lit or spec? a submission guide to that story you wrote with funky magic/spaceships/surreal shit
how to submit short fiction with speculative elements: a practical guide
Hello! Wow. It’s been a while. I didn’t mean to leave this newsletter alone for almost 4 months, but sometimes life happens.
Recently, I have had similar conversations with multiple people about what makes a piece literary or genre fiction and how you go about identifying in your own work whether something could be potentially a good fit for either SFFH zines (Clarkesworld, Uncanny, Lightspeed, Nightmare, etc.) or literary magazines open to weirder stuff (which is, from my experience, many of them).
What this is not: a comprehensive guide to submitting short fiction. This newsletter assumes you already know how the submissions game works and are actively writing and submitting short fiction.
Who am I, and why is anything I say worth listening to?
Hello! Nice to meet you! I write a lot of short fiction. Most (but not all) are speculative in flavor. Some of these have been in genre markets such as Lightspeed and Strange Horizons. I’m a SFWA member. My work has also been in a roughly equal number of literary markets. I usually have around 20 pending subs out at any given time because I write a lot of flash, so I’d say my info is up to date.
Relevant to this discussion is that I’ve been on the other side of the fence—I’m currently a Fiction Reader for Split Lip Magazine (literary) and a First Reader for khōréō (SFF), and I used to also be on the staff of Flash Fiction Online (SFF), which means I have some firsthand experience with respect to how genre and lit markets evaluate pieces differently.
The below steps are just how I evaluate whether something I have written should be submitted to SFFH markets, litmags, or both.
Step 0: Finish the story
We’re not going to focus on this part here, but the most important part is having a finished story that has been revised probably many times, etc. This is half the battle already, LOL.
Genre vs. Literary Fiction: Not an either-or
I’m not going to go deep into the weeds of what is speculative, but generally I think of it as a sliding scale from 1-10, where 1 is “totally realistic, could happen to me right now,” 10 is something like Star Wars with magic that also takes place on another planet, 5 is possible in real life but unlikely, like The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde.
Lincoln Michel has a much more complex breakdown here of realism complete with a 2-axes system where he labels each quadrant Realist, Speculative, Fabulist, and Stylized with respect to how the works in each quadrant handle reality. For me, his categorization is cool and yummy food for thought, but it doesn’t help me that much when I try to actually publish a piece because it’s pretty complicated.
Literary fiction, too, is not a monolith. I like to think of it as another sliding scale, this time 1 would be pulp stories. Books and stories that would score high on this scale would be works like Checkout 19 by Claire Louise-Bennett—unusual in terms of form and noteworthy in its prose. You can have pieces that score high on the speculative scale and on the literary scale at the same time, they’re not mutually exclusive. Think Ted Chiang, for example, or Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark, which has sections that take place in the far future but is basically a literary short story collection branded as a novel. Note that generally secondary world stories (pieces that take place in a world that isn’t Earth) are a harder sell with literary markets.
Plot: Is there a character (preferably with agency) that goes on a Hero’s Journey-type arc?
From my time reading slush at both genre and literary markets, there is more value placed on having a character in posession of agency go on a journey and change as a person in genre markets. This is not true of all of them—from what I have seen, the slush reading process at khōréō and Strange Horizons (which uses a similar process) places less value on this, and there have been voices calling for change to consider inactive protagonists more, but generally, when I write a story where there is/are defined character(s) that make decisions and use familiar genre tropes, I will send it to genre markets. I tend to save stories that are driven more by form and theme for litmags.
POV and Voice: How close is the POV to the narrator(s)?
Both genre and literary markets love it when a story has a strong voice that sticks out in the slush pile. What I have seen from reading a lot of recent short fiction in both categories is that on average, the POV of pieces in genre fiction markets is often more conversational than that of literary short fiction.
Examples:
The opening of “The Prarie Wife” by Curtis Sittenfeld, which originally appeared in The New Yorker and is such a funny story:
The understanding is that, after Casey’s iPhone alarm goes off at 6:15 A.M., Kirsten wakes the boys, nudges them to get dressed, and herds them downstairs, all while Casey is showering. The four of them eat breakfast as a family, deal with teeth-brushing and backpacks, and Casey, who is the principal of the middle school in the same district as the elementary school Jack and Ian attend, drives the boys to drop-off. Kirsten then takes her shower in the newly quiet house before leaving for work.
The reality is that, at 6:17, as soon as Casey shuts the bathroom door, Kirsten grabs her own iPhone from her nightstand and looks at Lucy Headrick’s Twitter feed. Clearly, Kirsten is not alone: Lucy has 3.1 million followers.
The opening of “Open House on Haunted Hill” by John Wiswell in Diabolical Plots:
133 Poisonwood Avenue would be stronger if it was a killer house. There is an estate at 35 Silver Street that annihilated a family back in the 1800s and its roof has never sprung a leak since. In 2007 it still had the power to trap a bickering couple in an endless hedge maze that was physically only three hundred square feet. 35 Silver Street is a show-off.
