Never Forget That Writers Are Insane: Five Things I've Learned from Reading Slush

In the comments after my last post, On Writing Long When Attempting to Write Short, rachel_swirsky wrote:

Posting generic grumble/grump about how "too much description" and "too much wordiness" are often dependent on style and aesthetic, and while it's good that some people are (edited) Carver and Hemingway, one is glad that some people are Flannery O'Conner, ( Read more... )

One of the hardest things, in writing fiction, is deciding what to leave in a story and what to take out. I'm here to say that this is a skill that a writer can learn, and I have some suggestions about how to learn it.

I read a lot of fiction submissions for Clarkesworld Magazine. Several submissions a day, so on a normal week I read about ( Read more... )

Today I read my 400th submission for Clarkesworld Magazine. That's since September 20th, 2008, and with four other people reading incoming slush; we were even closed to submissions from December 1st through January 15th. So that's what, three months' worth of reading, and only one person's part of it? We get a lot of stories! As you may imagine ( Read more... )

Here are the things I think a person who wants to write fiction (professionally) ought to do, and I will guarantee you right now that the list will be missing things I don't know about, but anyway ( Read more... )