8:53 a.m., Friday, October 30th, 2066. I’m freezing my tuchus off, standing on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Washington. Behind me, in the window of the business, a gigantic digital clock is ticking cruelly while a 3D-animated cartoon man underneath it taps his wristwatch and repeats the phrase, “Don’t wait until the eleventh hour!”Steam…
SleepoverWhen I sleep with men, I will remember the sleepovers. Lying curled in the crook of that masculine tang, Old Spice and old socks, I will remember Bath & Body Works—Warm Brown Sugar, and the way the scent, sprayed, clung particulate to the peach fuzz on your neck.It’s Friday. We flip to that same, two-page…
An Interview with Lev GrossmanLev Grossman is the author of eight novels, including the bestselling The Bright Sword, an epic retelling of the story of King Arthur. He’s also the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling The Magicians trilogy which has been published in thirty countries and was adapted as a TV show. He has degrees from Harvard and…
I wait in predawn gray for a rider.I’ve been home ten months, working for SEONS six, couch surfing and dodging questions about what I was doing back in town the whole time. After days without work, my phone buzzed me awake half an hour ago with a notification from SEONS, declaring I had a client…
Ladies’ Night was Wednesday night. I was a teen wearing the heat like charmeuse; my rhinestone decolletage not far removed from games of Pretty Pretty Princess and Ring Pop richness. How do fifteen years look, all dressed up in patent anticipation? Rappelling from windows like Rapunzel’s lust, two girls escaped plain homes to walk toward a sequined strip. We waited outside Razzle’s, whispering Can I have your bracelet? to passersby, pilfered paper wristbands to vouch for legal age. Men said yes, smiles laced with knowing. We fixed our wrists in paper cuffs sealed with bubble gum. Tits up for the bouncer. Sheer surprise at entry. Flash of wrist to the bartender: I’ll have a Sex on the Beach, sunset-colored drink with the naughty name that felt like power on my lips. We sat steps from the ocean. Shimmying silky pony hair and laughing like chimps. Imping the cool girls, the college girls, even them, barely skirting twenty-one. Together we danced on go-go stages, hanging, small cages for the display of pretty birds like us. We already knew how to move, how to grind our diamond belt buckles against the bars. When we descended to the dancefloor, a ballroom if ever we’d known one, the men materialized in Marlboro clouds. Our lips tied in bows, we ribboned together for safety. But each hip thrust, each sip of ether, pulled us a little looser until we hung askance, stringy and stupid. We imagined it was us, holding the keys to the castles between our ears. We didn’t know better, couldn’t yet grasp the jeweled boxes of women whose hinges and clasps were broken and forced open. Force: hadn’t occurred to us yet, children plumped on American Dreams, tender foie gras goslings. When they crushed their dicks against us and corseted us in touch; squeezing and rubbing, churning and shoving, we wondered: Is this love?
The roses here are like pomegranate seeds, ruthlessly carnal and hopelessly tinged with the scent of the dead. The soil they grow in is leaden, fungicide paints each head. The flower smell is bred out in a hedge for longevity. How did this bloom that wreaths collective memory in sparking thorn and throbbing petal become mostly poison? Our apples have met a similar fate, vitamins and minerals bolting at downshot rates, revolting from the flush. Calcium, Iron, Phosphate: Bone, Blood, Soft Tissue— What greater issue? If the blocks are lost, how will our bodies build? After my vitals succumb, I will be spirit only, a scythe of the new moon. So much has already been cut away from my crooning fingers, which reach to grasp a meager scrap of fragrance, flavor, feeling. To hold those things like a yawn before thick sleep. When I go under, my wraith will rake the leaves of you, unearth the time we ate apple crumble hiding in the thicket of my grandmother’s rose bushes, that walled-up garden where the thorns cut my back and your knees and nothing bloomed but us, despite the stoniest winter.
Behind the Manna of St. Nicholas she veiled a means of escape brought by belladonna, a clear champion of beautiful women (and aren’t we all beautiful) pressed into a bottle, for ugly skin (and aren’t we all ugly). For their cheeks that bloomed with bruises, nebulae forewarning the birth and death of stars, rouged with an atmosphere of long-waves and shaking with volcanic activity, molten in rivers and canyons cracked between their ribs. These women knew the different kinds of burn: spark, rage, smolder, rain. Degrees of damage done by ravaging, ravishing lips in red, their words lined in the color of blood. The head bleeds so much, the mouth heals so fast. The throat is always covered when in public. The back of the neck exposed when in the home. Guiliana T. made a pretty bottle, named for her sake, Aqua Tofana (Storm Water). Would it soothe the skin and disappear the damage? Or could it make the water rise, take them to that deep and sleeping place, the foam lapping their lips, the sky’s eyes closing—finally offering the rest— with which the moondrunk night is blessed.
You go home with the first guy you meet because he tells you that you are a goddess. You imagine you are Persephone, Goddess of Spring, because of the floral notes in your perfume. Because you are the wife of Hades, running out of time.
