As a writer, it’s very difficult to predict how readers will react to my work. I may think a certain piece is genius, while my parents, friends or teachers think it’s mediocre. Everyone perceives things differently. One reader may love it; another may not.

As an editor, it’s partially my job to predict how Polyphony readers will react to the pieces I’m editing. This definitely factors in when deciding to accept or reject submissions. Therefore, it is also your job to consider how readers might respond to your piece. It’s tricky, I know, but thinking about it will make your compositions much stronger.

Here are three key things to think about so you can get a feel for how readers at Polyphony might respond to your submission.

1.)   Proofreading – There’s no running away from it. When an author doesn’t proofread, we know. Not only does it reflect poorly on their writing, but it also sends a message the author may not want to send: I don’t really care. If you truly care about becoming a part of Polyphony, sharing your work, and being taken seriously as a writer, you proofread. To be honest, it makes our lives a lot easier, too.

2.)   Originality – This relates to just about everything: storyline, format, characters, title, etc.

1. Storyline: This is hard. Just about every story out there was somewhat inspired by another. You can take components of preexisting stories, but always make sure to add your own personal touches. This does not mean taking Twilight and making the vampire into a female, and the human into a male. Creativity is my favorite part of writing. Use it!
2. Format: Not every story needs to be in paragraph format. It’s not aesthetically pleasing. Switch it up! Maybe tell your story through dialogue, interviews, diary entries, letters, anything! The lovely thing about being the author is that it’s your choice. Just make sure your choices have reasons.
3. Characters: If I read about another high school girl who’s really pretty and good at everything, but nice and humble and neglected by the popular girls, I might puke. Have you noticed that this describes the lead character in just about every teenage novel, TV show and movie? Just ask yourself if your characters might actually exist in real life. Complex and unique characters make stories amazing.
4. Title: In many ways, the title represents what the author finds most important and/or interesting about their story. Your title can also impact the reader’s opinion of the piece. In general, it’s something that shouldn’t be overlooked. A mediocre title usually indicates a mediocre story.

Of course, there are more ways to be original than those listed above. For example, cut out clichés! We cringe when we see things like “needle in a haystack,” “two birds with one stone,” “life isn’t fair,” etc. Avoid them at all costs!

3.)   Showing vs. Telling – While commenting on submissions, I often write things like “need more showing.” “Showing” is hard; even advanced writers don’t always nail it. But what exactly is it? We’ll start with telling. Unlike showing, telling is never subtle. It can be equated to describing an attribute: “She has long, curly red hair.” Showing would be depicting that attribute: “Her lustrous crimson locks swayed in the breeze.” See the difference? In general, showing is more active. It isn’t direct description. It’s often metaphorical. Also, showing can be more ambiguous and interpreted in multiple ways, whereas telling often has one meaning. Dialogue can be a good way to show the readers something, but you have to be careful because it can be telling, too. In general, show; don’t tell!

These are the three problems that tend to come up most frequently in submissions. There are others of course, and even if you’ve mastered these three, that certainly doesn’t mean you have mastered the rest. Even the most talented writers are students. They take every opportunity they can to learn to write more effectively, and you should too! Lastly, whenever you write something, have other people read it before finalizing it. The people around you are one of your most effective resources. Use them!

Sunblock

Chicago is known for its biting winters. People save their parking spaces with lawn chairs. Ice lingers in the space between street and sidewalk, stained black with exhaust fumes. Snow falls in April, and I usually don’t mind, perhaps because I’ve lived here my whole life. There does come a time, however, when even I ache for a sunburn. Winter lasts forever in the Midwest. A change of pace wouldn’t kill anyone. Chicagoans would find just as much pleasure in complaining about a sudden shift in weather as they do complaining about the six-month winters, which only proves my theory. A day of 60-degree weather would please everyone, because come Valentine’s Day, most are ready for spring break trips to a tropical island somewhere.

I often receive horrified responses when I admit to enjoying winter. As a writer, I find the season invaluable. In my last post, I admitted to conversing with my characters. Usually, my characters appear to me in dreams or during passing periods, but between the months of November and April, while snow falls in sheets, my walks to school inspire me most. Because when I see a man racing against a blinking stoplight, two daughters in tow, stumbling across the ice, what am I as a writer to do but to invent a plot for him? So, he’s a teacher, unhappy in his job, barely pleased with his marriage. He wants to earn a graduate degree in music composition. He writes concertos while his Shakespeare class takes a pop-quiz. Perhaps it’s an exercise for the literature-obsessed, but without the need for a distraction during a freezing morning walk, I think I would always wait for my characters to find me. Does that make me lazy? Maybe, but my most enduring stories were born that way.

Not all writers feel inclined to do this, however. I like to say that there are two extremes—the character writers and the situation writers. Certainly, someone can fall between these two labels. I do, at least. But situation writers can have just as much luck with the dismal winter months as character writers do. What screams plot more than a car skidding over an icy street into a lamppost or a bank or a person? Nothing. And oftentimes, the best characters arise from graphic situations like the one I just described.

Yes, Chicago winters test the soul, but doesn’t the best art come from suffering? (Don’t worry. I’m half-kidding.)

Only four weeks until spring break.

Shelby Brody, Editor-In-Chief

Tonight, my aunt Janet was reading an article in my high school alumni magazine about my second novel, and she asked me, “How did you come up with the name Avery?” I looked at her, blinking like my younger cousin had just shot me in the eye with a laser pointer, and I said, “That’s his name.” She smiled, and then I said, “I mean, what else was I supposed to call him? That’s his name.”