133 Poisonwood only ever had one person ever die under its roof. Back in 1989, Dorottya Blasko had refused hospice, and spent two and a half months enjoying the sound of the wind on 133 Poisonwood’s shingles. 133 Poisonwood played its heart out for her every day.
The house misses 1989. It has spent so much of the time since vacant.
Today it is going to change that. It is on its best behavior as the realtor, Mrs. Weiss, sweeps up.
The opening of “Ghost Bride” by K-Ming Chang, which is speculative in nature but was in AAWW’s The Margins, a literary market:
When Sanyi was twenty, she married a rooster. It spurred her in the face on their wedding night, and that’s why she has a scar below her left eye, pearled like a glob of spittle. In winter, the scar on Sanyi’s cheek puckers out like a nipple. I suckled on her face when I was a baby, and sometimes I still taste the citrus of her scar. After I was weaned off nipples entirely, Sanyi explained why she married poultry: when she was ten, the neighbor’s son was stabbed to death for his gambling debts, and years later he returned in his mother’s dreams, quilled with knives like a puffer fish.
I bring up K-Ming Chang specifically because a friend asked me why she was published almost entirely on the literary side of the great genre divide despite her stories and novels being full of fabulist weirdness. You can from the excerpt that this story promises to be speculative from the get-go but uses language that is full of lush imagery. Chang has spoken about how one of her inspirations is Maxine Hong Kingston, whose books are hard to place in any single genre—The Woman Warrior, about the imagined lives of the women in Hong Kingston’s family and putting herself into folktales, is technically a memoir. You could instead say that it’s autofiction and should be shelved in the fiction section, and you wouldn’t be wrong. The work of K-Ming Chang is in conversation with Maxine Hong Kingston, which to me also signals to me that it belongs more in the literary category, just like how the many retellings/stories inspired by “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” are going to be genre by default.
Compare the voice of “Ghost Bride” to the John Wiswell story, where the house is talking to the reader in a casual way. The above excerpt from “Ghost Bride” is not what I would call conversational by any stretch. (Chang is also a poet, and the influence on poetry on how she writes fiction is clear.)
I have found that genre markets are more open to literary voice than the other way around—I have definitely rejected stories I’ve seen in the Split Lip slush pile because the voice reads too genre and isn’t a good fit. To get a good grasp on voice, I’d recommend just reading a bunch of recent short stories from both side of the aisle. (Which you should be doing anyway as a short fiction writer!) Another feature I’ve noticed is that paragraphs seem to be shorter in short genre fiction, which makes sense because almost all genre markets are online and shorter paragraphs are easier to read on a screen.
How does the story use figurative language?
In contemporary short literary fiction, figurative language is often primarily used to surprise the reader. An example would be Anthony Veasna So in “Superking Son Scores Again” from Afterparties (an amazingly funny short story I will never stop trying to push on people), Superking Son is the son of the owner of the Superking grocery store. The son of a rival business owner has beef with him and says, “This guy takes one business class at comm and he thinks he’s the CEO of Cambo grocery stores. Like he’s Steve Jobs and those spoiled Chinese sausages are MacBook Airs.” The MacBook Air/spoiled Chinese sausage comparison is funny, but more importantly, it’s unexpected.
In contrast, on the genre side of the fence, Alix E. Harrow’s award-winning story “Mr. Death,” about a grim reaper given a difficult task has a section that says, “So I don’t come apart when I see little Lawrence Harper’s name on that neatly-typed card, the curve of that 3 staring up at me like half a heart. I lay the folder in my scuffed briefcase—I was never a briefcase-carrier before, but fashion in the hereafter runs twenty to fifty years behind—and head out for 186 Grist Mill Road.”
The aim of “the curve of that 3 staring up at me like half a heart” is to illustrate, and the image of the heart comes into play with death. This story is also amazing—if you haven’t read it before, I recommend it.
In general (but not always), you’ll find more figurative language and imagery meant to illustrate in contemporary short genre fiction compared to language meant to startle in literary fiction.
What is this piece in conversation with?
Every work of fiction is in conversation with something. Nothing is so original that it comes out of nowhere. If a piece is talking to other pieces that are genre fiction, it’s probably a safe bet to submit to genre markets, and vice versa with literary fiction. See the above section on voice and K-Ming Chang.
Conclusion: sometimes stories are funky
Those are the criteria I use when deciding where to sub a piece! I write a story and let it fall where it falls, and then afterwards I look at it and go “hmmm where should I send this?” Sometimes I’ll see submission calls from genre markets that are looser or use keywords like ‘anything remotely speculative’ which tend to be a better fit for the kinds of stories I write.
If you found this guide useful, please let me know! Let me know if you’d like to see future newsletters about craft and the publication side of writing short fiction like this.
Pub Updates
I’ve had several literary flash pieces appear in bucket list places over the last few months. My chunkier 6k fantasy short story “North Georgia Hungry Ghost Investigators, LLC” is also now available to read for free on Frivolous Comma. The editors approached me to solicit a speculative story featuring kids, and here it is! This one was a lot of fun, including a ghostly love story and teenage girl hijinks.
See you soon!
tina