August 5th & 12th, 2019 - Motherless Child

Dear TNY,

“Motherless Child”, eh?  I made it 862 words into it and quit.  There were at least five characters introduced in the second paragraph with almost a complete lack of characterization or relationship definition.  The narration is from a fucking heinous psychic distance.  And the pacing, action, and writing are all as banal as possible.  So I couldn’t fucking do it.  The trees you murdered to put this into the world were completely wasted.  Way to increase issues with climate change while simultaneously decreasing human empathy and literary standards.  Baller.

So, I’m sitting here and once again I’m fucking pissed because you aren’t doing your fucking job.  Like, I’m going to try to be constructive here, but I’ve said this shit so many times in so many different ways that I don’t think there is a new way to say it so now I just make many curse words and froth.  I’ll try to curb that.

Deborah, I’m calling you out here.  I’m going to make some assumptions; hopefully they will be positive.  It seems like you read a lot.  Most of the stories are not total hack jobs like I’ve seen in the non-pro world.  So the stories you choose to put in the magazine are written (mostly) by writers.  But that’s the extent of your talent.  It seems like most of what you are personally reading are novels.  This story, in the small amount that I read, is for novel readers.  It’s novel writing.  Which is fine, if you are the type of person that doesn’t care about tight, compressed, clean, pointed writing.  Short stories are an excellent meal in a single sitting.  They aren’t a week of Thanksgiving meals and festivities.

And now, a quick primer on how perfect a piece must be, by length, because it seems like that lesson is necessary.

Novel:  There is so much volume that the author can fudge whole chapters.  Especially later in the novel.  The reader is so engaged that they will slog through crappy, useless writing just to finish the story.

Novella:  This is a grey area length where you can waste more than a couple of paragraphs, as in they are trash, but you can’t have a whole trash chapter.  That would be too much.

Short Story:  Maximum you can have is a half a double space page, size twelve font, wasted.  And it can’t even be totally wasted.  It has to be good, just not as good (read: pointed) as the rest of the story. 

Poem/Short Short Story:  Not a syllable can be out of place.  Great poetry has to be perfect.  Short Shorts can’t have a foul sentence.

So, you can see that the longer the piece is, the more it can meander.  It can be flowery, overwrought, contain whole chunks of worthless description, and it can take forever to define a character.  That’s exactly what this shitstick story “Motherless Child” is doing.  It’s novel quality writing (read: poor) passed off as a short story.

So, Deborah, what I’m saying is you might be great at selecting novel material, but that shit just doesn’t fly in a short story.  It makes the short story dumb.  A big, fluffy, cotton candy, navel-gazing, garbage-fest that never gets to any kind of point and has no juggernaut-drive to it.  Without that drive, a short story fails.  The novel, she doesn’t care if you waste some time.  So you’re fucked in the position you are in.  You are not qualified for this job that you have because you are treating these stories like novels and nearly all of them are fucking crap.

This leads me to my offer, once again.  Give me the slushpile for a week.  Maybe two.  And I’ll pull something, regardless of who wrote it, that fucking sings.  That kicks your fucking teeth in and upholds literary tradition and isn’t a waste of trees.  You can continue to diddle in your agent-provided, novel segment, narcissistic swill.  I’ll do the real work.  You don’t even have to come down from your ivory tower.  I’ll do this one on my own from the gutter.

Ah yes.  Fuck off.

Nick