I take my characters for granted. I treat them like old friends rather than like facets of my imagination. Maybe this comes from spending hours on end with them (in any given week, I talk with my characters more than I talk with my parents), but maybe not. Maybe it comes from the power of characterization, an element of fiction oftentimes abandoned (especially by young writers) in favor of an exhilarating plot.

I have what I like to refer to as a two-track mind. While one half of my brain works to answer questions asked of me by my teachers, the other half is considering various sentence structures that could be used for a certain cliffhanger line in my latest story. While the left side of my brain takes a Chemistry test, the other half is conversing with the male protagonist of my first novel, trying to determine whether he smokes cigarettes or not. While I’m supposedly taking notes in Geometry, I’m slowly turning everyone in my world into a character, and as I’ve learned from experience, writers and their characters have intimate, borderline Utopian relationships with one another.

In my first manuscript, my male protagonist is a twenty-year-old musician named Peter Scott, a dark-haired, outspoken romantic. He possesses every quality of a star-struck high school dropout, almost all of which are revealed throughout the course of the novel, but some of his more telling past experiences are kept quiet. Since first discovering Pete, I’ve spent hours getting to know him, and I oftentimes think that I know him better than I know myself. I certainly know him better than I know even my best friends. Only I am privy to the serious relationship he had with a girl named Melanie before he left his childhood home in Cleveland, Ohio, and I am certainly the only one that knows he lost his virginity to her in a field when he was sixteen, their bodies lit only by the dim headlights of his ancient Volkswagen.

Characters are undoubtedly complex, sometimes as complex as the people I encounter on a daily basis. Each day that I spend with Pete, I learn something new. Every time that I write another chapter from his perspective, I realize that I didn’t know him as well as I thought. It once took me an entire day to discover that Pete didn’t drink his vodka with ice, that he smoked Marlboro lights, and that his romanticism stems from his love of pop music.

Halfway through that day, I told my friend Adrian about my problem.

“I’m ninety percent sure that Pete has a substance abuse problem,” I said, sitting down next to him in the fifth floor hallway.

“Ninety?” he asked.

“Ninety.”

“Well, then why don’t you ask him?”

To write is to play make-believe.

“What?”

“Close your eyes,” he said, “and ask him.”

“Fine.”

And maybe it was my desire to write about someone with an addiction to nicotine. Maybe it was my need to explore problems that I’ve never experienced first-hand. Or maybe, just maybe, it was because Adrian and I were alone in that hallway, and I felt safe with him. So I closed my eyes, and I asked Pete.

And he said yes.

So it came to follow that Pete spent a large quantity of his nights with a bottle of vodka and a pack of cigarettes, and I felt that I truly knew him inside and out. That trick Adrian taught me helped me to better understand character. Once Pete had a definite set of personality traits, it became easy for me to deduce (or to learn by working for hours with him) what alcoholic beverage he preferred (Absolut vodka) or what his favorite color was (blue).

As a writer, I am also a manipulator. I take my characters and unwittingly place them knee-deep in the tide. I say, “Good luck finding your way back.” Once I’ve assigned them their basic characteristics, such as Pete’s impulsive romanticism, they’re on their own. It’s up to them to reach their goal. It remains my belief that once characters have been fleshed out to a certain degree, there is little that we can do as writers to convince them to approach their problems in another way. Once a character has been cast into the surf, there’s not much that we as writers can do but record their journey back. We may watch from the edges of our seats, our nails jammed into our mouths, but we are merely observers by that point. We’re simply along for the ride.

Shelby Brody, Editor-in-Chief

Yesterday, when looking through my bookshelf for inspiration, I stumbled across my Geometry notes. Mind you, I didn’t particularly enjoy Geometry, so my first instinct was to bury the notebook as far under my bed as possible. But then it slipped through my fingers, falling open on my carpet. There, staring me in the face, was the fiction of Geometry past. My characters filled the room before I could stop them, and the next thing I knew, I was sitting on my bed, flipping through the pages like an addict. Hidden underneath the notebook’s red plastic exterior weren’t two-column proofs. Instead, I found stories; plot maps; and perfect first lines.

Clearly, I’ve never been much of a math student.

I used to think that watching my teacher draw coplanar lines was a waste of my time, but as soon as I found that notebook, I realized how valuable the mundanity of high school can be to the adolescent writer. It’s the fuel to our literary fire; it kicks up inspiration into our eyes until the classroom around us disappears and we are left with nothing but our pencils and our ideas. Think about it. Where would teenage writers be without something—a teacher, a subject, a classmate—to complain about?

Exactly.

I turned my own complaints into a young adult novel. After the rejections started pouring in, I began to think of Polyphony HS as a safe haven for virgin writers, because Polyphony HS does something that no other agent, publisher, or literary magazine does—we talk to our authors.

When I was a sophomore, I submitted my own Geometry-inspired writing to Polyphony HS, only to receive a rejection six weeks later. But unlike the form letters I’ve received from publishing companies and agents, the Polyphony HS rejection didn’t sing praise or half-heartedly dismiss my piece. Instead, it gave me constructive criticism from three of my peers that forced me to reexamine my work with a more discerning eye. I’ve kept the suggestions I received for that one piece in mind as I continue to create, and the anonymous editors behind those comments have provided me with a more precise attention to detail.

Polyphony HS is a beautiful magazine (and I’m not even talking about our Tony Fitzpatrick cover art, although I could—trust me). For the adolescent writer, it’s an invaluable resource. It’s a place for each of us to grow, with support and with careful, but constructive criticism from our peers. It changed my writing, and I can only hope that in the year and a half I have left on staff, its message will continue to give courage to those writers too timid to share their Geometry notebooks with the world.

Shelby Brody, Editor-in-Chief