An Interview with Neil Clarke, Publisher/Editor-in-Chief of Clarkesworld

Part two of a two-part series on mastering the short story.

In this guest post, Brian Reindel shares with Fictionistas a recent interview he did with Neil Clarke. We consider ourselves very fortunate that Brian was willing to share this with our readers, and we hope you enjoy it!

Image by Enrique Meseguer from Pixabay

Several celebrated authors provided a series of tips for mastering the short story in part one of this two-part series. Many of these same authors, while recognized by readers around the globe, still had to deal with rejection. Editors and publishers all have their own set of unique acceptance criteria, and not all of them were welcoming to some of the greatest writers of our time.

Ray Bradbury, in his contribution to Snoopy’s Guide to the Writing Life, says:

“I have several walls in several rooms of my house covered with the snowstorm of rejections, but they didn’t realize what a strong person I was; I persevered and wrote a thousand more dreadful short stories, which were rejected in turn.”

Bradbury goes on to say:

“... even today, my latest books of short stories contain at least seven stories that were rejected by every magazine in the United States and Sweden!”

While it is not possible to avoid the editorial process or sometimes demoralizing rejections, it is possible to solicit feedback from editors. Writers can learn a lot from editors, including their ability to spot an entertaining short story of publication quality due to their exposure to both volume and a wide variety of voices.

That led me recently to catch up with Neil Clarke, Publisher/Editor-in-Chief of one of the preeminent speculative magazines, Clarkesworld. Clarke was willing to share some of his own insights, immediately following a Hugo win.

Congratulations on your 2022 Hugo win for Best Editor, Short Form! After a win like that, does it change the trajectory for you or for the magazine you edit, Clarkesworld?

Thank you! While the win means a lot personally, it's unlikely to have an impact on my career or the magazine. Some of the authors in fiction categories (particularly novels) might see a bit of a boost from a win, but it hasn't appeared to work that way for previous editor-winners.

Can you give some metrics on the scale of Clarkesworld?

We receive about 1100 submissions per month and publish 45,000 words of original fiction in each issue. We have a readership of over 55K combined (web, podcast, ebook, digital subscriptions–this is a very conservative estimate as we don't know the exact overlap between those groups. It's unlikely to be lower, but could be significantly higher.) Paid readership is a very small portion of that. In 2021, just over 4000. (This disparity is a major problem for all of the publications offering free online editions.)

What is special to you personally about short fiction that prompted you to create Clarkesworld?

I am a self-described short story junkie and have been since age ten. Short fiction is the heart of the genre and the creative lab that gives you a snapshot of what the rest of the field will be doing in a few years. I wrote an editorial that goes into some detail about the reasons I think the form is important. I wanted to contribute to that in some way.

I never intended to go into publishing, but a conversation with Sean Wallace at Readercon in 2006 completely changed that. At the time, I was running an online bookstore (a side job, my main career was in academia/technology) and had been experimenting with online fiction as a means of marketing the science fiction magazines I sold. Sci Fiction, a widely respected online magazine published by the SyFy channel and edited by Ellen Datlow, had recently announced they were closing, something that was leaving a huge gap in the field. Our conversation covered these topics and drifted into why online magazines had such low survival rates. From there, we came up with a plan for a magazine, and three months later, we published our first issue.

A number of short stories and novellas that appeared in Clarkesworld have been nominated for awards. Suzanne Palmer won the 2022 Hugo for Best Novelette for "Bots of the Lost Ark", which was published in the Clarkesworld, June 2021 issue. You publish some amazing stories, but that must mean you read quite a few duds. What is the number one mistake you see writers make as it relates to writing short fiction?

I wouldn't say there's a single big mistake. It's more of a collection of common mistakes ranging from not knowing where their story starts to ignoring, or not thinking through, the consequences of major or minor elements of the story.

I can tell you that the two traits I find among the authors we publish are persistence (a shocking number give up after one submission) and dedication to improving their craft. This horrifies some authors, but when I accept a first story from them, I go back and reread their previous submissions. This is primarily a check on myself, not them. Did I miss something? So far, no, but I always observe a steady improvement across the stories we've received from them.

You have a pretty good size list of "hard sells" on the submissions page. The lists between various speculative magazines are not all that different. How might (especially new) writers of short stories move away from recognizable tropes toward those harder-to-find original ideas?

Write what you love, even if you love one of those hard sells. Clarkesworld may not be the right market for it, but there are other markets that don't feel the same way about mine. The trick with a well-trodden trope is to make it your own. Don't follow the standard formula. I read a lot of stories that have their endings telegraphed from the first page. That's the danger of taking the familiar path. Even a minor change in trajectory can have major repercussions. Go for it. Surprising me is always a good thing.

In your Issue 167, August 2020 editorial, "Yes, Virginia, Short Fiction Is Important", you list some great reasons why short fiction is important. In a few of those bullet points you mention impact and brevity. What is the type of impact authors are making on you with short-form fiction that helps you to recognize a story's publication quality?

When training our slush readers, I tell them that I am particularly interested in stories that make them think about or feel something. In these cases, the author tends to have made you care about their characters or the world they've dropped you in. That's a good sign and these tend to be the stories that you remember the next day. When you read as many stories as we do, most just blur together. Recollection says something stood out.

Some people complain that statements like that aren't particularly helpful, but if you are volunteering as a slush reader or critically reading a lot of fiction from a variety of markets, you'll quickly learn what I'm getting at. I haven't found any shortcuts to that understanding.

Ernest Hemingway believed that what you omit from the page can lend just as much weight to a story as what you leave on the page. His short stories are a testament to that. Do you have any theories about the art of short-form fiction that have been ruminating that you would like to share?

I have no shortage of theories, but none of them are about writing. Plenty of people cover that territory. As an editor and publisher, I often find myself thinking about the process that happens after the writer has written their story. I want to see a thriving ecosystem for short fiction. That's something we're all still working towards. Those theories range from the business realities that hold us back to my belief that the future of science fiction is international and should not be constrained by lines on a map.

Neil provided some links where he discusses the publishing ecosystem, including the idea of sharing science fiction across borders:

EDITOR'S DESK: STARING AT THE CEILING
EDITOR'S DESK: TEN+ YEARS OF TRANSLATION
EDITOR'S DESK: NOT ALONE

Neil Clarke
Clarkesworld Magazine / Forever Magazine
clarkesworldmagazine.com / forever-magazine.com

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Thanks again to Neil Clarke for sharing his editorial insights. If you want to support Clarkesworld, be sure to check out their Support Clarkesworld page.

Are there other types of interviews you would like to read within Fictionistas? Be sure to let us know in the comments.

1. Conrad, Barnaby, Monte Schulz, editor. Snoopy's Guide to the Writing Life. Writer's Digest Books, 2002.

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Brian Reindel is a journalism graduate who opted to write code instead of hard-hitting news. After a twenty-year absence, he is now writing speculative fiction and slice-of-life essays on his Substack Future Thief.