A Peek Behind the Editorial Curtain — The Winnowing Boards

So your beautiful little story has survived slush! Hurray, right? You’ve officially passed a major milestone. The vast majority of submissions never make it any further than the slush round, and here your story is, scooped out and passed along to the second round we call the Winnowing Boards.

Now, only a couple dozen stories out of the four or five hundred we get every month actually make it to Winnowing. So make sure to give yourself a pat on the back. A writer’s life is tough, and you’ve got to see seize those little moments of validation when you find them.

When the stories go up on the Winnowing Boards, the entire staff scoots on over to take a gander. And this is when the blood begins to flow. There’s no simple yes/no/maybe in this round. Oh no. This is where the scalpels and magnifying glasses come out. The plot holes are teased out. Dialogue is poked and prodded. Errors in tense and grammar are brought to light.

Basically, it’s brutal.

And still some of us will fall in love with your story, ready to defend it to the Editor until the bitter end. Or some of us will hate it, thinking it too dreadfully flawed to ever be saved. But still, most stories will fall back into that dreaded middle land of “good but not great”.

Then comes the vote. Quite democratic, eh? And here you thought we threw the manuscripts into a cauldron and any that bubbled blue smoke were the ones that we published… Silly hobbitses…

Finally, watching all this very closely, is She with Great Power aka our Editor in Chief, Suzanne. She reads all the comments with the staff has left, takes in the voting, and most of all, the merit of the stories themselves.

Cannot stress that enough. The merit of the stories themselves. Not their message. Or author. Or group popularity. Or what’s trending on Twitter.

The story.

And the acceptance letter is sent.

But let me tell you a secret…

If you can make the slush readers fall in love with your story, they will lobby the Editor, battering her with pleas for your story, and sometimes…sometimes…they can change her mind.

So my advice for all three wooden nickels it’s worth is this: write the best story you can. Write from your heart. But most of all, keep writing. And submit!

Much love,
Anna