Participating in this season’s Sixfold voting

As I continue to explore different venues for submitting short stories, one publication different than the others has been Sixfold. Traditional literary journals have a team of readers and editors who vet submissions and curate the publication. Sixfold, instead, has the writers who have submitted stories or poems read, comment, and vote on one another’s work. The top-ranked third of the submissions advance through each of the three rounds of voting; by the end, pieces that are finally selected for publication have been read by over seventy writers. The result, Sixfold says, is reliably selecting the best work.

Reading and evaluating

I came across Sixfold in the same way I have found most of the literary magazines I send things to–through Erika Krouse’s invaluable list. This April I sent a story in, and at the beginning of May, I began the first round of voting. Six anonymous stories showed up in my online portal on the Sixfold website, and so during some of my writing time this week I have been reading them and writing comments, contemplating my ranking for the first round. Meanwhile, my own story is circulating around out there with six other writers. We’ll see what happens.

I’m really enjoying the voting process. I am guilty of reading surprisingly little contemporary fiction, which I know I should do as a way to be honing my own craft, as well as supporting fellow writers. This voting process gives me the incentive to keep up, read stories, and consider carefully what I think really works or doesn’t work about them. Having to rank the stories forces me to make judgements that perhaps I would otherwise be loath to make, and this helps me put myself in the position of an editor, who receives hundreds of submissions and must cull out from this a handful for publication. It helps me begin to get a grasp on what their thought process might be like.

The six stories I’ve received for this first round run the gamut. Some are long, approaching Sixfold‘s 5000-word maximum. Others might be classified as flash fiction, only one or two pages. There are mental health stories, grief stories, coming of age stories. I will also say, there is a range of technical skill in these stories–some are strong; others less so. And this leads me to a question that I think is at the heart of this process: what is it that really makes a story good?

Quality in fiction

I remember vaguely a section that stood out to me, nearly fifteen years ago when, in 11th grade, I read Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. One of the many issues Pirsig explores here is the elusive question of quality. In the novel, a professor tells students that if he asked each of them to tell him what made a piece of writing quality, they all would come up with different answers. But if he instead gave the students three pieces of writing and asked each student to choose which was the best, all the students would choose the same one. Quality, the professor argues, is something universally recognizable.

Sixfold gives some numerical evidence that seems to support Pirsig’s idea. In its discussion of “Worst-case Voting Scenarios,” Sixfold notes that in general, voter agreement is high. That is, it is unusual to have wildly different rankings show up in the voting process. In addition, they describe how when a particular story receives few votes (because some writers who submitted stories then forgot to vote), the story automatically advances to the next round, yet in the following rounds its performance is usually on par with the few votes that it did receive in the previous round. These data suggest, then, that indeed there might be broad agreement over whether a piece of writing is strong or weak.

Is that true? How does this idea jive with the also very evident subjectivity of reading, the way some people will love a novel and others despise it? What about the greater diversity of our societies today? Perhaps Pirsig’s experiment yielded this result because of the relative homogeneity of the class. The question is as well, I suppose, whether majority vote can really be said to constitute truth.

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In a few weeks, the voting will finish, and the results of whatever happens will be posted on the Sixfold website. All the writers then will see the rankings, and they will also receive comments left by other writers. I’m looking forward to reading others’ thoughts, even if I’m also a bit nervous. I don’t know if I’ll advance to the second or third voting rounds. All remains to be seen. In the meantime, this is a great instructive exercise and a really intriguing way to be part of a kind of the editorial process.

Best wishes for the coming weeks,
Jimmy