One hour before your perpetually angry husband gets home, one week before he finds out about your tryst, one year before you do the same thing all over again, to spite him. Before he left the house tonight, you told him to go to hell, but he’s already there, already spewing hellfire across his life and yours.
The kind stranger from the bar says you look so young for your age. You are a maiden again, in his eyes. He motions for you to sit next to the pizza-sauce stain on his couch, moves in to kiss your pomegranate lips, your teeth tugging his bottom lip as he does. The Queen of the Underworld does not want to go home. Only regret awaits you if you leave. Only regret also if you stay. You decide to stay.
The night your husband leaves for good is not as joyous as you had imagined it would be. It feels more like the emptiness after pushing a baby from your body.
You head back to the bar, because you cannot be alone tonight. You are the Immaculate Virgin Mary, starting fresh, untouched. Plus, the next guy you meet is into the whole Madonna-whore thing. You find yourself sitting on his couch—is it possible this one has a crusted stain on it too?—being kissed, the Queen of Heaven observing no sensation in the meeting of your lips with this mortal.
You are the Mother Most Pure, contemplating how long the sauce-crust under your fingertips has been stuck to the couch. He takes your face in his hands and tells you he’s always wanted to kiss a goddess like you. Bored by his earnestness, you divert your attention to the rain falling outside. Sometimes, when you leave a cardboard box in the rain, it melts into a flat paper puddle, and sometimes, that box is your heart.
The newly divorced, single mother Ambika, that’s you these days. You’re using a baby wipe from your purse to clean the jelly stain off the couch of a man much younger than you and wondering how late the sitter can stay tonight.
He stares at your chest a little too much, teases you a little too much, calling you a cougar, a cradle-robber, a MILF, but you are the goddess Yakshi. You’re not going to let his mommy issues get in the way of your fun tonight. You toss the baby wipe on the table and check your phone. No messages. You want to stay late, want to teach this young man things only an older woman knows, want to show him how to rub that one spot on a woman’s foot that can practically make her come.
The young bachelor excuses himself to get you more wine. You are Śāsana Devī Ambai, firing off a quick text to the sitter, putting your phone on Do Not Disturb, and slipping off your shoes.
Congratulations, you have entered your ho phase, you rich-throned, immortal Aphrodite, you! You have kissed countless young men on countless stained couches, and here you are again, an unholy Androphonos. You are kissing Bachelor No. Infinity, mentally calculating how long you have to stay, how much you have to do in order to be polite, in order to seem grateful.
Because this is all simply a transaction, isn’t it? He says you have killer legs and a killer smile, but what about your killer mind? Your murdered heart? You’ve been trying hard to embrace your sexual liberation, but this doesn’t feel like freedom. You’re ready to clock out for the night. It’s late. The scheming daughter of Zeus moves to speed this whole thing up. Maybe a hand job will be enough. Maybe a blow job. What does he want in return for the dinner he bought you? When will the heavenly Venus have given enough?
This one’s profile says that he likes strong, independent women, so you arrive at his house as Deborah the Judge. You are all discernment and no patience now, a Prophetess. You’re sitting on what might as well be the same damn gravy-encrusted couch of the same damn guy as last time. You foresee this night not going well.
You’re not here for the sex, so why are you here? Are you afraid to die alone?
You avoid his advances by asking him how he makes his marinara sauce. He rambles about tomato peeling for twenty minutes straight, as if you don’t know how to peel tomatoes. You are the Torch Woman, your judgment is an intrusive thought, a knife through his temple.
Sensing your distaste, he hands you a goat-cheese-stuffed date, says he got the recipe from The New York Times. You swat his hand away and stand abruptly, declaring your ruling as you slam the door behind you. What kind of person makes the fucking recipes from The New York Times, anyway?
It’s Self-Care Sunday and you are Bastet, protector of health. You stroke cleansing balm across your face, apply a clay mask to remove the impurities, and lay down on your pristine couch with your phone on silent. Your cat forms a loaf on your chest and her weight grounds you, her purrs reverberating through you both. You touch foreheads with her, seeking wisdom.
Despite all these usual measures, peace alludes you. Instead, a bitterness pools at the back of your mouth. Your jaw clenches against an imagined acidity, like when you salivate just for thinking of something sour. Your quest for unconditional love has curdled. You’ve spent your whole life as the Sacred and All-Seeing Eye, taking care of everyone else, giving until you have nothing left to give, being everything for everyone and so becoming no one in particular. The hot ache in the center of your chest cools into something hard, impenetrable.
The daughter of Ra has come to a decision. What will your dad think? Your ex? Your hot-headed sister? You realize you finally don’t care. It’s time for a new moon. If it’s a goddess they want from you, you have just the one to show them. You reach for your phone, reinstall Hinge, and hunt for your final date.
You are the soul-eating, life-creating Empress Kali, goddess of destruction and renewal. In every rebirth there is a death, and tonight it’s time to begin anew. You are standing akimbo on the back of the couch of this last everyman, ready to give him what he needs. Four arms now stretch from your torso, dark blue like night encroaching, and envelop the man in your grip. You make all the rules now.
