Results: Duff McCourt

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• Editorial

BY Duff McCourt and Helen Michaud

Over the years, this column has mostly been my attempt to capture my thought process while reviewing submissions, but the actual process that stories go through from our inbox to the front page is much more collaborative. For nearly the past year, we’ve had Tim Ford and Lou Sytsma add their perspectives to the mix, which I believe only makes us stronger. In the hopes of giving a glimpse into how we select our stories, the three of us got together virtually to chat about how we approach reading for AE. This makes for a longer “Over the Transom” entry than the others, but hopefully a more entertaining one as well.

• Reviews

BY Duff McCourt

Socrates, Abraham Lincoln, and Neil Armstrong sit down for tea. It’s not the opening of a poor joke, but rather a potential scene from Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld. In Riverworld, the entirety of humanity is resurrected naked and youthful along the banks of a single immense river that winds through an intricate valley on a vast and temperate planet. Peoples ancient and modern mingle in what can only be described as a cosmic social experiment.

• Editorial

BY Duff McCourt and Helen Michaud

What makes narration work? Voice, the confident delivery of narration, is a cornerstone of making it work.

• Editorial

BY Duff McCourt and Helen Michaud

You’ll hear the same advice repeated in books, magazines, and blogs aimed at writers: Do bad things to your characters. Raise the stakes. Give them something they care about and then take it away. And then do it again.

• Editorial

BY Duff McCourt and Helen Michaud

Micro: the wild and elusive subgenre of truly tiny tales

• Editorial

BY Duff McCourt and Helen Michaud

It seems that every few weeks someone writes a piece about why agents will stop reading your manuscript, often within the first few sentences. It doesn’t seem fair, and perhaps it isn’t, but these are readers with a finely honed sense of what works — or more precisely, what they can sell — and they know that no one with buying power gets any more forgiving further downstream from them.

• Editorial

BY Duff McCourt and Helen Michaud

If you read many of the editor’s interviews over at Duotrope, you’ll notice several common refrains in the answers to the question, “What is the best advice you can give people who are considering submitting work to your publication?”

• Editorial

BY Duff McCourt and Helen Michaud

We get a lot of stories about pronouns in our inbox — characters who have no other handles than “he” and “she” or “I” and “you.” There’s a certain seductiveness for an author to leaving names unspecified — not only can you avoid coming up with an appropriate one, but you can argue that leaving things more open-ended allows readers to can fill in the blanks from experience and identify more closely with the characters. But there’s a risk associated with it as well.

• Editorial

BY Duff McCourt and Helen Michaud

We talk a lot about the importance in fiction of a strong beginning, but what is often harder to pull off successfully is the ending. This is especially true in short fiction, which doesn’t provide much space to introduce new characters, develop an intriguing situation, and bring it all to a satisfactory resolution (which doesn’t necessarily mean tying it up with a bow).