How to be publishable (according to Damon Knight, Creating Short Fiction):

Editors look for a number of things, including:

– A sense of the transaction between the author and the reader. If you’re writing as if you have no readers, you’ll be right. Knight’s imaginary reader is someone who shares all his tastes but is a little smarter than him and knows more (so he has to be careful not to do anything stupid).

– A sense of form. The story needs a discernible shape.

– A command of language, including some knowledge of how to assemble words into phrases and sentences, and a good active vocabulary. [Also, I would add, some knowledge of how language is used to create fictional effects.]

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If the magazine you’re submitting to gets 4000 submissions a year and publishes 40, your chances are 1 in 100, right?

Wrong. If you submit something as bad as 90% of the people submitting do, your chances of getting published are zero. If your story is decent and falls within the magazine’s invisible boundaries, your chances may be 1 in 20, or even 1 in 4.

– (paraphrased from) Damon Knight, Creating Short Fiction.

Pretty much the point I make in The Well-Presented Manuscript, and I’ve heard variations on it from several professional editors.

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Writing for a market (Damon Knight, Creating Short Fiction):

Every market has invisible boundaries that they don’t announce. You need to know where those are, and write something fresh that falls inside them.

The best way to know where the boundaries are is to read the market carefully. If you don’t like what they publish, don’t submit.

Don’t write what you think other people are interested in if it doesn’t interest you. Nobody will be fooled.

You have to stand out as well as fit in. Editors don’t want the same thing they’ve already bought.

Don’t write characters who are not interested in themselves, who are bored, apathetic, self-pitying and passive. If you don’t like the kinds of characters that are traditional for the market, write a variation on them; don’t show your dislike by having the characters hate themselves.

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Revising (from Damon Knight, Creating Short Fiction):

Put the story away after you finish the draft, so you can come back to it fresh.

Does it make sense and mean something? If not, decide whether to abandon or rewrite.

Does it hang together? Are there pieces missing, or unnecessary pieces?

Is the opening comprehensible? Does it convey information?

Have you answered who, where, what, when? Do you at least know why? Is the opening consistent with your answer? If not, rewrite.

Does the ending round it off and complete the pattern, show the story’s meaning, satisfy the reader, explain the mystery, solve the puzzle? If not, what have you left out of the early part of the story that would make an ending possible?

Are the characters believable, consistent? Have you used the best point of view, person and tense? If not, abandon or rewrite. [I’d suggest rewriting a fresh draft, not just changing the POV, person or tense in the same file. You’re bound to miss something.]

If all that is fine, make every word and phrase justify its use. Block out a few words at a time on screen or paper, with a mask if necessary.

Rearrange awkward sentences. Shorten. Clarify.

Correct viewpoint slips.

Read your dialog aloud. Can you distinguish dialog from narrative? Does it sound natural?

Kill cliches. Correct spelling and syntax.

Keep going until you can’t stand to look at it any more.

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Damon Knight, Creating Short Fiction:

What to do when you’re stuck:

1. Track back through the story until you find where you went down the blind alley. Work forward again from there.

2. If a character is going off-script, either you don’t know enough about the character, or you now now enough that you realise she wouldn’t do what you originally planned. Either give her her head and see what happens, or change the circumstances until she will do what you wanted.

3. If you’re bored, scale back or eliminate the part that bores you.

4. If you’re stuck for a name, place, date or fact, put in a placeholder (marked in a way you can easily find when editing) and move on. Often, you’ll solve it shortly afterwards anyway, if you regain your forward momentum.

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Negative practice: if you know your writing has a fault, try to commit it as often as possible. In doing so, you are making it conscious and bringing it under your control. (It’s a psychological technique.)

– Damon Knight, Creating Short Fiction

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Six ways to think about style:

1. Variety (of sentence structure).

2. Fluency. Nothing must interrupt the flow by making the reader stumble.

3. Consecutiveness. One thing must lead on to the next, so that the reader has no place to stop and bail out.

4. Precision. Use words to mean what they mean, and not something else. “If you have only a vague idea of the difference between one word and another, you are like a carpenter who has only a vague idea of the difference between a screwdriver and a corkscrew.”

5. Economy.

6. Clarity–both simplicity and avoiding vague references.

– Damon Knight, Creating Short Fiction

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