You bite his tongue hard down the middle, hot salty blood like pizza sauce waterfalling from his lips. You smile, the Mother of the Universe, as he pulls away in horror, your lips benevolent and glistening with his blood. You throw him
to the floor as he wails and stand atop his chest in all your omnipotence, screeching up into the heavens you have created and down across the earth whose death you will one day bring. The Great Time strikes a match. You want to burn this crusty couch, burn the house down with him inside, burn the whole world down to create yourself anew.
But, you are not Kali, are you? You are not Bastet or Deborah, Aphrodite or Ambika. Not the Virgin Mary. Not Persephone. After a lifetime of morphing yourself into what everyone else wants you to be, it’s time to cast out idols.
You step off his chest, blow out the match, and walk out the door. Four arms become two again, and fade from midnight blue as you head home towards the sun rising in front of you. You wipe the blood from your mouth. The hardness in your chest begins to loosen its grip and you exhale, finally exhale, like you’ve been holding your breath for a lifetime. You feel the sun spreading warmth against your cheeks, casting a halo across your head.
You are, immutably, divinely, you.
What name will you give yourself, O Holy One?
Dear lovely reader,
To understand our fascination with gods, please step with me into this handy-dandy time machine I’ve conjured. We’ll press a few impressive, sci-fi, glowing buttons—beep-boop—and gasp as the metal craft shakes, hurling us back in time. Three thousand and twenty-four years fly by—and many, many miles, depending on where you’re cracking open this tome—and we’ll step out onto the dusty roads of Ancient Greece.
At this time, Athens is the peak of civilization (in the West), the birthplace of society, of democracy, of philosophy. Sure, the Indus Valley and Mayans were arguably more technologically advanced (thank you, actual flushing toilets and intensely complex timekeeping!), but what was special about the Greeks is that they were one of the first civilizations that wanted to find answers to everything, from how the elements mixed in our bodies to where knowledge comes from. They were thinkers, philosophers, scientists, sociologists, psychologists—all the things we hail as highly intellectual, highly grounded in fact and method. And in terms of lasting influence, man, they kicked ass and took names. Everything from modern-day democracy to the first concepts of atomics (the idea that stuff is made of littler stuff that we can’t see) and heliocentrism (that our planets revolve around the sun) was influenced by these toga-clad thinkers.
But at the same time as this science was on the rise, faith—what we’ve been told is the antithesis of science—not only thrived but also was needed to make everything else work.
For example, let’s strap on our sandals and wander up the rocky pathway to the Parthenon. It’s not in ruins.
The roof is intact and painted gloriously. The Ottomans haven’t used it to store explosives that “accidentally” go off. It’s beautiful, a sixty-two-foot-tall acropolis overlooking the city full of sun-bleached roofs.
Rain starts to patter on the stone. A storm is coming. Now shudder with me as a bolt of lightning blazes through the sky, scaring the bejesus out of us both. Someone beside us mumbles, “Zeus must be angry.”
Our modern-day brains are tempted to judge this person. Surely for such an advanced civilization, a big old shirtless god in the sky tossing lightning bolts feels foolish… but let’s think about where science was at the time.
Advanced as they may be, the Ancient Greeks have no understanding of weather patterns, of the cool air in the clouds that conjures rain, of colliding positively and negatively charged particles creating flashes of light to carve open the sky. They know only what they can observe. They see enough to know there are four seasons but not why some years are wetter than others. They can observe a healthy body corrupting, but they have no microscopes, no way to understand the many, many ways we can decay on a cellular level.
You see, the Greeks are smart, they are method-centric, they believe in logic… but when there are that many question marks, logic simply doesn’t cut it.
Without modern-day physics, chemistry, astronomy, if you look at the sky broken open by a bright, blinding light and a crack so loud it shakes your bones, what explanation makes more sense than god?
And, for the Greeks, a whole pantheon of them! Don’t understand the movement of the sun? It’s Apollo, dragging the sun along behind his chariot. Are your crops doing better than your neighbor’s? Well, Demeter just likes you better. Are you struggling to get pregnant while your sister can’t seem to stop? Better get your ass down to the temple and pray to Aphrodite.
Like the Greeks, most ancient civilizations used gods to explain natural phenomena that people could observe but not fully understand. Gods, you see, have always been a convenient Band-Aid we toss over anything we just don’t understand. But more than that, in Ancient Greece, science and religion are, in many ways, one. They aren’t competing for dominance. Instead, they team up to explain the biggest, most complicated elements of our world.
But, of course, like any powerful coupling, science and religion were bound to break up.
Now let’s jump in our time machine and cruise forward to the first century CE and the birth of Christianity. For anyone who’s studied the history of religions, you’ll be sick of talking about how much Christianity disrupted the entire field, but think about it: before Christianity, almost all the major faiths’ pantheons— certainly, Greek, Roman, and Norse—all had warrior gods, gorgeous, sexy, capricious bastards who only took a shine to the most magnificent of mortals. The Achilles and Minamoto no Yorimitsu of the world. The 1% of the 1%. Only they mattered to the stars of the big soap opera in the sky.
