Why your story was rejected: Tales from the slush pile
Just over year ago, the New Smut Project opened to submissions for Erato. We had room to publish pieces from up to 50 authors. We received submissions from over 300.
Stories we accepted including science-fiction prose poetry about a polyamorous triad on a diplomatic mission, a kinky story written entirely in dialogue, hilarious historical fiction, sexy novel excerpts, and translations from Spanish. We found beautiful pieces that subverted expectations, played with tropes, and celebrated many variations of gender expression and sexual preferences.
But then we had to reject all the rest. Understandably, “We didn’t have enough room to fit this is” isn’t the most satisfying explanation for a writer whose story has been rejected. Why, you want to know, did we strive to make room for some, but not for others?
Here are some observations from my reading of the slushpile. While Erato is an erotic flash fiction anthology, I think many ideas hold across forms and genres. I hope they will prove useful for writers, for readers wondering what happens behind the scenes, and for other editors (especially newish ones like us) who might feel less alone.
The #1 thing you can do to improve your acceptance rate is to read the submission guidelines. The guidelines are there for a reason. (I have a future blog post in my drafts meditating on what we put in the guidelines, why, and how they worked out.) If your story doesn’t fit the call, send it to where it will fit instead.
If your story does fit the call, please use the file format the guidelines request, include the info in your cover letter that we ask for, and use the subject line we suggest so your email doesn’t get eaten by the spam filter.
This isn’t a matter of editors seeking docile authors to boss around. The authors I’ve been most grateful for as an NSP editor are the ones who ask questions, make suggestions, and call me out when I slip up. They help me improve, and they do that by being engaged and helping me achieve the goals we both share. Following the guidelines is a quick way to show you are engaged, that you care, that you’re vibing with the editors’ goals. Plus, seriously, the spam filter eats stuff, take the lifeline I throw you in the form of a recommended subject line.
The #2 tactic to improve your odds of acceptance is to proofread/self-edit, not just for the absence of typos, but for vividness, clarity, coherence, a sense of giving a damn and having something to say. Hunt down your pleonasms. Make sure each sentence is interesting. A typo won’t sink an otherwise great story, although I do calculate necessary copyediting time, and a story that requires a lot of effort to be made readable needs a lot of awesome to outweigh that. A story draft with widespread infelicity, whatever its promise, should be nurtured before it reaches my desk–by the author, a beta reader, fellow workshop participants, a hired copyeditor, someone.
Despite my love of well-written sentences, however, our initial rejection decisions mostly came about from content, not style.
- Failure one: The story wasn’t erotica or erotic. We specifically said “submissions should be arousing” to drive this idea home. Yet we received pieces that were excellent examples of other genres–including horror stories so accomplished that co-editors had to leave each other content warnings in our submission notes so nobody read one during lunch or before bed. I’ll just say that I didn’t expect serial killers to appear in response to my call for submissions for a “sex-positive” anthology with numerous pastel cover art mockups. I suppose the thought process here might have been “well, I won’t self-reject,” and I respect that. In theory. In practice, sometimes you have to self-reject to save yourself and the editors’ time, not to mention peace of mind and/or stomach.
- To say nothing of the serial rapist stories, by which I mean both stories about serial rapists and certain authors who sent multiple stories about rapists, and a few stories about underage characters, none of which we did, could, or wanted to accept. And our guidelines made this clear, even if the surrounding pastel covers of smiling adults didn’t (hint: they did).*
Yeah, nonconsensually receiving stories about nonconsensual sex is a trip. Moving on, more unsubtle failures to read or follow the guidelines:
- We had a few people send stories way over 2,000 words, or more than 3 stories–multiple authors sent four pieces “because they’re short.” Dude, this is a call for flash fiction, they’re meant to be. A surprising number of people failed to write the story’s title in the subject line as we asked, although they did write “Submission” as we asked. Go figure. And some sent PDFs or Pages files even though we offered a smorgasbord of options I can actually open on my non-Mac and edit (if I ever accept a story that’s only available in PDF, I can tell you I am not the person doing the work of getting it into a copyeditable format).
