Above and beyond adhering to standard manuscript format as referenced in our guidelines (and believe me, I’m getting more and more stringent on observance of format), here are some pointers to stay on this editor’s good side:

• The comma is your best friend or your worst enemy.  Learn how to use it, or it will destroy the rhythm of your slaved-over sentences.
• I had not thought tense problems would be very prevalent, but guess what?  They’re more common than I had expected.  Re-read your story with an eye toward consistency in tense; unless it’s supposed to be a first-personal narrative with a very conversational tone, in which inconsistent tenses are a mark of verisimilitude, your story should probably all be told either in past tense or present tense.
• Pay attention to tone and diction.  Your writing shouldn’t sound like Maya Angelou on one page and then be thick with Lovecraftian adjectives like “eldritch” on the next.
• Pay attention to character voice.  Even more so than your authorial tone, each character’s choice of diction and vocabulary should be consistent.  Dialog should also bear at least a passing resemblance to things which one might actually say.  Here’s a hint: read your dialog out loud.  That will help you find awkward constructions, such as parentheticals, which you would use in written text but which would never come out of anyone’s mouth.
• Don’t load the first part of your story with exposition.  Before you rattle off a character’s entire life history which has brought him to the point at which the story starts; look closely at whether the readers need this information at all, and if so, whether they need it immediately in order to understand what comes next.  Is there a better way to bring the reader up to speed than a dump of background info in the first two pages?
• Don’t change the viewpoint character in the middle of a scene.  This is frowned upon by any standards, but it also happens to really rub me the wrong way.  Every scene should be told from the viewpoint of, at most, one character; if you need to change your viewpoint character, do it with a scene break.

More so than the two members of the editorial board (at least, judging from our differing responses to several submissions), I react to stories on a sentence level.  The overall concept may be sound, but if the prose doesn’t pull me in, I’ll be indifferent (or worse, downright hostile) to your submission.  Unfortunately, I know that we as writers sometimes get too familiar with our words as we write them and read them back; we can’t see the weaknesses that others might.  Read your work aloud.  Read it in a different font (you’ll be surprised how much difference this makes).  Hand a paper copy of the manuscript and a highlighter to someone reasonably intelligent and have them simply make marks wherever the prose sounds off to them, or where they didn’t understand how they got to this sentence from the previous one, or where they felt the narrative was being sidetracked by exposition or description, or where they had to backtrack and re-read a sentence to make sense of it.

And once you’ve tightened the bolts that need tightening, then send it to us.

Nathan Shumate
Editor & Publisher