Those religions, dear reader, were not made for the masses. They were made for the few. Not everyone, after all, is invited to dine forever in Valhalla.
But then, here comes Jesus, who loves you just the way you are, every last one of you. And you don’t need to be great—in fact, being great might be quite bad for you. The meek, he tells us, will inherit the earth.
Judaism, Islam, Sikhism, and Christianity all share this ground-breaking idea of a God who loves anyone, anyone, who is devout, who follows divine laws, and who loves and celebrates their religious values.
These religions no longer try to explain natural phenomena, largely because society was starting to get a grasp on them. During the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, science had at least some explanation for the movement of the stars, for weather, for the human body. Certainly, it wasn’t always right—Earth as the center of our solar system, leeches pulling toxins from the body, flies spontaneously manifesting—but an authority figure could stand before you and deliver an explanation that lined up with your lived experience.
Instead, the question mark centered on the unseen world: Do we have souls? Where do we go after we die? How should we live?
And man, oh man, did the birth of modern-day monotheistic religion tell people all those things and more. Not just how to live and die, but who to love, who to hate, who was worthy of forgiveness, and who was too far gone. Across the globe, religion became one of the most successful forms of government, of community, of moral order.
And suddenly, the days of the Greeks were over. Faith and science didn’t work hand in hand to help us understand the world. They were enemies, destined to battle it out to the end. And so began the wild escalation of murdering scientists and philosophers. Of “Us versus Them” thinking. Of holy wars and the massive, massive, money-making machine of the church.
Let’s skip over the dozens of centuries of religious wars and blood-soaked battlefields and cruise right back to the modern world of Starbucks caramel macchiatos and smartphones. Statistically, in the West, religion is losing its hold. In America, less than half the population reports being religious, with 20% considered devout, weekly churchgoers. Europe is even lower, with only 40% identifying as religious.
Every decade, these click a little further down.
Of course, there are strong exceptions beyond the West, with South America, Asia, and the Middle East still largely identifying as religious, but from the places where most of us are reading this Editor’s Note, it certainly looks like science is winning the war. And that a deep exploration of gods—say, in a lovely little lit anthology like this one—is growing less and less relevant with each passing year.
But, let’s face it, I just accidentally wrote four pages about the history of gods—and I’m not even at my favorite part yet! Because no matter what the stats about the decline of religion tell us, we are, as a people, fascinated by it. Look at the best-selling fantasy novels of the last fifty years: Circe, Percy Jackson, The City We Became, Dune, Good Omens. We are fascinated by the idea of the divine, from police procedurals starring Lucifer to Bruce Almighty generally sucking at playing god.
So, as with all issues of F(r)iction, we listened to our readers, our students, and our own passions, and started putting out calls for submissions about gods. As a lover of world religions, I expected lots of retellings, wild fantasies where old gods try to walk among us. Or perhaps new gods who mimic what we fret about today, Gods of Instagram and our nightly worship in front of our God of Televised Entertainment.
But like every issue, I’m always surprised by what our community conjures. A first glance at this content will show a big fascination with death—in many ways, a question mark that makes even the most devout Christian or fervent atheist hold a sliver of doubt. From a ride-share app for ghosts to complete their “unfinished business” to a pastor using crazy sci-fi tech to find a way to die that won’t destroy the faith of his flock, death was everywhere.
It’s even seeped into our “In-World Interview,” in which bestselling author Neal Shusterman is interviewed by his own characters from his Arc of a Scythe books, a rad sci-fi series in which a god-like AI has cured all the world’s woes, including death… but in a world without death, someone needs to keep population growth in check, thus introducing a world of modern-day Gods of Death who can “glean” a select number of the immortal humans.
There were also far more works rooted in modern-day Christianity than I expected, including creative nonfiction grappling with the guilt and pressure of standing strong in that remaining 20% devout church demo. We’ve got poetry, essays, and stories that bravely explore contrasting belief systems and how damn hard it is to balance joy and obedience.
And, of course, there are some profoundly hilarious pieces too. I’m particularly tickled by the opener feature by F(r)iction alum K-Ming Chang, exploring how gods evolve to stay relevant, and an utterly fantastic comic by Kieron Gillen in which two tech bros try to disrupt the oldest industry out there… badly.
However, of all the pieces in this journal, the one that takes gods and makes them so deeply human and relatable for me is “Good as God,” a comic memoir from one of our justice-impacted students.
You see, when this theme was just a random thought, I brought it up in one of our Frames Comic Program courses last year. We were teaching a class for formerly incarcerated and justice-touched folks, particularly those with felony drug charges. As it turns out, our students spend a lot of time thinking about God, not only because many of our students are religious themselves, but also because selling drugs is its own form of god-like power. Many of our students were high up in the trade—big money, big influence, lots and lots of worship by their communities… and goodness me, does that sort of power leave a mark.