- We didn’t think our guidelines for a sex-positive erotica anthology would have to explicitly suggest “try writing sex between characters who actually like each other” and/or “try writing sex between characters who actually like having sex.” So another unexpectedly common reason we rejected stories was because they were about people having sex they didn’t enjoy with people they didn’t like–or one or the other; either on its own was enough to sink a story for our purposes. And I’m not talking about “enemies to lovers” jaunts; these lacked the passion (or the character growth, which to be fair is hard to achieve in <2,000 words, though not impossible). Instead, they just left me with a sort of grimy ennui. I felt less sexy for reading them. The opposite of the Erato experience.
- So is it, as my girlfriend said when I complained to him, “so hard to write enthusiastically consenting adults doing sexy things?” I think the problem is people try to inject “conflict” because they believe a story needs to have it. And despising the person you’re with does create conflict. But what a story really needs is tension, which can arise from many sources**–such as the pull of desire. As a reader, I love to be moved by the thrill of discovery (something stories of people with Playboy’s idea of a perfect body having mechanically perfect PIV sex lack, for that matter). And effective suspense in erotica may come less from will they/won’t they and more from when and how will they? Overall, then, interpersonal conflict is not the only option, nor, for our purposes, the best. Especially when our guidelines suggested other sources of conflict, like “two lovers vs. one’s arousal nonconcordance”!
- The other thing is, some “conflict” left us wondering if the characters wouldn’t have been better off if they hadn’t tried to have sex in the first place. NOT the best fit for a sex-positive anthology! (By “sex positive” we at NSP don’t mean sex is always positive, but that we are interested in exploring the ways and times when sex is a positive force in people’s lives. This can include stories where characters reclaim their sexuality after previous traumatic experiences, like Annabeth Leong’s “Return to Rope” in Between the Shores.) Some of the stories we received seemed to carry the message “sexual desire is bad and you’ll be punished for it.” Yeah, no thanks. Literary sex does not have to be bad. Enjoying yourself is not something only mindless plebes do.
- Numerous stories, despite our body-positive guidelines, were based on the idea that a huge cock on its own is sexy, and the absence of one is tragic. Similar if a little less strident were the representations of flat stomachs, washboard abs, and large breasts (but not too large, lest the woman they’re attached to also become large). Does any of this actually work for people? I mean, no shame; certainly the erotica I read and write has been known to revisit particular fantasies with only moderate variations. But Erato is for people who got bored of these particular fantasies of “perfect” bodies, or were never into or included in them in the first place.
- You’ll likely be rejected if you think it’s cool to send a feminist-identified erotica call a story where the male protagonist only identifies his female sex partners by their hair colors.
- Or if the writing is, as they say, “visually oriented” but you seem never to have actually looked at a flesh-and-blood woman in your life. Much less imagined what it’s like to be one. No, our bodies (cis or trans), minds, and/or social roles don’t work like that — however much you might wish they did.
- When writing erotica, remember you’re competing with visual porn: a story that’s a list of actions without sensory detail, characterization, or emotional stakes (not necessarily romantic), so that we could be watching just anyone have sex, isn’t an improvement on going to the many websites where we can literally watch just about anyone having sex.
Other problems showed up long before we even read the attached story:
- You don’t need to explain your story in the cover letter (except in rare cases where the call for submissions asks you to do that). It’s a 2,000-word story; we don’t need to pre-game by reading another 250 words of summary or explanation of your symbolism…or, awkwardly, autobiography where you explain the heroine isn’t precisely your ex-girlfriend but does share her initials and hair color and maybe a few more identifiable details… Editing erotica is a fraught area of pseudo-intimacy anyway, and some authorial background information is helpful (“This is an #OwnVoices piece because like the main character, I have fibromyalgia”; “When not writing bondage erotica, I’m a rigger for Cirque du Soleil”), but don’t make it weird with TMI. Especially TMI about a third party who doesn’t know you’re writing to us about her (yeah, it’s usually a her).
