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 What Not to Submit
By Aimee LaBrie
Columnist, Philadelphia Stories
Though I have not written any interesting
fiction in, oh, years, I still find it easy
to judge the writing of others. This
impulse comes not just from having
taken years of workshops alongside
teaching undergraduate writing, but also
from my own dark little heart, which
says something like,Well, I may not be writing,
but at least I’m not writing this kind of stuff.
However, I do think this list of things not
to do can be helpful in avoiding common
errors that seem to happen again
and again in beginning writing.
1. Having a first person narrator who
turns out to be dead at the end. As in: “And then he shot me dead...” Or, “And
that’s how I died that day.” Because, really,
how is the narrator telling the story
then? (Also, it violates rule #3, see
below). Same goes for: “And it was all a
dream.”
2. Cramming 15 characters into a ten
page story. Unless you’re George
Saunders and using this technique satirically,
the only thing it does is give your
reader a headache: “Tommy opened the
door. ‘Hi, Timmy,’ he said. Tony was in
the kitchen, blending the drinks with
Rich. ‘Come on in,’ called Joe from the
living room where he was playing cards
with Jack, Jim, Todd, and Dan. ‘Sam
called,’ announced theman with the blue
suit from the top of the stairs. The dog,
Jeff, barked. ‘We’re in for it now,’ said a
familiar voice.”
3. Again, unless you are a fantabulous
writer or a blood relation of O. Henry,
the “ah-ha” ending most often leaves
your reader feeling tricked and cheated.
The “ah-ha” ending occurs when there is
a final huge reveal at the end that turns
the entire story on its head. For instance,
you find out that the narrator,who seems
like this total womanizer (keeps referring
towomen as “bitches”) is really….a golden
retriever!
4. For literary journals, don’t submit
genre fiction. That means your story
cannot contain elves or unicorns or hobbits
or dragons or vampires or swords
andmost especially not elves on dragons
with swords chasing unicorn-riding,
undead hobbits.
5. Not a big fan of the “crazy narrator”
story. Unreliable narrator: fine. Nutso:
no good. It’s difficult to create an interesting,
complex, believable crazy, and
very easy to fall back on stereotypes
from movies and clichéd endings such as
the narrator making plans to escape his
padded cell.
6. Third person stories where the point
of view shifts suddenly and for no reason.
You’ll be reading a story written in
third-person limited (inside the mind of
just one person) for the first 10 pages,
and suddenly get a random interior
thought from a periphery character.
Often, the thought doesn’t impact the
story and so serves to just be jarring: “His
sister Mary wondered why it was that
grapes were round.”
7. I’ve been told that you’re also not supposed
to write stories about other writers,
cancer, break-ups or mental illness. I
know this rule, and yet, I have attempted
to write all of those stories with varying
degrees of failure.
8. Nonfiction masquerading as fiction.
You can spot these pieces because they
contain more “telling” rather than “showing.”
If you happen to workshop such a
piece, the author’s defense to criticism
will be “well, that’s the way it happened,
so…” So, write it as an essay.
9. Stories where the narrator is an animal
or an inanimate object. My friend Luke
recently toldme about a girl in one of his
workshops who turned in a story called “Sweat Beads.” In the story, the sweat
beads referred to the sweat between the
breasts of the female character. In any
case, cats, trees, mailboxes, etc. do not
make compelling narrators outside of
children’s books.
10. Avoid sound effects in writing unless
you’re writing a graphic novel (“The car
back-fired with a ker-blam, startling the
owl who cried hoot-hoot, setting off the
sprinklers, which went tsk-tsk-tsk amid
the frat boys yelling whoo-hoo!”) Same
goes for exclamation points! Or the
overuse of adverbs (“she advised guiltily,
knowing truly that she too was particularly
given to this gravely amateur
error”). Or the use of the participle
clause. Example: “Revving the engine on
his motorcycle, the two-year old began
to wail“ (makes it sound like the two year
old is about to take off on a Harley).
But you know what?Write whatever the
hell you want. Someone famous once
said that the secret to writing is “Ass in
chair.” At first, I thought that meant you
had to be a jackass to sit down to write.
Later, I realized it means that as long as
you’re showing up and sitting down in
front of the page, you’ve already started
to succeed. So go ahead.Write it.
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Aimee LaBrie
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