Lessons from the Slush Pile
Good writing and good storytelling aren’t always the same thing.
I recently joined an online literary magazine as a volunteer reader, which means reading blind submissions from the slush pile and recommending which stories merit a closer look by the magazine's editors.
Each submission is read by three volunteers who vote yes, no or maybe. (We don't see the names of the authors or the other volunteers reading the same story.) A story must receive at least one "yes" vote to earn review by an editor who makes the final decision whether to accept the story for publication.
Serving as a volunteer reader means I'm disqualified from submitting, but that's a price I'm willing to pay for the chance to work in the trenches of flash fiction.
The magazine is firm in wanting stories (as differentiated from vignettes, reflections, slices-of-life, and musings) and uses this definition by Robert McKee to emphasize what they're looking for: "The essential core event in all stories ever told in the history of humanity can be expressed in just three words: Conflict changes life. Therefore, the prime definition becomes: a dynamic escalation of conflict-driven events that cause meaningful change in a character’s life."
Let's break that down:
“a dynamic escalation...”: The story is propelled by action, and the action intensifies as the story progresses. Something is happening now, not merely being remembered or described. The pressure increases. Stakes rise. Complications multiply. Even in flash fiction, there should be a sense of momentum — a feeling that events are moving toward a reckoning, revelation, or decision.
“...of conflict-driven events...”: The things that happen are fueled by conflict. Conflict does not necessarily mean arguments, violence, or melodrama. It can be external (person vs. person, society, nature, circumstance) or internal (fear, guilt, longing, denial, divided loyalties). But without resistance, there is no story movement. Conflict is the engine that forces the character to act, react, choose, and change.
“...that cause meaningful change in a character’s life.”: The main character must change in a way that matters. The change may be dramatic or subtle, triumphant or devastating, visible or purely internal. A character may gain courage, lose an illusion, accept a painful truth, make a sacrifice, recognize love, confront grief, or cross some moral line from which they cannot return. What matters is that the character is not fundamentally the same person at the end of the story as at the beginning.
Of the first ten stories I read, I voted "yes" on only a few. Of the submissions I recommended rejecting, most could not be considered actual stories. The conflict wasn't apparent. There was no escalation of events, just a series of actions followed by a plot twist that seemed unrelated to any of them. There was no discernible change in the main character. In one story, there was no discernible main character. In more than one, the narrative was a litany of "telling" vs. “showing.”
I felt a tinge of regret with every "no" vote because it's not that the writing was bad. In fact, most of the stories I read were well-written in the sense that the writing was clean, clear and grammatically sound. Some of the stories were engaging and interesting. Some had vivid, unique descriptions. They just weren't complete stories.
Reading the slush pile has helped me to see more clearly the difference between good writing and good storytelling. A piece can be lyrical, atmospheric, clever, or emotionally resonant and still fail as a story if nothing meaningfully changes. The same is true, I think, of flash memoir. Recounting an experience is not enough on its own. The piece must still capture movement, tension, discovery, or transformation—some meaningful shift in understanding, identity, or emotion.
In flash, the stories that succeed often arrive already in motion and leave the reader with the sense that something irreversible has occurred. In only a few hundred words, we writers must create not just a scene or a mood, but the feeling of a life being altered.
That's what makes flash fiction so maddening to write. And so rewarding when it works. At its best, a story told in flash works like a camera flash, capturing the precise instant a life changes.