The class discussion was a Great Flood of questions: How do we redefine ourselves without this power? How do we fight the temptation to go back? How do we accept that there is something or someone bigger than us, and will that make our lives better?
And as our students started delving into their own turning points—moments in their lives when their choices most deeply impacted the trajectory of their lives—one of our students, Jaron, was particularly drawn to the theme. You see, Jaron was writing about growing up in his father’s drug empire, but he was struggling to really land what it was like to feel so in awe of that power, so taken by it even when it killed those he loved.
I won’t ruin the memoir for you, dear reader, but as one of his teachers, I can tell you that the lens of Greek mythology finally helped Jaron express what it was like to be split between his father’s powers and his legit family, a demigod torn between two worlds.
And as I watched Jaron and the amazing artist, Shan Bennion, bring this memoir to life, I thought again and again of that time machine we traveled in. Of the question marks in my students’ lives that they needed gods to answer.
In fact, in all the stories, essays, and poems in this issue, that same lesson applies. Gods—whether of a mystical power source or the power we find within our mortal reach—are still the go-to answer when we can find no other explanation. When our senses fail us. When logic breaks. When the microscope just can’t zoom in anymore. When there is a question mark, God lingers.
And as you read these stories, looking for the question marks in each work, wondering about the question marks in your own lives and experiences, I wanted to leave you with one last mini-jump in our time machine… This is only a wee step back, to the 60s.
Science is having one hell of a heyday, the world marveling as science fiction finally becomes fact. We’re sending people to the moon, “discovering” quarks, inventing things that will shape our modern world: weather satellites, video games, robots. And, as a result, religion is starting to get pushed around. Creationism starts to be replaced with evolution in school curricula, and the world starts to change.
But then… something happens. A crack in the trend.
It starts with the split electron study. For those non-science nerds out there, this theory purports that an electron can exist in multiple states (wave and particle) until it is observed. If you haven’t heard of that, you’ve surely heard the thought experiment that popularized it (Schrödinger’s Cat, in which a cat and some murder toxins are put in a box… and until we open the box, the cat is both alive and dead).
Now this might seem simple, but this idea—that something needs to be observed to actualize—is actually pretty earth-shattering.
Now, of course, most people believe in the Big Bang. Hydrogen, helium, and lithium collide in the universe, and suddenly, stuff exists. Atoms, elements, planets… life. It all appears as a powerful chain reaction, when just a millisecond beforehand, we had empty space… certainly there was nothing “conscious” kicking around in that oblivion. Something from nothing.
If we are to believe modern-day science and accept two facts: one, that the Big Bang happened, and two, that everything needs to be observed in order to happen… there seems to be only one explanation.
Something with consciousness needed to exist when there was nothing… and this thing needed to “watch” the Big Bang happen. But science has no way to explain what or who that thing is.
You see, dear reader, another question mark formed in some of the most advanced scientific minds… and we all know the best fix for a big, old question mark…
So, science invented a “first observer,” some being that witnessed the start of the universe, somehow living outside of time and space (sound familiar, dear reader?). This theory, that observation is needed for everything to transition from the “possible” to the “actual”—called the Copenhagen Interpretation—is currently the most commonly adopted explanation by the scientific community to explain how the quantum realm functions. Think about that. The smartest, most skeptical minds in the world, with the most knowledge, openly adopt a theory that needs a “first observer” to work.
Reminds you a bit of our first time-traveling adventure, does it not? When we looked up at the cosmos from Ancient Greece, and lightning couldn’t be solved just with science or religion… we needed both.
And as you read these amazing stories, dear reader, I hope you remember how much humanity’s question marks have changed… but also, how much they haven’t. And I hope you discover your own question marks and think about how you best can find those answers.
Cheers,
Dani Hedlund
Editor-in-Chief
Editing is a process, and an important part of that process is the editor—or editors, as is usually the case. Hopefully, over the course of preparing a piece for publication, others (whose feedback you value) review your work. Sometimes, though, it’s unclear what advice you should take and what you shouldn’t. If you’re workshopping a story with a big group, you’ll probably get more feedback than you know what to do with—and some of it might be contradictory. In this case, it’s always good to know what you want from the advice. What are you looking to improve in your story? Of course, you may not know that, especially if this is your first venture into crafting a story. To help with this, we’ve asked Brink staffers to share the most memorable, helpful, tired, and useful feedback they’ve received over the years—and what to do with it.
Nate, Communications & Marketing Director: Everybody Knows That (EKT). My dear friend Antoine hit me with that feedback years ago in relation to worldbuilding in a science fiction book I was writing. Basically, whenever you’re writing exposition or dialogue, you apply EKT to decide if people living in the world would already know what you’re describing, which means they wouldn’t talk or think about it. For an on-the-nose example, you generally wouldn’t say, “I’m going to brush my teeth with toothpaste and a toothbrush” because the toothpaste and brush are an implied part of living in your world.
Dominic, Content Creator & Staff Writer: “Not everyone knows what is going on in your head as the writer.” When working on a piece, I can live in the world of it, but it’s my job as the writer to transcribe that experience onto the page to the reader and help them walk around in that world. The experience of looking at another person’s vacation photos isn’t as riveting as hearing an engaging travel anecdote.
