Editors From The Sun, Ploughshares & Okay Donkey on What Makes Them Keep Reading
A one-shot workshop on pacing, voice, and turning good openings into great work
Hey friends,
Welcome to another round of Tell Us Something We Don’t Know — where we source a panel of literary experts and ask them questions about whatever the heck. Today, the heck is pacing and our instructors are experienced editors from three top-tier literary magazines:
The Experts:
Derek Askey — senior editor at The Sun
Rachel Dillon — award-winning poet, teacher, and managing editor of Ploughshares
Steve Chang — co-founder of Lit Match Collective and fiction editor at Okay Donkey
The Takeaways:
Effective pacing techniques to keep moving your story forward
How to draw out your unique voice through detail and observation
Common pacing issues editors see in submissions and how to fix them!
How important is a strong opening or a killer ending? And what about all that stuff in the middle?
By the end of this workshop, you’ll know how to capture the attention of editors, develop your stories with depth and nuance, and keep readers hanging on every word.
Let’s Begin at the Beginning…
Opening lines, exposition, pacing, and living up to the promise of your premise
Don’t set expectations you can’t keep!
Derek Askey, The Sun: It’s not particularly difficult to tell when a submission’s opening has been labored over more than the pages that follow: A compelling beginning might give way to rote, unimaginative prose, or a voice that had been clearly and memorably established in the first few paragraphs fades into blow-by-blow descriptions or stilted dialog. It’s often such a shame: Why couldn’t the author keep up that level of writing? Where did they lose their way?
It’s a natural impulse, of course. You know your piece is being read alongside thousands of other submissions, and you want to impress right out of the gate. There’s no way they’ll stop reading after an opening sentence like this — it’s perfect! But in truth, the pieces where such high-quality writing is spread across the whole submission: Those are the ones that get passed along to our editorial staff for further consideration. Even the most gripping opening can fade — and quickly! — in a reader’s mind if what follows doesn’t live up to its promise.
Keep exposition to a minimum
Steve Chang, Okay Donkey: At Okay Donkey we love “off kilter” work that’s not quite normal, and what that means in terms of submissions is that we get a ton of pieces that start with great premises… but then they tread water.
Why?
One reason is that, often, these pieces get bogged down in exposition. We get a great situation with potential but then the story feels compelled to explain all the ‘what’ of it, the history of everything and everyone involved, the rules of the world, the ‘how and why’ of getting into such a situation, etc.
I think writers would be surprised by how little exposition is actually needed for a piece to do its job. Yes, context is great (and necessary) but it should serve the forward momentum of a piece. It offers a deeper understanding of what’s happening, sure, but that understanding should also heighten the reader’s anticipation of what might come NEXT.
It’s not just idle looking back. It can do so much more.
And, yes, the act of looking back can generate great forward momentum if handled correctly, like in Rina Olsen’s Skeletons in the Closet or Brittany Ackerman’s Boy Crazy, but these stories are also driven by other factors, such as character agenda and cause and effect.
All I’m saying is: it’s not necessary to overwrite expo dumps. So why do we get so many submissions that do?
I think it’s a symptom of the draft. The writer is figuring things out on the page. Then forgetting to clean up the mess of construction. Or they think the mess IS the construction.
The solution, for me, is to maaaaybe differentiate between drafting and revising as modes, and keeping different questions in mind when doing one or the other.
Developing Your Story…
So many writers get stuck in the middle of a story — so how do you keep the momentum going, escalate the plot and develop your character arcs to keep readers hooked?
Go further & deeper
Derek: One of the best pieces of advice I’ve been given on pacing is from my mentor when I was in graduate school, Steven Schwartz, who often reiterated that stories, as they advance, need to go both further and deeper.
He was referring specifically to fiction, but I think the rule applies to nonfiction as well, and it’s one of the things that’s often in my mind when I read submissions for The Sun:
Is this plot merely advancing, or am I actually becoming more invested in the people (or characters) being described as this piece goes on?
If something’s happening on the page, is it something that matters?
Is this particular exchange of dialog so important that it needs to be in quotation marks and conveyed in full, or would it be better to summarize it and get to something more important? (And, if it’s the latter, does the reader really even need to see it at all?)
Are the characters, or people in the essay, the same as they were when the piece started? Have things gotten more difficult for them? Better? How are they handling that?
I’ve found that, so long as you’re accomplishing at least some of these things, concerns with pacing kind of take care of themselves. I’ll add that nothing kills pacing quite so much as a character or a narrator spending too much time in their head, or walking around aimlessly, or otherwise squandering their precious time on the page.
Does every paragraph need to take the piece further and deeper? Does every sentence? Well, probably not, but it isn’t a bad idea to take a look at maybe every page (and no less than every scene) and make sure it’s doing just that. Does every paragraph in your piece deserve a place in it—does it justify its presence? Or, perhaps more to the point, would you feel the same way about that paragraph if it had to stand up to the scrutiny of being the very first one in your piece?
By and large I just want to know I’m in good hands with an author: that, if I’m spending a lot of time in a particular scene, or with a particular character, the author has a good reason for me to be there. Once you start feeling like the author’s lost hold of that authority, things can go off the rails pretty swiftly.
What now? So what?
Steve: Once we have a draft on the page, maybe our guiding questions are no longer ‘what’ and ‘how and why’ etc, but ‘what NOW?’ and ‘so what?’
‘What now?’ is what the reader should be thinking, periodically. They should be looking ahead in anticipation, not just passively receptive. Have we shaped our draft to help them do so?
‘So what’ can guide us when considering how much exposition we need. Whenever something transpires on the page, we have to ensure that the reader understands the ‘so what’ of it. And by doing so, we also get into the consideration of motivations, stakes, and consequences and whether all of that is on the page yet.
