So You Want to Start a Zine: The Editorial Process

(photo taken by the lovely Diana Rowland; text by John Klima)

This is going to be overly simplistic, so bear with me.* Even so, it's still pretty long.

In my mind, there are a few basic things that you look for when editing short fiction. I don't have to explain why you would be editing, do I? I do? OK, let's look at that for a bit. I work under this tenet:

No story, from any writer, comes to you 100% perfect with 0% need for edits.

Does that make sense? No matter the stature of the writer, no matter how good it appears to be, every piece needs editing.** Maybe you don't feel comfortable editing. That's OK, it's your job. If you make sensible requests, your writers will appreciate it.

The big thing you can be sure of, if you don't edit, people will be able to tell. And people won't keep reading unedited publications for very long. These days, if they want that, they can read a blog, or look for someone's fiction online. If you're asking people for $$, you need to provide them the service of being an editor.

What I want, when I read a story, is a seamless flow. I don't want to come out of the story with places where I stumbled in my reading, or with questions that haven't been answered. And this is what you look for when you edit.

If you hit a part that makes you stop reading, took a look at it. Try to figure out what specifically made you stop. Dissect it, show it to the author. Yes, you sometimes have to open up a story and have the writer take a look at its guts. Some writers don't mind, some do. You'll have to learn the hard way who is whom. Either way, it's your job.

Did you skim over a section? Go back and re-read it. Does it need to be there? When you've finished the story, does it add anything to the overall story? There should not be stuff in the story just for the sake of being in the story. If cutting it seems too distract (it's not) perhaps re-writing it would make more sense. Is there a way to tie the section into the overall plot?

When you finished the story, where there parts that bothered you? Sections that brought up questions with no corresponding questions that answered? Ask these questions to the author. There could be places where more exposition is needed to help allay questions. It could be that the idea itself was not well-formed enough and the section needs to be cut or re-written.

Is that making sense? Some other things I try to watch for when editing:

1. set up with no pay-off
   
2. pay-off with no set up
3. confused character motivation
   
4. lack of character motivation
5. an unclear timeline/order of events
6. little nits that have to be cleaned up

There's more of course, but these are some of the basic things I look for. The last one falls under skimming and stumbling mentioned above, but I want to make some specific points.

1. Since I think of stories as "set up + pay-off"*** this one should be obvious. Either the story's set up doesn't pan out in the end, or the ending isn't set up properly by the beginning. You can have a rare occasion where a story is entirely set up, but more likely than not, you need some set up that leads to a pay-off.

This can be as basic as a story that starts out great but fizzles in the end, or a story that wallows around a bit at the front and then pulls it together for a great finish. But it can also be a story that sets up one thing and then finishes with another.

In all these cases, you'll need to work with the writer to make the story as strong in the beginning as it is at its end. The Alistair Rennie story from issue 15/16 initially had a poor setup. There was a lot of extraneous material that didn't add to the overall story and we ended up cutting almost all of it. Cutting that material let the reader get straight into the story rather than reading what amounted to a prologue.

2. Jay Caselberg's story "A Taste for Flowers" I felt needed a little punch at the end. The story was creepy and seditious, but I thought it needed more. The difficulty was adding that more into the story without tipping your hand too soon.

3. Confused motivation is where you have characters do things that don't make sense. Their motivation is not set up properly so that their later actions make sense within the confines of the story.**** I don't acquire much that has confused motivation, as this is one of my pet peeves as an editor/reader. I don't mind being surprised by a character's actions, but you have to give me an opportunity to realize what might happen.

4. Almost worse is when you don't have any motivations for the characters and the story is a series of unconnected scenes. I say worse (and I've written my share of stuff like this) because it's the written equivalent of watching a David Lynch movie with the sound turned off. You can kind of follow along, but you'll miss something along the way.

It's rare that I would find this type of story compelling enough to acquire it in the first place. It would need some sort of thread that you could suss out, or have a leit motif that allowed the reader to draw a connection through the scenes.

Brendan Connell's Dr. Black stories (like the one in issue #12 for example) come to mind. There be scenes in these stories that seem unrelated to the rest of the narrative thread. But, when you finish the story, you realize that they helped elucidate another scene in the story.

5. "Perfect Tense" by Lisa Mantchev from issue #14 has a convulted story structure that got a little sticky towards the end. The point of view was shifting from one character to another throughout the story, but at the end (where the sections were only one sentence long) it seemed that the perspective hadn't shifted. If you read it through as though the perspective kept shifting, your understanding of the story would've gotten confused. After checking with Lisa, we got them sorted out in the proper order.

6. Darin Bradley's story, "All the Blue in the Mirror," for the next issue had a bunch of little things that I felt had to be addressed before the story was ready. I don't want to discuss too much before the issue comes out, but there's a major event that the plot revolves around, and I had a lot of questions about it. The event is essentially a mystery, definitely a mystery to the reader, so I was willing to let a little obfuscation slide, but there were some things that seemed to be contradictory.

Bradley's story had a little bit of the set up/pay-off problem, and a little character motivation problem, and a little chronology of events problem. None of them alone were enough to be a major issue, and even all together they did not amount to a lot, but in my mind they needed to be addressed.

There's much, much more. But those are some of the things I run into time and again. If you're starting a magazine/zine/whatever, I hope this helps you when it comes to editing your content.

And of course, it all comes down to the individual story and author. The same author may react differently to similar suggestions on different stories. The thing to remember, the story is the author's, and it's up to them to accept or revise. The only place where you can feel confident that there's actually something irrefutably wrong to be fixed is when you find spelling and grammatical errors.*****

As the editor, you do your best to point out where the story isn't working for you, and the author has to make the changes. It can be frustrating when you run into something flawed in a story and the author either can't see it, or is unwilling to change it, but it's their baby in the end, and they have to live with however it turns out.

There's a story break in Hal Duncan's "The Chiaroscurist" from issue #9 and Logorrhea that I marked to change. The break was in the middle of a conversation with no change--same narrator, same point of view, etc.--after the break. but Hal explained that he wanted a pause in the story and was forcing the reader to literally feel it. I left it in, and had it questioned by each of my proofreaders, by Juliet Ulman at Bantam, by the copyeditor at Bantam, by the proofreaders from Bantam, by reviewers, etc.

But there it sits.

After Hal made his case to me, I defended the break to everyone else down the line. I still don't like the way it reads, but Hal did it on purpose. He meant to have the break there.

Let's end on a little anecdote since this is plenty long. I hope this drives the point home that it's up to the author in the end.

When I was editing Logorrhea, I starting chuckling to myself while working on Jeff VanderMeer's story. My wife looked up at me, and said, "What's funny?"

"I'm editing Jeff's story," I explained. Sometimes I am the master of the understatement.

She indicated she wanted me to elaborate.

"I just took out a comma. But Jeff's going to put it back in."

And he did.
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* although in its essence, editing is: read the piece, fix what's wrong, which sounds pretty simple if you ask me.

** And yes, I do have an occasional piece that I am unable to find something to change. But it's not for lack of trying.

*** Yeah, I know, there's there's that whole Freytag thing of exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and dénouement/catastrophe, but I really think that's needlessly complex. I prefer something simplified: set up + pay-off.

**** A classic example is finding your friend's head in the toilet and then going to investigate what happened instead of running for your life.

***** Even in the case of spelling and grammatical errors, it's all pretty subjective when you're talking fiction and making edits.