The Writer’s Coin

This book took me a LONG time to get through. It’s been on my sidebar under “Currently Reading” for a really long time. More on that later. But anyway, I finally made my way through it and all of the stories inside. The book is a collection of short stories that are supposedly the “best of the year.” You may have heard of some of these authors but for the most part they aren’t that well known, at least not to me.

There are two reasons I wanted to read this book:

• Entertainment: This is usually my priority when it comes to reading books, although sometimes I will read a non-fiction book because I want to learn about something. But usually reading is all about entertaining myself.
• Practicing what I preach: When it comes to getting published, I’ve started to come around on certain things. One of them is NOT sending out a hundred submissions to different literary magazines or journals. It sounds smart, but it’s not. It’s almost like sending spam out and seeing if you get lucky. One of the best tips is to know where you write. Instead of paying $5 to subscribe to a single journal that I may not even like, I’d rather read books like these that have stories from all different places. This way I can get an idea if a story I’ve written may or may not be a good fit with journal X or Y.

That’s the idea, anyway. That’s also why I like to read books from the Best American Short Stories series, which is what I thought this was going to be like. Unfortunately, I didn’t like these stories nearly as much. I kept a notecard with me at all times as I was reading and took short notes on each story. Hopefully, as I read more and more from different journals, I’ll be able to create a database of places I want to send work to. Places that publish stories I really like and think are good.

I also rated each story and wrote down which journal they appeared in.

The bad news? There were no 10s and no 9s. There were just two eights: (”Mudder Tongue” from McSweeney’s and “The Scent of Cinnamon” from One Story). The rest of them were all mediocre and some were just plain boring. Special mention: The New Yorker continues to churn out pretentious stuff that only pretentious people would want to read.

The good news? Even if I wasn’t as entertained as I would’ve liked, this was a very useful book to read from the perspective of someone trying to get published. As my boy Stephen King says, “you have to read as much as you can. Good and bad.” That’s paraphrased, by the way. But not liking these stories helps because I pointed out a few things that I do in my writing that, when I saw these people do it, pissed me off. Like going on and on about a little detail that is completely useless to the reader — why have that in there? In the end, it’s helped me see some things in myself that I want to avoid. Plus if these mediocre stories are in a prize book, that’s also a sign of hope.

I also had fun looking up the publications these stories were in after reading the story. I actually like McSweeney’s and One Story, so that makes sense. The book also has a cool thing at the end: each author writes a little paragraph about his/her story. Where it came from, how long it took, how much of it is real, etc. For a writer like myself, this stuff is gold. Sometimes it was more entertaining than the actual story.

If you’ve read this book and are curious what scores I gave your favorite story, shoot me an email or drop a comment. I’ll gladly share with you and I’m curious which stories you liked best.

On a related note, you’ll see there’s a new book on the right-hand side, under “Currently Reading.” If you’ve followed that section at all (or know anything about me), it may surprise you to see such a mainstream author/book. Well, that’s because I’m a snob. So to remedy that (and part of the ongoing “read everything, even the ‘bad’ stuff” campaign), I decided to read a bestselling, mainstream book. There weren’t a lot of recommendations, so I picked this one out with Amazon’s help.

From this day forward, if I ever criticize a “mainstream” author, I can at least say I’ve read up on them (or at least one) and not sound totally ignorant. And who knows, I may even like it. I hope it’ll be more entertaining that the last book (and The New Yorker).

Tags: McSweeney's, Mudder Tongue, new yorker, O Henry Prize, One Story, Stephen King, The Scent of Cinnamon