Furry Writers' Guild Forum

"Live slush pile" panel concept

General Writing Discussion
#1

This type of panel has apparently been done at sf/f cons, and I was wondering if anyone had seen something like this at a furry convention yet. It might be a good choice for RF, especially if a lot of the fandom’s editors are in attendance.

Basically, the panelists are all editors or slush readers, and writers bring the first page, single-spaced, of a story or novel to the panel. One of the panelists reads the page out loud, and the others listen and raise their hand once the work hits the point where they would stop reading/reject the story (for whatever reason). Once all the editors raise their hands, the reader stops, and they comment on the page. No comments are allowed from the audience.

The pages are submitted anonymously, though in at least one version of this panel, if someone’s page gets all the way through without stopping, the submitter is invited to stand for applause.

#2

I think you’d have to be very brave to submit something! But an interesting learning process for everyone present, and I bet there’d be some great discussion among the eds.

#3

I have not heard of such a panel, but if I went to a con and learned of it, I’d bring something if for no other reason than to gain some insight on why my stuff keeps getting rejected.

#4

That sounds like fun

#5

That does sound like a lot of fun!

#6

Sounds like fun! If I ever make it out to a con again, count me in.

#7

That does sound neat. I think I’d be up for that. I guess, as the editor of ROAR, I’d be one of the editors? I’m still getting used to this “being an editor” thing.

#8

pipes up Sounds interesting and fun!

#9

I’d gladly submit material, provided that I had faith in the professionalism of the panelists. IMO, it wouldn’t be easy to get more than one or two experienced editors together. Only a very large or lucky con could pull it off.

#10

Well, FurPlanet and Sofawolf have several editors between them with years of experience, and there are other folks who would qualify depending on how one wants to measure. (The fandom does have people lurking in it who’ve done professional editing in mostly non-furry contexts, like Mel. White, and people who’ve done editing for paying markets within the fandom a long time ago, like, uh, me.) It’d be tough to pull off at smaller cons, certainly, but at this point there’s probably a half-dozen ones that could be considered “big enough.”

#11

I’d be down for this at RF. I’ll recommend it to Sterling next time I see him, or at least to Bliz so he can throw the idea Sterling’s direction :3

#12

For what it’s worth, to the editor of a furry anthology who has to choose 12-15 stories from among 20 submissions, the notion of the “slush pile” has a very different meaning than it does for an editor at a mainstream publisher who receives a thousand submissions per year and will only publish maybe a couple dozen.

#13

I’ve (attempted to) run magazines that were getting around 10-15 submissions for each available slot, and this was back in the days before electronic submissions were a thing. It’s fascinating, by which I mean kind of panic-inducing. I haven’t ruled out another attempt, now that I have about two decades more life experience and now that electronic submissions not only are a thing but it’s possible to make them a required thing – but it’s definitely a different endeavor.

#14

I can see this being an awesome panel concept, and I can also see this being something I should never, ever be allowed to do. I can be really harsh in the slush pile.

#15

I think revealing the harshness is kind of the point.

#16

Agreed with Ryff here. There are going to be some very broken hearts, but at the same time it’ll give writers a good chance to get a better idea of what editors and publishers are looking for.

#17

Oh yes I would do this.

The harshness of reality, but not the harshness of cruelty. No panelist should act like American Idol’s Simon.

#18

Hrm. This sounds questionable for a good deal of reasons, and I think if you guys did decide to go through with this, you’d have to be very careful with how you approached the panel and the subject matter. I’m going to go through a few of the things that you might want to be wary of.

  1. A panel about rejection might be harsher than the actual slushpile. The incentive of a panel is to communicate with your audience and being receptive to them. If an audience is looking bored, people on said panel are going to have more of an incentive to show off what they know. That means they will likely be more decisive or susceptible to pet peeves than they might be in private when they look over a piece, because they do want to give the audience a show. That can be misleading.

  2. Anthologies and book sellers have target audiences and purposes. This means that good stories get rejected by editors (and they know that this isn’t a rare thing.) Occasionally, one piece might feel more technically proficient than another, but that other piece might go better with the already accepted collection. Any story can always be improved (phrasing, appeal to emotion, engagement of scene, utter rewrite) but a rejection doesn’t necessarily mean “you weren’t good enough,” nor is that always an editor’s belief. In editing workshops, I learned part of being an editor is making hard decisions. Sometimes there isn’t enough page space, and rejections are made based on composition strength as opposed to individual work.

