The Readers on the Front Line

Discussion with Pete Sierra and Don Webb

In an e-mail conversation, Pete Sierra asks some good questions, particularly about our rule that as editors we don’t pass judgment on authors’ lives or on their personal motivations in writing; rather, we represent the readers to the authors.

Pete asks, logically, how we might claim to do that. The gist of the answer is that editors can’t claim to speak for each individual reader; that goes without saying. However, the editors are our contributors’ first readers; we’re on the front line, so to speak, and we’re the veteran troops.

Thanks for replying. As usual, you bring up very stimulating points. I ask these questions with great respect for your opinion. How do you know that you represent the readers?

A lifetime of professional experience in teaching.

What percentage of readers you do represent? Should we write only for a majority? Is the editor’s role to exclude any story that is not pleasing to the majority of readers?

What will the answers to those questions tell us that we need to know? How can even the most sophisticated polling of the readership — even assuming we can know what the readership is — tell us anything about the craft of writing?

Some readers will say they like anything, because they’re afraid to question it or consider alternatives. Others will dislike almost everything, because they have narrow expectations. Most readers will understand the difference between the critiques and the originals.

Maybe it could be informative and amusing for all involved: writers, editors, and readers to have a section, in which you publish one rejected story per issue with your rationale for doing so, and ask the readers to post feedback with a thumbs up or down. Just a thought.

I’ve often considered doing exactly that. In fact, that is what my article “Writing Action and Plot” does. And it’s standard practice in English composition courses.

There are a number of problems with that, the main one being time. BwStories is a big operation: our priorities are putting the issues on line, reviewing submissions, and replying to mail. However, I do have a substitute: the official Challenges. A lot can be learned from them, but they are not and can’t be point-by-point critiques of entire manuscripts.

[The next part has to do with seemingly irrational occurrences in life and how they’re treated in literature.]

[Don] But the effects must be rational. That’s not just us: that’s the way everybody thinks; otherwise life would be an incomprehensible series of non-sequiturs.

[Pete] Do you really think all effects of life are rational? Everyone hopes to find life rational, and that their lives would be meaningful, but I’m afraid that we ourself bring rationality and meaning to events, as we bring food to a picnic.

An interesting image...

We have to distinguish between cause and effect. To do that I’ll quote one of our unofficial mottoes: “Everything we perceive comes to us from the past; everything we do goes into the future.”

The point is that every individual consciousness embodies a present moment. The perceptions or causes, which necessarily come from the past, seem chaotic and irrational, because reality is much bigger than any individual. What the individual does with those perceptions is the effect.

Now, the effects will be rational, and we measure rationality on a linear scale ranging from wisdom to normal to comic to tragic to... chaotic. At one end, wisdom is moral creativity. At the other end, the chaotic is destruction: an effect that has no evident cause, as in talking to invisible people or acting as though a situation were entirely different from what it is.

Otherwise, life events are disconnected blades of grass that our conditioning see as whole called a lawn. If you pay close attention you will see how often you have to mown that lawn to make it look tidy.

Heh... I’ve solved the mowing problem: I consider a lawn an artificial construct; rather, I’ve let the yard become a prairie. I mow only paths and maybe trim a little bit here and there. Otherwise the yard blooms with wildflowers, each in its season.

But your principle still applies: I prune trees and bushes. And I make sure the plants don’t crowd each other out and that they get enough water. And that’s the way Bewildering Stories works.

Regards, and keep up the good work,

Don