Kaitlin, Internship Supervisor & Senior Editor: To be hyper aware of how frequently we rely on pronouns to reference characters. There’s an obvious time and place for using them as identifiers, but often they function more like filler than anything. It’s something I noticed in everything I read and when I edit my own work.
Ari, Junior Editor: Unfortunately, the most memorable piece of feedback I’ve ever received was negative. I had a creative writing teacher in college who intensely disliked me and she once told me my work was “over dramatic, over emotional, and overly descriptive.” Which is, frankly, all the things I love best about my writing style, so thankfully this motivated me via spite to lean into these elements even more.
Maribel, Internship Assistant & Junior Editor: “What does your character want?” Before hearing this for the first time, I never realized while reading that what drives a story forward are the characters’ desires. Without them, you have no conflict, drama, or motivation. I now look for what characters are truly striving for in everything I read, watch, and listen to. The best stories always have multiple layers of this, and clear desires in every scene.
Nate: Don’t assume the reader knows what you know. When we enter that writerly flow state it’s very easy to get wrapped up in the experiences and emotions that we’re tapping into and channeling into our characters and their choices. And because we tend to feel what we’re putting on the page, we sometimes fail to write that feeling in, and that means that readers will miss out on invaluable context. I share this feedback a lot, but probably the first time was after reading a friend’s love story. Love is this universal thing that we all (hopefully) know a bit about, but each love is vastly different, so I recommended that my friend spend time really talking about the love in their story and why it was so special.
Dominic: “Show, don’t tell.” Dialogue is fun to write, and it fills up the page count quickly to give a sense of accomplishment, but does the reader want to receive all the information that way? Will it immerse them in the story? Think of which is more receptive by the reader: going through the entire process with the characters or overhearing some recap via talking heads.
Kaitlin: In a more general sense, why is [XYZ] character doing something? I think as writers we’re so aware of all our characters’ motivations that we sometimes forget we need to be more explicit with our readers so they understand as well. And it’s a fine balance between informing your reader vs. info dumping on them, but I often read work and am left wondering why characters do a certain thing or have a particular response to something.
Ari: It was less one specific piece of feedback and more of a thank you I received from a writer I had been friends with for a long time, explaining how my faith in her abilities and my encouragement helped her to strive towards the type of writer she wanted to be. I always try to balance my constructive criticism with what I love about a piece, and I was over the moon to hear it had genuinely inspired her.
Maribel: I’m always looking for fantastical or strange elements in perfectly normal stories, so I once told someone that I loved their use of magical realism in a story where it seemed to me that the increasing smell of burnt food was caused by the character’s anger. The author then told me it was because the character had left a pie in the oven, and due to their distraction forgot about it. I was kind of sad and said I liked the magical realism aspect better!
Nate: “This is great. I really like it.” I love praise, of course. We all do! But positive feedback without any details or deeper digging doesn’t help any writer improve.
Dominic: “Who is the audience?” The market is changing year by year. For example, the romance genre, which was associated with monthly Harlequin mass markets, now has multiple sub-genres, trade paperbacks, and bookstores which focus mainly on that audience. The horror genre is growing in the comic book industry but when “The Walking Dead” was first pitched, Robert Kirkman said that the zombies were only going to be in the first storyline.
Katilin: “I don’t like this character, can we make them more likable?” No, the point is for them to be complex and unlikable.
Ari: There’s been a trend lately to encourage action-oriented plots, quick pacing, and writing shorter. Which isn’t inherently negative, but it is anti-anthem to the type of “over dramatic, over emotional, overly descriptive” prose I prefer to write and read. Sometimes you need to indulge yourself in decadent metaphor and syrup-thick interiority, baby. I think the industry would be very boring if we only prioritized one type of writing.
Maribel: Any feedback that is critiquing something the story isn’t actively trying to do. For example, critiquing a story for not including magical realism when it never meant to. There’s no point. Also, “Write what you know.” I actually think it can be very good advice, but I hate that it gets so misconstrued and over used.
Nate: Don’t try to write like anyone else. In high school and college, I really wanted to emulate the authors that I was reading, especially when it came to postmodernists. The trouble was, as one professor told me bluntly, I was creating out of parody rather than out of my own experience. Trying to be the next Pynchon or DeLillo means connecting with your own present day understanding, rather than doing an impression of an author from a previous generation.
Dominic: “What is the story? And what is the story about?” These two questions were the best writing advice I ever received from a teacher. One is about the through line that the plot is hung on, and the other is the theme that works as the guardrails for the characters’ actions. Jaws is the story of a shark terrorizing a summer resort community as much as it is the story about duty and Chief Martin Brody’s commitment to protect everyone. The character motivation of what the story is about is shown through the actions of Brody going out to hunt the great white shark even though he is terrified of the ocean.
Kaitlin: Stop burying the start of your story with lyrical language and conceptual posturing. I’m always more engaged with a story when it jumps straight into the meat.
