November 4th, 2019 - God's Caravan
Dear TNY,
“God’s Caravan” is a story you printed. Okay…
Eh. This story doesn’t incite a rage flurry for me. The surface conflict, what was going on with the pastor and the boy, was enough for me to finish this 6500+ word story. And the fact that a good portion of this story occurred in scene was a good feature too. But that’s about it.
The continual insertion of backstory was fucking dumb. Like, as an editor, you should look at this story and see that the only interesting thing is the time-moving-forward narrative of the pastor in the van and the boy. And that everything that isn’t that is getting in the way of that and it only took a couple of those fat flashback text blocks to annoy me enough to make comments about it in my copy of the doc. So, TNY, you should have asked the author to cut that shit out because it doesn’t matter. And if the author was absolutely insistent that some of the information in those asides mattered, maybe have them do the actual writing work of integrating them into the scene-narrative of the story so that the reader doesn’t have to take a break from the story to read some other shit. Nah, TNY. You opted for lazy.
That lack of editorial work aside, this story is still forgettable. The writing isn’t fresh. The transcendence isn’t there. Nothing in this is beautiful. There are a host of characters and most don’t seem to matter. There’s just no spark. Maybe there is a spark and it’s lost among all the clutter that wasn’t cut. I don’t think so, though. This is one of those stories that you read in prep for an MFA workshop, you underline a few lines and say, “Nice”, and you leave a handful of sentences at the end recommending to cut the backstory. Then you fart, scratch your butt, look out the window, and forget you ever read it. Later, when it comes to actually ‘shopping it, you look at your comments and think, I hope they can’t tell that I can’t remember this story at all.
Oh, I was having a conversation with an author friend of mine the other day about this site and he said, “You must really hate these authors.” And I explained to him that no, in fact, I do not. That all authors are capable of writing things that are not good. We all do this. The author isn’t the problem here, TNY. Again, it’s you. You choose subpar work and then you don’t edit it and pass it off as “the best”. I have nothing against any of the authors that you publish. I’m saying you shouldn’t publish the vast majority of the stories you do because they aren’t “The Best Writing Anywhere, Everywhere”. So, change the tagline. Maybe “Mediocre Writing By Authors In The New York ‘Literary’ Community”. Maybe “Inward-Looking, Self-Congratulating Circle-Jerk”. Or “Watch While We Put Something You Love In The Garbage Disposal And Destroy An Arm Of The Humanities”. Any of these would be more accurate.
Later.
Nick