Simple, right?
Use observation & detail to propel your story forward
Rachel Dillon, Ploughshares: Whether a submission reaches the maximum word count or is only a couple hundred words, I am most interested in consistent, confident, surprising work; work with a clear, trustworthy voice. By “trustworthy,” I don’t mean that the characters or speaker need to be reliable or likeable — rather, I want to feel like I am in good hands. I want to trust the writer to carry me through the rooms of their piece, whatever those rooms may hold.
It’s important to note that, though I used it above, I’m often wary of the word “voice” when describing the writing and writers I love. It calls to mind the nebulous, overused advice sometimes given to emerging writers: to “find your voice.” Locating yourself among the chorus of writers you read, write alongside, and admire can feel like an insurmountable task — but when I think about a writer’s voice, I’m not only thinking about the syntax, lexicon, and formal experimentation at work in their piece. I’m considering the writer’s ability to observe. These observations might come from their daily environment, their personality, their literary lineage.
While reading, I ask: What sensory details stand out to a character or narrator? How might the way they see their world enrich my understanding of my world and, in the words of Naomi Shihab Nye and Vievee Francis, build our “shared world”? These questions complicate how we might define “voice,” and makes room for the strangeness and mystery that comes from deep, daily observation.
Devon Walker-Figueroa’s story Hold Harmless, published in our Fall 2025 Longform issue, exemplifies how close attention to language and hyperspecific characterization can propel longform prose forward. In one particularly memorable scene, a character named Alma eats a cruller. Alma describes the cruller’s taste as “sweet and awfully wonderful, the smallest hint of lemon in the dough.” Walker-Figueroa’s story is over 40 pages long, but that detail — that hint of lemon — sticks with me; in part thanks to its specificity, in part because I love a hint of lemon in all baked goods, and in part due to the rhythm of the sentence itself, and the way it’s rendered so perfectly in Alma’s speech (the quick clause-comma-clause structure, plus “awfully wonderful” — a phrase I can hear every time I read it). As a reader, I trust Walker-Figueroa to both carry me and surprise me — her observations are consistently compelling and strange. She paints a world that I am sad to leave when the story ends.
Endings: Nailing the Landing
Finding the right ending for your story can be a huge challenge, and can make or break a submission — whether it’s too on the nose or leaves us unsatisfied — so how do we wrap things up in short fiction?
Take the reader on a journey
Steve: The other issue with pacing I see a lot is when a writer heads directly for the ending — the solution to the problem posed by the premise — and a compulsory ‘beautiful’ moment.
So what we get is an A → B flip.
For example:
‘My mother hates how I have extra tentacles’ → ‘Starting today, I will love myself.’
or
‘I get bullied at school’ → ‘But today I fight back.’
What I might be talking about is the concept of ‘earning’ an ending vs. a protagonist solving a problem without doing any work. A story that involves the latter is like… a pre-solved problem. The solution just hasn’t been announced yet.
This might be more of an issue for shorter pieces. At Okay Donkey we publish up to 1200 words for prose. So, when working within the confines of flash, writers might feel rushed to deliver the goods.
Maybe?
But how we get where we’re going is important too. And there’s room, even in flash, for journeys. What I recommend for writers who head straight for their endings is simply: Learn to turn.
(Or escalate. Like in this piece by Skyler Melnick.)
What do I mean by turn? Change course. Compound or alter the problem. Get knocked off-path by a reveal or some combo of action-reaction.
Example:
This piece by Chris Scott appears to be about a strange door in the woods but what is it actually about? Where’s the turn here?
Of course, a straight shot from A → B can work fine if done well — that’s a whole other topic — and a turn doesn’t necessarily have to occur via plot.
Example:
This piece by Didi Wood appears to be a straight shot from A → B in terms of plot but how does it ‘earn’ its ending?
What do you think?
Derek: Finally, I’ll leave you with the words of The Sun’s founder and editor emeritus, Sy Safransky, whose thoughts on submissions are more eloquent than I’ll ever manage:
“I’m looking for a writer who doesn’t know where the sentence is leading her; a writer who starts with her obsessions and whose heart is bursting with love; a writer sly enough to give the slip to her secret police, the ones who know her so well, the ones with the power to accuse and condemn in the blink of an eye. It’s all right that she doesn’t know what she’s thinking until she writes it, as if the words already exist somewhere and draw her to them. She may not know how she got there, but she knows when she’s arrived.”
Ask an editorial expert!
If you have a question about pacing, story development, or lit mag submissions that wasn’t covered here, leave a comment below and our wonderful editors will be here until Fri 13 March to give you feedback:
Inspired to write? Heck yeah.
Find even more tips on developing your short fiction, writing exercises, and editorial insights right here:
Bosh out your next short (short!) fiction draft in just 10 minutes with micro-expert Darien Gee:
A comprehensive guide to flash fiction — from initial idea to final draft — with award-winning short fic author Jo Gatford:
Go even deeper into the editorial and revision process with Steve Chang in this four-part workshop:
The only resource you’ll ever need on submitting your writing to lit mags, from the co-founder of Chill Subs:
Plenty more gems to be found in our Short Fiction, Editing & Submissions workshop catalogues, too…
And shout out to our friends at Lit Match Collective — a writers’ community led by editors (co-founded by Steve Chang!) offering tons of literary events, activities, 1-to-1 consultations and conversations to help us all grow and connect.
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This piece was full of good advice. Thank you Editors!
I love these interviews!!! So glad you spoke to Derek. I would love to be published in The Sun...someday. I haven't submitted yet except to Readers Write, but it's one of my favorite magazines.