- Not a cause for rejection on its own, but a tip: You don’t need to include the copyright symbol in your cover letter or at the beginning or end of your story.
- A few people spelled the anthology’s title as Erota. I don’t blame them for a slip of the fingers, but I do wonder why they didn’t proofread before hitting “send,” or didn’t copy & paste our own spelling from the guidelines, my usual technique. I also recommend doing this for the editors’ names, which for Erato submitters who did this prevented the embarrassment of writing to “Mr” anyone (we have no Mr.s on our editorial team; meanwhile, “Sirs and Madams” doesn’t cover the full range of genders). “Dear Alex Mill and T.C. Mill” is perfectly fine, and more polite than “Dear Mr. T.C. Mill and Mr. Alex Freeman” actually!
- A weak story title can be redone, a bland title may become memorable if it’s attached to a fantastic story, and frankly we saw some amazing titles that went over terrible stories. But there were also some pieces I predicted I’d reject just from the title, and proved correct. And there were two or three pennames I just flat-out said NO to. You should sound like a writer and not a cartoon character. Not least for the sake of the people adjacent to you on the Table of Contents.
- You only need to list 2-3 previous publications in your cover letter–the most recent, the best, and/or those most similar to the place you’re submitting to now. Since this is flash fiction, it’s possible to send a list of publications longer than the actual submission. But it won’t do you any good.
Okay, past the cover letter, let’s talk about my own favorite aspect of stories: style…or lack thereof. Stories that were consistently nongrammatical worked as prose poetry. But we did read some pieces with issues like:
- Point of View, often using too distant or inconsistent a POV. Most readers expect one POV per scene, and especially in flash fiction most stories only need one POV (though we published some submissions that skillfully used multiple!). What you want to avoid is a jarring “head hop” effect where we can never tell whose perspective a given sentence is from, or a POV so distant we can’t really get a feel for the people or events. It’s difficult to make a pure omniscient narrator work in the 21st century–not impossible, but an uphill battle. And the lower slopes are littered with the fallen bodies of those who tried.
- Yeah, as I often say as well as demonstrate, metaphors are a realm of potentially great reward and certainly great risk.
- Dialogue: if it’s wooden, hard to follow, tagged distractingly, tagged confusingly, or so poorly punctuated it’ll take your copyeditor an hour to fix your story, rejection becomes likely.
- Showing vs telling: especially finding a balance–too much of either can make a story boring, either vague or deathly slow-paced.
- Tone: lots of different tones can be erotic–humorous, bawdy, romantic, wistful, thoughtful, urgent, curious, even frustrated or bittersweet. But others just aren’t. Even when characters liked each other and enjoyed the sex they had, the author sometimes didn’t seem to feel that way. Their tone of arch smugness sneered at the characters for daring to be sexual (especially while old, or fat, or otherwise marginalized). Contemptuous =/= sexy. Neither do whiny, egotistical, or contagiously miserable.
- There were also stories where word choice was all over the place so that we couldn’t figure out what we were supposed to be feeling. Victorianisms alongside neologisms alongside “betwixt her buxom tatas.” Yes, laughter is sexy, but see also what I said above about being a writer and not a cartoon character.
- Speaking of probably unintentional hilarity, we spotted malapropisms suggesting a bad relationship with the Muse of Langauge or with one’s beta reader. Rye smiles, the peeks of her breasts, and so on in that vain (sic). Slip-ups happen to the best of us; I’ve been known to type “there” when I mean “their” because my brain knows better but my fingers don’t. Even so.
- One or two stories were so overwritten it took teamwork, and guesswork, to figure out what they were depicting. After answering “What’s this author on about?” the next question usually was “Why couldn’t they just say that?”
- Other stories were so underwritten that the proverbial Ikea manual was sexier.
