I was reading Virginia Quarterly Review’s intriguing entry about complaints for returning submissions too quickly. They used to get angry letters because it took them months to return submissions, because they relied on paper; now, they get angry letters because thanks to their new electronic submission system, they can give something a quicker review.
Part of the problem they face is that people expect a Santa Claus response. That is, they think of editors like Santa Claus reading the letters kids send up to the North Pole. In their minds, they’re sending their story to some cute little old guy who reads it carefully, maybe over a cup of tea and some cake, then considers it over a long walk in the snow, reads it aloud to his reindeer, then returns to it later over the next couple weeks and really thinks hard about it. He’s more concerned about letting one good story go than he is about time, so he peruses it idly. He’s looking to understand the author before he’s even read the story. This vision is completely out of touch.
Back in reality, there are thousands if not millions of people who want to be published authors. They send their stories in by the truckload, especially over summer, and they all want the same Santa Claus treatment. On the other end of the process, there are readers who don’t have the time to meander through a story trying to figure out what the author meant. The editors make a smart compromise: they give each story about the same time a reader will, which is 15 seconds to five minutes, to give them some insight into what it offers. This allows them to process the load of stories and not really get backed up with 10,000 in the queue and no end in sight.
This compromise is smart, because it allows the magazines to continue operation, but it’s dumb because it means that stories get increasingly focused on the external, flashy aspects, because you’re not going to read for literary content in five minutes. If the greats of literature were submitting today, they’d be doing it for a long time before someone discovered them, because many of the greatest stories don’t immediately grab you with some outlandish, wild plot and emotional, flamboyant characters. Editors are missing out on the subtler “content” of literature because they’re focused on the external aspects in order to drop the 99.9% of stories that are not relevant.
When people write angry letters in to their editors, they’re complaining about this choke, whether it’s too fast or too slow. Right now, since the methods of submission have sped up and gotten much cheaper, it’s going too fast and so we’re choked with the lack of editor time. In the past, it moved too slowly, but much of that had to do with opening mail, marking manuscripts, and getting them back in envelopes to mail back. The problem is the same, and that’s that literature is choked with submissions.
Personally, I’d like to see a return to a hierarchy of journals and literary magazines. Not every magazine should be subjected to the same flood of stuff. It makes more sense to have some magazines filter it all, and other more established magazines to publish out of that flow, so that stories move up the chain and at the end of the year, we have some magazine which is publishing the top fifty stories in all of North America, for example. It might make the submission frenzy abate a bit, and might give editors some breathing room to consider what makes great literature, instead of looking for the “isn’t total junk” category.