A View from the Slush

Catherine Shortridge
January 28, 2026

Stretch your ghost wings and scream

SLUSHFOOT

It’s like trenchfoot, but less deadly.

I’ve been involved in slush reading for various competitions and magazines for many many years. It’s a thing that teaches you a lot about writing, though, if you’re me, you’re also prone to forget those things when you take a break.

See, the stories you read online or in magazines have managed, one way or another, to get through the front lines of slush readers, and receive the final nod from the editor. They can teach you a fair amount of what makes a story work, but there’s a hell of a lot you miss when you only see the ones that make it.

The lessons in what not to do, and why, are brutal and effective, and you learn them firsthand in slush.

BUT IT’S A GOOD STORY, REALLY

When you read slush, you don’t have the space or time to give a story chances. You read like Dear Reader skimming through a hundred offerings from twenty different magazines, looking for the one that hits them. Your slushpile may have hundreds upon hundreds of entries, and you don’t have time to sit and read every one closely (nor will you want to.)

You cannot wade through eight pages of turgid build—up to hit the AHA! moment of payoff.

Because, lmty, Dear Reader won’t.

There are a few recurring issues you spot if you spend any length of time reading slush, and they’re all things you can look at and apply to your own work, if you’re looking to make your stories sing from the first line.

Image by SarahCulture from Pixabay

WHAT WENT WRONG

There are a couple of things that make you nope out on a story pretty much from the first line or two. When that happens, I skim the rest to see if it picks up a bit in, or if the writer is trying do something unusual.

Just Plain Bad Writing

You mighty think this is subjective, but it’s pretty quickly apparent when a writer hasn’t worked long enough at their craft, or hasn’t read enough to have a solid grasp on what helps make a work flow.

There’s the overly wordy, ‘Eye of Argon’ type writing, often found in bad fantasy.
The dry, dull list of events and technobabble that seem to be a standard SF prologue.
the attempt to capture an archaic voice (think Lovecraft) that just reads like pastiche.
the block of breathless prose where the author has yet to discover the invention of grammar, and, importantly, paragraphs.

Bad Writing on Purpose

You can get a little further in a story sometimes

The work is grossly misogynistic, racist, homophobic, or includes physical or sexual assault at a plot point just because someone wants to get their rocks off. The number of horror stories I have seen in the slush that revolve around murdering an ex-wife is something.
the ‘I’m so clever wait til your read my ending!’ story where the big reveal shows that all the previous bad writing was the set up for their ‘brilliant’ punchline or rugpull (This won’t work, because I won’t get there, and neither will Dear Reader.)

That last one frustrates me endlessly because it’s often done in the service of comedy, assuming that a reader will trudge through to the end.

It’s also related to a different issue, which is not so much bad writing, as bad storytelling.

IT NEARLY WENT RIGHT

Some stories are pretty well-written, or at least readable and clean, on a sentence by sentence level. They fall apart due to the execution of the narrative.

With these stories, when the writing grabs me, or it seems like the story is heading in an interesting direction, the flaws become, in a way, more frustrating.

If only you had work-shopped this one a little more, I think as I sadly pop it in the no column.

GHOSTPIG! I was introduced to this phrase today by Chris Bissette, who mentioned it when I was lamenting the reveal at the end of a story, where the opening sentences don’t hint promise the payoff.
Work that is interesting, has good bones and fresh writing…but needs a lot more polish and restructuring before it lands in front of editors. An editorial team will usually take on work that needs a bit of a guiding hand, but will balk at a story that needs serious overhaul.
Pacing issues - story takes too long to get going, has scenes that aren’t needed for the whole, and races to the finish.
The story only starts on page three - the rest was the writer setting up the backstory and world-building. Stuff that the writer needs to know to inform the story, but the reader doesn’t (see above with pacing)
Work that doesn’t stick the landing. The build up is great - the payoff or final paragraphs/lines, do the rest a disservice.
The story says nothing new or interesting - treads ground a thousand stories have trod before and doesn’t bring freshness to familiar ideas.
This would be a fantastic opening chapter of a novel. A short story it is not.

THIS WILL GET PUBLISHED, BUT NOT HERE

Or the sad tale of the market that got away

Some stories are so good, or so nearly good, that you know that you’ll see them turn up sold somewhere.

tonally not a fit - I really dislike didactic stories, or ones with a moral that is as unsubtle as a brick to the teeth. Those stories will appeal to someone, but it won’t be me.
on the flip side of that, I love weird af stories that do interesting things with time and space and gender and language - but not every magazine has an audience looking for those things. You need to steer towards the right harbour. I will highlight stories in the slush that I like and think will sell to a different magazine, but at the end of the day, that decision will be down to whether the editor feels they’ll fit with the magazine or anthology vibe.
The mag just published or bought something similar. Sorry, that’s just a sucks to be you moment. ☹️
Story is the wrong genre or length. Just a fundamental mismatch, but the work has merit enough that it will find a home. Double check these things with The Grinder.

YOUR WRITING WILL GET BETTER

Mine has.

And lmty I’ve probably done (and still do — see not sticking the landing) near everything on the above list.

You learn to write better by writing better.

By reading more, by analysing where you went wrong with the help of a writer’s group you trust. By giving crits to your fellow writers (so much easier to see their flaws versus your own, even when they’re the same 😉 )

And if you get the chance to join a magazine slush team, you will get a crash course in what it means to hook the writer from the outset, to understand why work needs to be edited and polished, to understand that a rejection is not personal.

And rejection is subjective. A fundamentally good story is still not going to appeal to every reader and editor. If you know, from crit and reader response, that the work is good, you need to keep subbing until it finds that home. (Or save it for that future collection.)

Sometimes you come back to a good story months or years later and realise how you can make it better, and then it sells.

So don’t give up after those first rejections.

Happy writing (and revising!)

Until next time,