At the Nebula Conference this year, Kat Brehm organized a live-action slush reading panel. She said this has been a dream of hers for several years and she was super excited to pull it off. She got Scott Edelman and Erin Roberts to read the openings to manuscripts (the first 500 words) and had a panel of slush readers who were to raise their hand when they were ready to reject a manuscript. And once three raised their hands, the reading stopped and she asked the slush readers to explain why they had rejected the manuscript (or why not). I decided to submit a piece to the event and attended the panel.
It was interesting to see what the slush readers liked and didn’t like. To be honest, I couldn’t always tell the difference between the things they gushingly extolled and the things they rejected out of hand. A common factor was starting the story at the wrong place: they sometimes thought a story had too much set up, but frequently were willing to tolerate (what seemed to me) like. a vast amount of set up if they liked something or were intrigued by something.
Obviously, it was about striking a balance. Some had too much worldbuilding. Some had not enough worldbuilding. Sometimes reviewers agreed and sometimes they disagreed.
Their responses were also calibrated to what kind of submission it was: short stories needed an immediate hook while they were willing to let a novel start more slowly, acknowledging there was time to let the action develop,
My piece didn’t fare very well. It wasn’t the worst (which was someone who used a mirror trope that got universally rejected within the first two sentences.) But mine was rejected before half way through.
The first reader rejected it almost before the narrator started reading. They said it was “not the type of story they vibe with.” Two or three more raised their hands at more-or-less the same moment about halfway through. Most of their comments didn’t really tell me anything I don’t already know about my writing.
The goal of my opening was to present what I thought might appear as a conventional (perhaps even cliched) scenario and then take it a different direction with a twist. But all of the slush readers simply rejected it as appearing too conventional. They never got to the twist because they didn’t give it a chance. That’s really useful for me to know about slush readers. I’ve been a slush reader before (though not very much) and one of my goals was to try to actually get through a story unless it was really intolerably bad. But that was my privilege, since I don’t have to do it very often.
Another comment they made was that the language was too ordinary or matter-of-fact. This is an intentional stylistic choice I make. I hate flowery, literary writing. It gets in the way of me being able to enjoy a story. So I strive for relatively simple, prosaic prose. But I can see that, at least these, slush readers would prefer something that sounds less ordinary.
Finally, one or two slush readers pointed out that they want to know more about the protagonist’s feelings — to have more interiority. Again, this is a stylistic choice I make (which I’ve described elsewhere). Since we can’t get inside other people’s heads and only ever hear our own thoughts, Unless I’m writing in first person, I much prefer to write about things are observable: people’s words and actions. But it’s obviously out of step with what these slush readers were expecting. Or, rather, what they were looking for. They probably expect most manuscripts to be terrible, which is why they don’t bother to read more than a few sentences before rejecting them.
This isn’t really a surprise to me. I know that the stuff I write isn’t what a lot of editors are looking for. But I like it. And I was disappointed that people didn’t even get to the twist to see where the story was going. It’s given me some useful perspective to figure out what to consider going forward. But it leaves me with a question.
How much should I try to change my writing to satisfy others? If they’d read the whole story, I expect they’d have a bunch of other complaints about my writing. I don’t like a traditional three-act story structure either. I’m not big on the whole “dark night of the soul” thing. I like more episodic fiction with different kinds of pacing and stakes.
I really appreciated John Wiswell’s comments in his Nebula acceptance speech. He described being rejected again and again and again until he gave up. Then he really doubled down, quit trying to satisfy editors or agents, and wrote something as “weird and neurodivergent” as himself. Thanks, John.
