes don’t stick between the slats.” This is visual and tactile at the same time. More important, it reveals significant detail about Cynthia’s development without telling us anything explicitly. And we come to the most telling detail of all: “[S]he never wants to swim, only stand ankle-deep, her head wobbling on her neck as she looks toward, perhaps not really at, the expanse of Lake Huron.”
By the time I’d come to the end of that opening paragraph for the first time–and with increasing admiration each instance thereafter–I knew I was dealing with a story by a writer of masterful skill and subtle sensibility.
Here’s a terrible secret: editors read with an eye out for reasons to stop reading. We want, we need, to move on to the next submission. And there’s always a next. But “Blue Bear” kept me reading, not just with professional interest but with the kind of eagerness and suspense that represent a kind of magical intersection–where an editor becomes also someone just reading for the pure pleasure of it.
Of course, I couldn’t be certain about this story just because of a wonderful start. It’s also true that good beginnings, even superb beginnings, don’t always lead to success of the story as a whole. It may not sustain enough crackle to the narrative, enough resonance to the drama. And then there are always those damn endings. . . .
Nope. I’m not giving anything more away. I’m not about to spoil your own pleasure in reading “Blue Bear” by giving away the plot or the ending. Let’s just say there’s plenty of drama–but not flash-bang dramatics. Rather, Elizabeth Chandler creates a drama that rings true and humane, poignant yet not at all sentimental.
Maybe the next time I write about editorial choice I’ll deal with how a story ends.