Meet my new crush. Let’s pretend he’s asking “So honey, what are you wearing?’ in the image to the right, and for bonus points, let’s pretend I photoshopped the booklet he’s holding to have ERATO’s cover. And of course his honey is wearing many shades of beige.
- Again, a typo, even on the first page, won’t get you automatically rejected. But I observed many stories we rejected for other reasons had typos on the first page. Might not be a coincidence.
Length is an especially live issue with flash fiction, but these snarls also appear in short stories, novels, essays, even poems:
- Your story was too long, even if it was within the guidelines: too slow-paced, pleonastic, padded, or meandering to an unclear destination.
- I’m not sure we accepted any story that began with a “how we met” summary. Some include brief “how we met” flashbacks that I think work quite well, but they tend to open with immediate action, a strong image, a line of dialogue, something that connects with the reader.
- With respect to Salinger, and those who enjoy starting with the David Copperfield crap (it certainly has its place in longer stories!)–skip it here.
- One secret recipe–-and my not-so-platonic Platonic Ideal of submissions–is to start the story at the sex (or in the middle of the sex, or in a breather between sex). We can figure out who these people are and why they’re in bed together as we proceed.
- Generally speaking, the reader who turns to erotic flash fiction is in search of friction-inducing hotness now. So opening with a meet cute 5 years before the lust blossoms doesn’t work for them. (Again, flashing back to one can work, though.)
- Then again, I often start my stories in the midst of a sex scene and they *still* grow to 4,000 or 5,000 words long. Flash fiction is, indeed, hard.
- On the flip side, your story was too short: it failed to expand on interesting events, to add characterization or feeling. Not evocative. You made a flash fiction by writing the synopsis of a longer story–and people don’t often read synopses for fun. In general, and in my humble opinion, flash is too short for much summary: what I love about it is its reliance on vivid scenes.
- OR you made a flash fiction by chopping off the first few thousand words of a longer story–I think opening in media res is rewarding when done well, but it’s also a challenge. For some stories we thought the writing was great and not overwritten, but we still scratched our heads at the context or lack thereof. One reason I like stories that open with characters in bed is because it’s pretty clear what they’re doing and how they got there (they liked each other and wanted to be–right?).
And then we rejected some stories for failures of personal taste.
- Everybody’s id is different. Plus we were balancing the joys and dismays of 3 co-editors and the anticipated tastes of Erato’s readers. I’m so grateful to my co-editors for the balance they provided; if I picked every piece I liked, the tone of the anthology would have ended up more bittersweet with some candy-fluff whiplash.
- This is to say: a story can be quite good and still be rejected for subjective reasons.
- And everyone’s idea of a buzzkill is different.
- And yet…if you inject a paragraph about the protagonist’s mother or child in the midst of a sex scene and you’re getting lots of rejections, I’d suggest deleting that paragraph. It will only help.
Also, a story can never stand on its own in a slushpile full of hundreds of stories.
- Most painful were the wonderful stories that happened to cover the exact same topic in the same way as three other equally or more wonderful stories.
- And then at least ten people sent in versions of something we didn’t care for–what is up with sex robots? (We did publish a story about android sex, but it was about two characters connecting, not one character interacting with a flashy sex toy. And it’s not like we didn’t accept excellent stories about masturbation either! But authors who included sex robots got distracted by the shiny toy and generally failed to tell us anything new or interesting about sex. It didn’t help that the sex robots tended to step out from the pages of Playboy and enact bog-standard fantasies.)
- Meanwhile I discovered some pairings were unexpectedly rare–NB/NB I realized might be thinner on the ground, but we also had very, very few NB/M pairings compared to NB/F ones. Also some premises, settings, and kinks didn’t show up as anticipated. I don’t think this is something you could determine going by published works, because I believe some get published disproportionately–maybe because editors are so pleased to finally see some. And hey, I’ve been the token femdom writer before, so I kind of get it.
