Sixteen brave writers submitted their first pages of poetry or prose to our Slush Pile! event April 17, 2021. Our panel—Noah Stetzer, Ty Stumpf, and Tracy Crow—provided insightful critiques and helpful advice. They also admitted their biases.
Three themes emerged in the discussion:
- Everything that is important needs to be on the first page—or in the case of poetry, in the poem. This includes place, time, conflict, character, voice, mood, and tone. The analogy was given that a first page is like a VW bus (or a suitcase) packed for a cross-country trip: it needs to hold everything needed for the trip. The analogy for a poem would be a VW Beetle.
- Stories/poems need to start at the beginning, preferably in scene, without introductory ‘throat clearing.’ Think about telling a story to a group, one of whom already knows the story. You want to tell the story in a way that does not bore the friend who knows it already. Conversely, I say it like starting a story about a dinner party with “I fixed tea and toast for breakfast this morning and then…”
- The main elements of the first page—place, time, character—need to be braided into the action so as not to present an information dump.
Specific comments on the poetry—though some can apply to prose also—were:
- Unclear imagery—didn’t understand what an image represented
- Unclear antecedent—pronoun could refer to two or more preceding nouns
- Too abstract—abstractions need to transform to a specific image, object, or action
- Too distant—author ‘had no skin in the game’
- No surprise or “turn”
- The title told readers what to think/feel—let readers discover for themselves
- Word choice—words did not convey as much meaning as they could
- The Wrong tone for subject matter
Specific comments on the prose—though some can apply to poetry also—were:
- Verbal-tics—words repeated throughout the text that do not add to the story (recently mine has been ‘just’)
- Repeated words without purpose—using the same noun to describe an object, the same verb to describe an action
- Use of clichés
- Ensure each word has meaning/purpose
- Use words that both propel the story and stimulate the reader
- Long sentences that don’t propel the story
- Sentences of the same length that become monotonous
- Wordiness
- To tighten sentences try to make the last sentences in each paragraph flush with the right margin
- Too much set up at the beginning
- Beginning in the wrong place—too much ‘throat-clearing”
- Start in scene, that is begin with the story and braid in background information as the story progresses
- Use of flashback/backstory shows the author doesn’t know where the story starts—many editors & agents don’t want flashbacks for at least five to ten pages
- Information dump—exposition that doesn’t move the story forward
- Use of dialog to set up information dump
- Telling rather than showing, which creates distance from the story
- Too much detail
- All detail given the same weight—don’t know what is important
- No sense of place or time
- Jumping around in place and time
- No sense of conflict or complication
- Confusing change of verb tense
- Unclear POV
- Unclear why the story is being told
- Using a narrative device more than once without changing it up
And then there were the biases. It is important to realize that everyone has biases and that editors and agents are no different. But what one person may reject because of bias may be welcomed by another. Case in point, shortly after one person said they didn’t like dialog to start a story, another suggested a story start with dialog. However, it is good to be aware that biases exist. The ones admitted to were:
- Concepts not grounded in poetry
- Questions in poetry
- Use of gerunds (words ending in ‘ing’) in poetry
- Opening dialog with no context
- Dreams that aren’t profound