  3. Editors view harsh criticism differently from non-editors. Sometimes I do think an editor can become jaded by the process and forget that writers are scared. Even the good ones. This is even more true of writers who have not worked in editorial positions, and don’t understand what an editor has to go through. A good editor knows that the process can be tortuous. They know that they might have to restrain personal writing biases and think about the piece with fairness and with a discerning eye before they can make a judgement. Sure, that judgment can be easy. We could get a submission where the voice or tense isn’t consistent. Some of us might get pissed when we see a typo in the first sentence and drop it. For some of us, if there’s a single typo on the page, we’ll stop reading. I am not the kind of editor that could dismiss a potentially strong piece because of a few typos, but I know some of us are, and I know that’s a valid decision making process for a very competitive spot. (And we all know that competition between anthologies varies greatly. Something like Heat will have poor Darkend and Sofa Wolf’s other editors drowning in a deluge of submissions whereas Rainfurrest’s adult anthology couldn’t even fill its quota last year.)

Hopefully I’m starting to convince some of you why this might be a more difficult endeavor than it seems. I think part of becoming a good writer is at least becoming familiar with the administrative aspect of the editing process (like picking between two good submissions from the slush pile). Perhaps the panel could focus more on teaching the participating writers how that acceptance process can work in a variety of situations. The editors could make their own rough drafts to present to the other editors, too, so that way the panel feels less tense and becomes more informative. Path Hyena said once in a podcast interview that the last thing you want to do in a panel is dominate or isolate your audience (paraphrasing that). I think he had the right idea.

If an audience member sees editors being egregiously harsh, it will confirm to them that editors are impetuous, narrow-minded and aren’t even paying attention to the stories that they’ve been sent. Then said author will never try to improve because they think it won’t matter. We don’t want to create more of those writers, in my opinion. (Not everybody is going to act like that, of course, but some people I’d want to help before I think they’re too far gone.)

I was also thinking the same. Right now, furry is community driven and grass-roots based. Our big advantage at the moment is that we can actually have a personal, hands-on approach when it comes to upholding community writing standards. We don’t typically have to send out 1000+ mail-merge rejections when it does come down to that. That’s why I think the editors showing the different valid reasons they’d reject their own pieces in the panel would come across as less icy.

Help people understand, and get them excited about thinking like an editor.

#19

I think it’s possible to do it without being unreasonably harsh. Frankly, I would suspect that the writers who would walk away thinking editors are impetuous and narrow-minded probably came in the room with that mindset, either because of getting rejected or because they’ve bought into the “traditional publishing is dead” argument.

I also think it’s worth pointing out that even though the fandom’s editorial world may be a little different, some furry writers aren’t just looking to be published in the fandom. If you want to publish outside furry, you have to learn how the mainstream editors are going to look at things, and as has already been mentioned, they’re going to be far more selective. This could be a way to point out differences, like “this doesn’t bother me, but another editor might reject it for this.”

#20
I would suspect that the writers who would walk away thinking editors are impetuous and narrow-minded probably came in the room with that mindset, either because of getting rejected or because they've bought into the "traditional publishing is dead" argument.

Right, but do you see that how a person coming to a convention and watching a panel about the selection process might not necessarily have professional experience, or might get mixed ideas about expectations? I’m certain some of them will hold that aforementioned opinion, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they have to be stuck on that opinion, or that a charismatic educator can’t convince them differently.

Also, in my previous post I tried to explain the troubles that this panel might go through as a public speaking piece. It is going to be objectively difficult to pull off with such a comprehensive subject matter. We’d be showing people the tips of different iceburgs in a 1 to 2 hour session.

At the beginning of the panel, if you are focusing specifically on non-fandom publications, you would want to make it clear that “this is how the selection process happens in non-furry at the company _____.” It would be even more helpful to get in contact with an editor from that specific company who is still in the market and who still has that experience to elucidate the differences between large press and small press right now, today. If they didn’t come to the panel themselves, you could at least interview them and read off what they have to say. Harlequin books is not going to have the same selection process as, say, Apex Magazine. “Mainstream” as a term is a bit too nebulous for me and has rarely been a useful or informative phrase. If I went to one of my mentors in UNCW’s publishing labs and asked them “how would I become an author at a mainstream publication,” they would cock their head at me and say “which one?”

If you have specific editors from different furry presses speaking, and want to make the focus acceptance for fandom publications, you’d want to have them talk about how their selection process differs from one another, because that process is certainly going to be different.

I know that for some furry is viewed as a sort of writing training ground before they can get into non-fandom markets, but a panel isn’t going to give authors the same kind of experience that semester long editing classes and workshops will give them. A panel should expect that the audience will be coming from different places of experience and should cater to that. People want to learn, but they also want to have a good time, especially when they are at a convention.