Here is probably the most controversial reason for rejection (or maybe it isn’t but it puts me in a spitfire mood): This story of yours is actually quite good and interesting. But the other piece(s) you submitted to our call were horrible, either in terms of craft failure or especially because they revealed a weird (mis)understanding of how to write sex–or write about women or gay or black or disabled people. And it made us not want to work with you.
Rejections aren’t personal. In Erato’s crowded field, I had to reject people I’m friendly with and authors whose stories I’ve read elsewhere and admired. No editor accepts your work just to be nice to you (and tell that to your imposter syndrome if it claims otherwise!). But if I have to say no to people I like, I’m very much not inclined to accept stories from people I don’t get the impression really like me. There’s some stuff it’s just rude to send a queer woman who asked for “sex positive, body positive” and consensual sex stories. Even here, though, it’s most importantly a matter of business: I try to include authors I can trust to promote the anthology without saying something flat-out against the spirit of it!
I don’t need to agree with authors on everything, and there are times I’ve benefitted from pushback or a new perspective. But that helpful pushback generally doesn’t come from the person who sent us one really good story and one story from the POV of a self-confessed rapist. Or sex killer. Or just a whiny misogynist.
(It’s not that I identify the author with these characters; I’m happy to trust they’re very different in person! But if the author thinks these stories fit the pastel-covered, sex-positive feminist-identified anthology, or doesn’t care…you see my problem.)
***
This blog post based on my experience co-editing Erato is far too long to itself be submitted to Erato–at least if I take the guidelines seriously. As I should. But these thoughts have been simmering the past year (in between other life stuff, and personal tragedy and transformation, plus the actual editing and construction of the anthology). I think it’s time to share them with curious readers and writers who they may help!
Also…I’m not saying a new call for submissions will be appearing from NSP soon, but…if you’re a champion breath-holder, you could give it a try.
Endnotes:
*Regarding noncon, I came across an interesting stat: Lonnie Barbach, editing The Erotic Edge in 1993, observed “Of the stories submitted by men, almost twenty percent dealt with [rape and forced sex]. The protagonists of these stories, usually male authority figures–judges, policemen, and teachers–use the power of their positions to get women to submit sexually. Only one woman wrote a story based on coercive sex. I included none of these stories because I believe without the consent of both parties, the sexual experience is really about coercion or violence, neither of which is compatible with eros.”
Barbach puts it well, though in my experience the gender breakdown is rather different. Women write nonconsent fantasies as well (which is perfectly fine), and sometimes even submit them to publications that have asked not to see them (less fine, and painfully ironic). I also remember receiving a story during our first calls for Heart, Body, Soul and Between the Shores, written by a man about, iirc, a policewoman using her authority to force sexual submission. A session or two of a gender studies course might fruitfully explore what’s going on there, and I like femdom, but what I don’t like is getting nonconsensual stories when I have explicitly expressed that I will not consider publishing them.
I wonder if Barbach’s guidelines included a message to the effect of “all characters must express their consent”–perhaps not, since it was almost 20 years ago, before I think “affirmative consent” became a catchphrase, and she might not have anticipated the particular responses she got. Even so, let’s just say you should probably take it as a given that no erotica market wants to publish stories about nonconsensual sex (maybe they can’t for legal/distribution-related reasons). Dubcon, edgy roleplay, and similar realms of fantasy are usually, in my experience, described explicitly as something the market is good with seeing if it’s something they’re able to publish.
**My intuition that “conflict” is not actually necessary to a story received unexpected backup in Henry Lein’s essay for SFWA, which observes “conflict” is a development of modern Western literary criticism. As a counterexample, Eastern storytelling makes use of a four-act structure based not on conflict or tension but on harmonizing elements and incorporating revelations.
Another counterexample is poetry, which holds the reader’s attention but not by using conflict or leaving you in suspense about the ending (at least not as suspense is generally considered). Flash fiction shades into prose poetry, so the techniques and structures likely work for both. At least they do for this one reader.
