Confessions of a Journal Editor

Joe Ponepinto

But first, a brief explanation of this new endeavor…

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What this Substack blog is about:

Beyond Craft is a Substack dedicated to helping writers (both established and emerging) to better understand their endeavor—everything from working more creatively and efficiently, to identifying publishing opportunities, and knowing what to avoid along the way. We do this by publishing essays from people involved in the industry, from long time editors and publishers to practicing writers, to people new to the craft.

What we are looking for:

Thoughtful essays on aspects of creative writing, the writing life, and the business of writing and publishing. We are particularly interested in new or counterintuitive interpretations of craft, and honest examinations of industry standards and practices. If you believe you have an essay we might be interested in publishing, contact us at beyondcraft25@gmail.com with a brief inquiry. Essay word count should be between 750 and 3000.

What we are not looking for:

Finger pointing, meanness, screeds, unfounded opinion or grievance, cheerleader essays, vague writing, or any position that cannot be supported with verifiable evidence. No racism, sexism, homophobia, or any other hate speech will be accepted.

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And now, this week’s post: Confessions of a Journal Editor

Six years, twenty issues, more than 15,000 submissions. Most editors at literary journals don’t have much time to discuss their processes and preferences. But with our final issues having just been published, now I do. So why not share some of that secret knowledge and give writers some insight as to how it all works? And while I’m at it why not reveal some of the more arbitrary aspects of editing, the ones that were influenced by my personal experiences, writing industry practices and politics, and my own admittedly contrarian nature—that impulse in me that has always kept me from going along just to fit in.

Which by the way is one of the main motivations for starting this Substack. If there’s one industry that needs some strong and honest criticism, the writing universe is it. But for now, allow me to critique myself, and offer some hints about what I’ll be addressing in future posts.

I read submissions nearly every day for the past six years. Sometimes just one or two, but when we had a mountain of outstanding submissions I would read twenty or more a day, which occasionally included several submissions that had paid for feedback. Stopping that practice cold is somewhat like giving up alcohol. You can’t go back and have even one drink, read one submission, or you may be pulled into that vortex again. Reading submissions every day takes so much time away from one’s personal writing that it is almost impossible to do both. I still have a lot I want to write, and now I hope to have the time to write it, and make it as good as it can be.

That’s another issue about reading for a literary journal. I’ve seen some fantastic writing, which has opened my eyes to new techniques and ideas. And I’ve seen some abysmally bad writing. If there’s one plus from reading so much bad writing, it’s developing the ability to recognize why it’s bad and learn to avoid those kind of mistakes. I would recommend reading for a literary journal to any emerging writer for just that reason—it can be more helpful than joining a writers’ group, which is often made up of members who have similar skill levels. But the bad writing far outweighs the good in the submission queue, to the point where it begins to seem acceptable, and that’s when it can start to erode one’s skills.

Sometimes the issue is merely one of experience. Many submitters are students who are still learning the craft. But many others are middle-aged or older, people who have had careers and believe they have something to share about life. The issue in both cases is usually the voice. For the younger writers it’s a lack of voice—they are searching for how to say what they feel. For the older ones the issue is often entitlement, the belief that the writer’s life experience is enough to make the writing publishable. It’s not. Not by a long shot. I always found that type of voice to be arrogant, as if the writer is saying, I was a successful lawyer, salesperson, whatever, so of course I’ll be a successful writer, even though I’ve never studied craft. Too many of these older writers wind up lecturing readers instead of engaging them.

Either way, a lot of what I saw in the queue was self-indulgent. I believe much of the publishing world encourages this approach, which is intended to validate the writer and what they believe in. But too often writers try to build their case by forcing readers to take sides in society’s ongoing cultural debates. And this only divides us further. What I always looked for was writing that understands motivation—why people believe the things they do. I wanted to see an exploration of an idea or issue instead of a predetermined position. It is a far more subtle way of writing, and it is far more powerful in the long run at bridging our divides. Let readers come to your conclusion—don’t force it on them.

I’ll be writing about that more in future posts.

Some of my personal preferences while editing at Orca:

• The quality of the writing was my top priority. Always. Because powerful, immersive writing takes readers out of their daily lives and allows them to imagine a different reality. Because literary writing encourages readers to think, to question and evolve their beliefs. It challenges them to understand characters (as in other people).

• I preferred stories that are imaginative and demanding over stories about overdone social memes. Because as a member of my Orca staff once put it, “We are past that time when just calling things out is daring or enough.”

• I would always choose an unpublished writer over a published one. There are a lot of magazines, literary journals, and publishing houses that rarely publish a debut author. So obsessed are these venues with celebrity, or the belief that their readers are only interested in reading the work of known writers, that they won’t give a new writer a fair chance. With the book publishing world this is called “platform,” a catch-22 that precludes writers from building a public persona because they don’t have a public persona. As a relatively non-platformed writer myself, publishing previously unpublished writers was always a priority with me in a very small effort to level the playing field.

