Lift your story out of the slush pile and onto the pages of your favorite journal. TL;DR Tension matters.
I hate the term "slush pile."
As a teacher, I find it mildly offensive, and more than a little pompous. Let me come down from the mount and deign to read your slushy drivel! Uh, no. I have respect for every writer out there...and I mean every, single writer. Your work might not be in fighting shape at the moment—but if you're writing, you're an artist. And your work is art. Not slush.
As a reader, however, I kind of get it. I still think the term is rude, but it serves a purpose. For me, "slush pile" evokes an image not of a stack of stories sitting neatly on my desk, but an image of an urban landfill stretching for miles and miles into a distant gray horizon, complete with seagulls and dump trucks and clouds of gritty brown dirt. Did I mention it's raining?
Reflect on that for a moment. I'm not saying your story is garbage. I'm saying your gem of a story is buried under broken refrigerators and Amazon boxes and empty tomato cans and dog throw-up. The term "slush pile" serves to send every aspiring contributor a message: It's really, really, really, really hard to get noticed.
To get inside the mind of a slush reader, find five old stories you wrote long ago, and read them in a single sitting.
If you don't have five old stories, read five of someone else's stories, or read a published journal, heck, read The Best American Short Stories of the 20th Century cover to cover. If you're reading the BASS, that's the best case scenario, but still...you're exhausted. You want to take a break from reading, even if it's the most brilliant writing on the planet. Am I right?
That's because if you're a good slush reader, you're putting all your effort into the act. You're making note of the inspired turn of phrase, the elegant arc, characters who jump off the page. Your brain is working on overdrive. Some readers stop after reading a few paragraphs, but I read every story all the way through. It's the least I can do for the submitter, who more than likely paid a small fee to submit a well-loved story. Reading closely is exhausting. It's exhausting after the first story...and more exhausting after fifth, sixth, tenth, twentieth story.
As generous as I am as a reader, even I start receiving the work like a tyrannical king.
Entertain me, now or...YOU'RE OUT!
In fact, reading slush has opened my eyes to how eye-wateringly dull my own stories can be.
There are a million "how-to" blogs on what to write in a cover letter, how to format your submission, and even what not to write about. My advice is simpler.
Serve up tension on the first page, then every page thereafter.
Not only will a slush reader take note of a grabby, tension-filled first page, but if it's me, I'll thank you for it! Who doesn't love a page-turner? I'm a reader just like anyone else—the only difference is I've already read thirty stories today before I got to yours.
But before you think I'm being too short-sighted, thick, or pedantic about this advice—or, god forbid, that I'm telling you what or how to write—let me explain what I mean by "tension."
Tension is the subtler, more malleable first-cousin of conflict. While the core conflict of the work takes center stage, tension peeks in and out of scenes, acts, and dialogue. And importantly, tension can appear so subtly that the reader might not even recognize it as such. You don't have to write spy novels or thrillers or whodunits in order to serve up tension. If you want to write a quiet scene about a young lady picking up a soft drink from the local bodega and paying the one-eyed cashier on duty with a hundred-dollar bill, FINE. Have at it! But how you write that scene matters.
Compare two versions of this short scene:
I got to the bodega around midnight and jogged to the coolers in the back, grabbing two Mexican Cokes. When I went to pay, I noticed the one-eyed cashier was on duty. I walked up and presented him with a hundred-dollar bill. He took it from me, regarding me with suspicion before holding it up to the fluorescent overheads. He wanted to check if it was real. Reluctantly, he rang me up. "What'd you do?" he asked, fixing his one good eye on me. "Rob a bank?"
It was midnight. I was parched by the time I got to the bodega and made a beeline for the back where I knew they kept their Mexican Cokes. I grabbed a couple cans and made a show of strolling casually to the one-eyed guy at the register. With a polite smile, I handed him the last of my cash: a hundred-dollar bill. He held it up to the light and scrutinized it for five, ten...eighteen seconds. Finally, he rang me up. "What'd you do?" he said, his bad eye wandering off toward the Wall's ice-cream freezer. "Rob a bank?"
The scenes describe a mundane transaction and in both cases use plain, everyday language. The first, however, feels transactional (i.e. "this happens, then that happens") while the second bristles with mini-volts of tension. The early use of the word "parched" clues us into the protagonist's desire: she's thirsty. And remember...
Desire breeds tension.
Similarly, putting "midnight" on center stage puts the reader on alert from the first. The mention of the protagonist "knowing where they kept their Mexican Cokes" echoes of secrets kept and secrets stolen. Her manner of walking casually and smiling politely suggests she's putting on an act. And while in both versions we suspect the protagonist and the one-eyed cashier have crossed paths before, the second version demonstrates the tension in real time—counting down the seconds as he checks the bill for authenticity. Finally, the scene ends on a tense moment, not with the cashier staring at the protagonist with his good eye, but with a spotlight on his other, more mysterious eye—as it wanders off in the direction of the ice-cream freezer.
So you see, tension doesn't have to mean shootouts or infidelity. Tension can happen in the quietest of moments. And tense moments don't need to be belabored in the prose—a few breadcrumbs of scenic evidence can suggest the tension buzzing underneath the physical scene. Give the reader tension, and she will read on—and maybe pass it on to decision-making editors.
With all that said, don't write for readers. Write what you want to write. It won't hurt, however, to take a step back and test your story for tension.
The good news for you is many submissions lack tension. Stories written by professors, published writers, and otherwise talented wordsmiths are regularly rejected when their pages, for whatever reason, lack the tension necessary to keep readers engaged. So if you're revising your piece for tension, you're already way ahead of the game.
So, go forth and tense up! I hope to pick your diamond out of the slush some day.
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