Which Words Count?

Reading a massive amount of e-mails this week on a listserv used by the online tutoring company that I am employed by, I picked up quite a few lessons on what I do wrong in writing. When writing creative fiction, I very easily convince myself to go ahead and throw grammar rules out the window.However, I learned by doing this I threw my chances of being published out the window as well.

So what are literary journals looking for that depends so much on grammar? Well, they want to see the writer get to the point. Whether this means eliminating repetition, extra words, or writing in the active voice, doesn’t necessarily depend on the different journal. The reader wants the author to get to the point. The reader wants to see the action happen. The literary journal wants to give the reader what she wants.

Recently, I read The Portrait of a Lady. I realize that I may be going against many in the literary community by saying it was one of the worst books I have read, but I’ll write it anyway. The story moved slowly, contained little action, mostly description, and repeated the same images. Yes, many of the images were beautiful and poetic, but I think they overwhelmed the story for 500 of the 600 pages. I literally yelled at the book “What is your point?!”

Don’t let your story fall into the pit of the yelling editor. Writing in the active voice helps to keep the reader involved in the action, limits the author’s intrusion on the reader, and lessens the wordiness. This has been my biggest struggle. At this point, I am revising my unpublished works, making sure they are in the active voice, eliminating unnecessary words (“that” is a big one), and ridding the paper of repetition. I suggest if you want to revise your rejected works the first thing you do is make sure you are writing in the active voice and not repeating yourself.