With this blog post I’d like to return to the subject of wading through the slush pile, though I’m on a less curmudgeonly mission this time. Once you’ve read enough submissions, it’s fairly easy to diagnose the many ways stories can fail. It’s far more challenging, however, to explain why successful stories are, well, successful. My project with this blog post is to try to identify at least one shared trait of successful stories, with the hope of helping some of you as you revise and refine your work to submit it to IR and elsewhere. (Speaking of submitting, don’t forget that you still have time to submit to our fiction contest.)
As far as I can tell, every good or great story must have a good or great opening. Perhaps this is a fairly obvious observation, but I can’t think of a single good or great story that opens with a mediocre first page. When you submit your fiction to journals, the opening pages of your story are absolutely essential in determining whether or not your story makes it beyond the slush pile. The opening convinces a reader to devote his or her time to reading the rest of your story, rather than moving on to another story, and editors are readers with a virtually limitless supply of other stories to move on to. Read more…