Ari: All writing advice is shit unless it works for you. What I mean by this is—any writing advice can be good or bad, depending on your personal process, project, or story. Just because something works for someone else doesn’t mean it will work for you, and just because something is traditionally classified as a writing “no-no” doesn’t mean you can’t do it. Be true to your needs.
Maribel: Own your own voice. Even if one or two people don’t like it, someone else will. The greatest storytellers of all time each had a distinct voice that made them memorable and interesting to read. There are so many stories out there—there is certainly a place for yours.
Taking your work to the next level, and getting it closer to publication, always requires editing and other sets of eyes. Other people can really help bring your piece to life and help you iron out any odds and ends with it. That said, know what kind of advice you’re looking for—everyone’s going to have their own opinion after all! As long as you consider every piece of feedback you receive and how it may or may not actually fit into your story, you’ll have done good work.
The Facts of Fiction series is almost at its end—can you believe it? We’ve reached a point in the great journey of storytelling where you are at a natural ending. Take some time to reflect on all you’ve done in the process. What have you learned? What have you written? Where will you go next?
Congratulations! You’ve successfully completed a FIRST DRAFT. You should feel PROUD, GLEEFUL, and CREATIVE. But now what?
Well, I hate to break it to you, but a first draft of any piece of writing (or art) is just half the battle. In fact, it may only be about one-quarter of it. The rest of that battle lies in the editing process.
Editing is a battle all on its own. It takes time, usually more time than the actual writing does, and it requires more than just one person. It’s more of a mountain than a molehill, so to speak. But no matter what kind of story you’re telling, whether it’s through a poem, podcast, film, TV show, novel, or short story, it is going to need editing. Nothing is born perfect, after all.
Don’t let that scare you. Just because the journey isn’t over yet doesn’t mean you haven’t gotten somewhere. In fact, your final destination should be clearer than ever. Before your first draft, you may have had only a vague idea of where you were going. Now, you have a story. And you can do anything with that.
This blog exists to get you from first draft to second draft and beyond with as few tears and headaches as possible. And although everyone approaches it differently, editing is a process and there are steps you can follow to make it easier on yourself. Here’s our guide to help storytellers improve the clarity, coherence, and impact of their stories in seven steps.
First of all, take a step back and take a deep breath. You’ve just created something! You should be proud. And like a good oven-roasted beef tenderloin, it needs some time to rest. Set your finished first draft aside for a couple days, or even a couple weeks—be careful of letting it rest for TOO long, though, lest you overcook the meat!—and take your mind off it so that when you do return, it’s with well-rested, fresh eyes, ready to chop it up.
Putting it away for a period of time will also help you shift your mindset from creator to editor. Creators are not concerned with perfection. In order to get words on the page, writers need to cast aside the idea that initial drafts can be perfect. Strive for greatness, not perfection—only then can innovation flourish. Then, once you have completed a draft, you can refocus your energy on editing.
Editing brings you a step closer to “perfection”—whatever that may look like. But don’t see it as a chore. Editing your own work can be just as fulfilling and inventive as drafting it was. It is where you can play with the small details and take your time with each scene, character, narrative arc, line, and word. Editing is where you ask yourself questions like, “Do I need that semicolon or should it be a period?” and, “What exactly am I trying to say by using the word expeditious twice in the same paragraph?”
More than that, editing is a time for you to fully appreciate the scope of your work. Enjoy it—and be prepared to brutalize it. In a fun way, of course.
You also have to be prepared for others to critique your work. No piece is complete without input from other creatives or editors you trust. Depending on who you share it with and how you choose to share it, you may have a lot of feedback to get through. Don’t let this bog you down. You don’t have to take every piece of advice (and you shouldn’t, as some will be contradictory), but you should consider all feedback with an open mind. And whatever you end up using or not using, have a good reason for doing so.
It cannot be overstated: Nothing will help you edit more than reading your work aloud. It sounds simple. It even sounds obvious. And if you hated reading aloud in school, perhaps it sounds dreadful. But this isn’t that. This isn’t stuttering words in front of a classroom of bored, judgmental middle schoolers. This is your own work, in the privacy of your own space. You don’t have to read this aloud to anyone (though you can if you want; my cat, Cleo, for example, has provided a beautiful set of ears for many a story).
Reading aloud will help you catch moments of awkward phrasing, repetitive language, and pacing issues that reading silently won’t even catch. As you read aloud, you will naturally stumble over areas that don’t make sense or have grown uncomfortably slow. Rhythm and cadence are a big part of what makes a piece flow well. If the words sound good when spoken aloud, then you know you have a good cadence going, resulting in an easier and more pleasant reading experience. This is true for all types of work, not just poems—though it tends to be especially important with those.
One way to make the most of a read-aloud session is by recording yourself. Even if you hate the sound of your recorded voice, being able to replay a recording of your work can help identify potential improvements. Plus, you get to imagine it as an audiobook!