• I would often choose a writer from a marginalized community over a mainstream writer. Again, it’s about creating opportunity. And usually the perspectives in those submissions offered something very different from yet another story about white existential angst that lacked specific character stakes. Just the fact that so many white writers write about existential angst is evidence of the enormous economic and cultural divides in our country. I have always been more interested in learning about things I do not know than in reinforcing the ones I do. I suppose that is my contrarian nature at work.

• I would often choose a writer from outside the USA over an American writer. Another way to publish different perspectives. Some of my most satisfying moments were when we finally published a writer from:

  • Africa

  • Italy (Where my family is from. And the fact that the essay was about Wittgenstein only made it more satisfying.)

  • The Middle East

  • Asia, and specifically south Asia

I couldn’t help often noticing a difference in tone from writers in other countries. Their stories did not have the meanness or partisanship that stories written by Americans often do. Those stories were also rarely written from a child’s point of view as so many U.S. submissions are.

My favorites were submissions from Ireland. I don’t remember too many submissions from there that disappointed. The writing was almost always imaginative, thoughtful, and lyrical. I’ve been to Ireland. They appreciate writers. They have posters and statues of writers in parks and even alleyways. The bar James Joyce frequented is a Dublin shrine. In America we honor sports stars and “reality” celebrities.

I also took pride in publishing writers from around the United States, which is why we started noting what states (or countries) each contributor hailed from in our issues. By the time we closed we had published writers from 35 states.

But there were also times when the quality of submissions made me wonder why I was in this business in the first place:

• Sometimes I wanted to decline a story just based on the title. There are some truly ridiculous titles in the slush pile. I always forced myself to read at least a couple of pages, but it never changed my mind.

• If I ever see another poem with a line about the sky being the color of a bruise, I will scream.

• I got to the point where I cringed whenever I opened a submission and saw that it was written in first-person, present tense. There were some days when it seemed like three-quarters of the submissions were written that way. Who is teaching emerging writers to write this way? Does it have something to do with our obsession with self-empowerment and personal validation? See above for why that doesn’t work. Obviously some of those FPPTs were well done because we did publish a few, but I can’t help wondering whatever happened to good old-fashioned third-person, past tense. You don’t see that much anymore, but I feel it is a far better way to create character sympathy and engage readers. Admittedly, this probably due in part to my Catholic upbringing, which emphasizes selflessness over egoism. But I still think it’s right.

• One yardstick for judging submissions that I developed: After a couple of pages did I feel like reading on or did I want to check my e-mail? If the e-mail urge won the submission was a decline. Callous, yes, but effective when you have so many submissions to get through each day.

Just so you know:

• I never considered a content warning for more than a second, and that was only to say no. I understand why others disagree. I’ve been there in my real life. But as I have gotten older I’ve tended to look at it another way. We are adults. We must recognize the world is often a horrific, hurtful place. There can be safe spaces, but I don’t believe literature should be one of them. There is only the choice between painful knowledge and willful ignorance. I believe we must confront what may hurt us. That is the only way to overcome it.

• Even on my worst day of reading I gave every submission a chance. Sometimes too much of a chance. I would feel guilty about knowing a submission was a decline after only a few sentences, and would read a couple more pages in the hope that it would improve. But they never did. I’m not talking about work that failed to fully engage, but had some spark of promise. I’m talking about the abysmal ones, the ones that make an editor want to tell the writer to find another creative outlet. Call it editor’s guilt. I lost a lot of time doing that.

• But then there were days when I found more promising submissions than was typical. Sometimes three or four in a row. I have begun to think that creative intelligence is like a wave, like a breath of inspiration that washes over the writing community, helping authors find their voices. Where it comes from I cannot say, and it is probably just my imagination. Perhaps if I understood the laws of probability better I could put a more rational explanation on it. But then if I understood the laws of probability I wouldn’t be a very good editor. So much of what we do is unquantifiable, based on personal experience and psychological responses to the work we are presented with. Even the most complex equation of probability could not factor all those things, as well as the randomness of how we slept the night before, what we ate for breakfast, how our personal relationships are going on that particular day. Maybe at some point in the future AI will allow us to account for all that and take the bias out of our decision making process. But by then AI will also be doing all the creative writing for us, so it won’t even matter. I’m kind of glad I won’t live long enough to see that.

Moving forward

I have been writing all my life. Professionally since my twenties (and even before that if you include the neighborhood newspaper I started when I was eight), and creatively for the last two decades. But running a literary journal takes a lot of time away from personal writing. Now, after those 15,000 submissions, of which I probably personally read 10,000, I am done with it. I can finally turn my attention back to writing. My hope is that I have learned enough from reading the good and the bad to begin again, to do it, as one of my favorite writers, Zadie Smith, says, to fail better.

Next Week: It’s Really All About the Voice