The first step of editing any first draft is to look at the big picture. It’s not worth editing at a line level until you can see how the story comes together as a whole. This will help ensure you don’t waste time editing details of paragraphs or scenes that will ultimately be cut. So, while it can seem overwhelming at first, here are three steps to help you get started with making big picture edits:
At this point in your writing/editing journey, the big picture is the most important part. If there are issues with your story at a base level, they’ll be much easier to fix at this stage in the process than, say, ten more rounds of edits down the line. We also call this developmental editing, because it looks at what needs to change with the story’s basic elements. So take your time and don’t be afraid to read through more than once. Of course, reading it on your own is only going to get you part of the way there. But once you have an idea of the areas that need fixing most, you have a better chance at getting closer to a final draft with the next steps.
The best way to get good, objective feedback is to share your story with others. This may feel scary at first, especially if you’re not totally satisfied with it yet. But, really, this is the best time to bring in other readers who can tell you what they’re seeing in the story. Sometimes, our love of our own work—the characters we’ve created, the scenes we’ve written, the lines of beauty we’ve formulated on the page—makes us too close to it. Other times, we’re too critical of ourselves and everything seems wrong—even the things that are very right. Asking other readers to provide feedback will help you sort through it all.
To find other readers, you can:
All of these options have pros and cons. Friends may be the easiest to ask, but they may not provide the clearest feedback because they’re not totally objective towards you. Joining a writing group is definitely the best option, and it means you’ll be able to lend your own editing skills to others. Trading work so that you’re both invested in the other is a great way to make this productive for everyone.
Beta readers can also be helpful, though this route will likely require you to pay for services. In this case, we recommend taking the next steps first and then paying for beta reading. GoodReads has a group that provides access to beta readers offering free services. There are also some Discord communities dedicated to such services.
Signing up for a course, such as the ones offered through Writers.com, Novelry, Gotham Writers, or any other program, can connect you with writers who are also working on a novel (or other kind of story). The downside is that these courses can be expensive. But because everyone is paying for them, there is an added pressure to get work done and provide good editing to all.
Another option is to work with an editor you have before. Editors who are familiar with your work know your writing style already and can speak to it specifically.
It will be helpful to know what kind of feedback to ask for and how to request it. After your own read through of your work, determine what will be most helpful to you. Consider these elements:
The more specific you can be in your request to editors, the more helpful they will be. Don’t ask for all of this at once, but rather highlight what you think is needed most in their read through.
Another important step of the editing process, and one which usually comes closer to the end, is line editing. This looks at the line-by-line of the text to make specific edits, fine-tuning language to adjust for pacing, grammar, and more. During line editing, you are looking at sentence structure and wording. You are asking questions about everything that appears on the page. It’s a long, drawn-out process, but one well-worth doing as it will heavily improve the quality of the work.
Here are a few general rules to follow of line editing:
These tips should help bring your story to the next level: one more step closer to “perfection,” whatever that is!
How words, phrases, lines, scenes, and chapters transition into each other is an important part of how easy it is to read a piece. Although we’ve discussed how important overall structure is in a story, it’s also part of what happens at a micro-level. Here’s how to tackle structural issues and check flow in your own work:
This kind of editing takes a lot of time because it’s so in-depth. But the end results will be worth it, and lead to a much more engaging and polished piece of art.
The final step of any draft is to proof and polish. Proofreading amounts to doing a spelling and close grammar check. It is essential to ensuring a piece is truly ready for submission somewhere, or for publication. Polishing your work in this manner will make you feel more professional and ensure that readers don’t write you off because of a silly grammatical or spelling error.
Proofing your own work can be difficult, so if you have someone to do it for you, use them. But if you don’t, follow this checklist:
☐Read the work aloud to check for sentence flow and clarity.
☐Run spell check or sit with a dictionary and go over any words you’re not 100% sure about.
☐Check for any grammatical errors by following this list:
☐The work is formatted properly and according to guidelines, if available.
☐Check the vibes: How do you feel about your piece?
Most importantly, recognize and celebrate the fact that you have created something. Completing a draft of a story, no matter what that story looks like in its first form, is epic and worth feeling good about. You did that!
Take a (short) piece of writing you’ve worked on over the course of this series and read it once to yourself without doing anything else. Then, read it through again, this time aloud, and mark every place where you stumble over words or notice awkwardness. Go back and edit those sections to make them sound better according to the guidelines above. After doing so, read it again. Still notice places to make changes? Feel good about what you’ve written? It may be time to share it with others to get their thoughts and feedback. After all, the writing and editing process works best when multiple people weigh in!
No one can write a story the way you would, not even ChatGPT. Or a ghostwriter. Nothing will feel like having created your own work from start to finish, so no matter where it goes next, even if that’s nowhere, you can still feel proud.
Remember: read your work through, read it aloud, send it to other people, and work on refining every part of it. The editing process is as rewarding as the creation process is, and it’s all part of the same incredible journey.
If you complete the editing process and feel really good about your piece, consider submitting your work to F(r)iction! Check out our submission guidelines here to see if your work falls under our purview.