A Fractured Reader’s Perspective: The 5 Most Common Reasons I Decline a Piece, and What to Do About Them

I’ve been a reader with Fractured since January 2024, and in that time, I’ve read hundreds of submissions. I’ve found that I end up passing on pieces for many of the same reasons over and over, and I’ve improved my own work by writing these reasons out for myself in detail, explaining to myself what isn’t working, how to identify the problem, and how to begin fixing it. In this piece, I will go through five of the most common issues that keep me from saying yes to a submission. If you’re a Fractured submitter or might want to become one in the future (and you should! The water’s warm!), I hope this list provides insight into what we’re looking at as we read and might give you some leads for possible revisions to your work.

Of course, every item on this list won’t apply to every kind of story. Many pieces we receive clearly signal that they’re trying to do something that goes against one or more of the ideas below, and our intention as readers is always to read each piece on its own terms. These are simply the most common issues I come across. If you read these and think, “That one doesn’t apply to what I’m trying to do,” you may very well be right, and you should trust your own vision. I’m trying to propose questions you can ask yourself about your work, not conclusions you must reach.

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The Characters Don’t Feel Lived-In

One of the most common notes I make when passing on a piece is that the characters don’t feel “lived-in,” and one of the most common when saying yes is that they do. This can be a difficult term to pin down precisely, but I want to dig into a few of the reasons a character can feel lived-in or not.

Often, characters seem flat or underdeveloped because the reader has a sense of their being purpose-built: they are there in the story so that the plot can happen, or so that the author’s message can be communicated. Of course, every character is in the story because the author put them there – Isle McElroy once tweeted that “writing a novel is mostly being a middle manager for a bunch of little freaks you made up” – but the best writing gives its characters the quality of independent life, of possessing their own volition; the best characters seem as if they have collaborated with the author on the terms of their creation.

What does this look like in practice? A few examples of what an underdeveloped or not-sufficiently-lived-in character can look like:

• The only trait the character seems to possess is the one that relates to the current story: for instance, a story about Max’s battle with drug addiction in which Max’s only character trait is that he’s a drug addict.
• There’s a boilerplate quality to their dialogue or internal monologue as if their words/thoughts could be lifted and transferred to any character in any similar story: the character does not seem like Natalie, who’s falling out of love with her husband, but rather like Woman Falling Out of Love With Her Husband. That is to say, the character behaves as if they were an example of a type, not an individual. The reader might think, “I’ve heard almost that exact line in other stories.”
• They live their life as if it started when the story began as if they have no history: Max thinks about his drug addiction as if he only just started thinking about it, not as if he has lived with it for years, thought about it from many different angles, and has watched it inflect his experiences, relationships, and memories.
• Their actions seem imposed on them, unmotivated: sometimes this is because the action is at odds with what we know about them as a person, and sometimes it’s because we don’t know enough about them as a person to be able even to assess whether it’s at odds or not.

The common thread connecting these examples is a want for specificity. A lived-in character feels as if they had a real life before this story started and will continue to have one once it’s over; they have the idiosyncrasies and internal tensions of a real person. Natalie’s parents have been married for sixty years, and her brother’s been divorced twice by 27, and out of something like competitiveness, she insists to herself that she’s as in love with her husband as ever. Max has gotten clean in fits and starts, but the housing discrimination he faces as a formerly incarcerated person perpetually pushes him towards relapse, so that he has slowly become embittered toward the very prospect of quitting. Each has their own particular patterns of speech and thought, their own desires and fears, and their own sense of their place in the context in which they live.

If you’re unsure whether your character feels lived-in or not, try to write a few scenes with them that have nothing to do with the current story and may have nothing to do with any story: shadow them at work, listen to them talk on a first date, accompany them to a doctor’s appointment. I’m phrasing those ideas passively for a reason: release the character from having to perform in any particular narrative and let them come to you, let details adhere to them, and let them surprise you.

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The Premise Never Develops

Imagine a flash piece that goes like this:

Beginning: the narrator tells us that she’s the night clerk at a hotel in the middle of the Sahara Desert. The desert is vast and unforgiving, and the hotel gets very few customers.

Middle: she describes what life is like at the desert hotel: the cleaning crew wage an eternal war against sand; fennec foxes are always getting into the dumpster and eating bagels from the continental breakfast.

End: she describes the intense quiet of her night shifts: she’s often there by herself, and there’s no sound but the wind against the windows, so she likes to watch movies from the hotel’s small stash of VHS tapes.

This is a kind of piece I encounter a lot: it establishes an intriguing premise but then stays parked there with the premise, adding more and more detail, but is unable to create forward movement in the story. The writer has created a hotel and put a person inside it, and I’m waiting to see what that person does. I learn what she does habitually, I learn about the static conditions and routine events of her life, but as I’m sitting there watching her, ready to learn what she’s doing now, at the time of this story, she isn’t moving yet. You’re giving me more detail about the premise – night clerk at desert hotel – but not moving beyond it, not setting anything in motion.

This problem can arise in many different kinds of pieces and can happen much more subtly than in this example. Sometimes, the piece moves backward to explain how we got to the present set of conditions; sometimes, the piece delves deeply into a character’s interiority, showing us how the character feels about the premise. These can enrich our understanding of character and situation, but they are not the same as narrative progress: we are still at the same place we started.

If you’re unsure if your piece develops its premise, look it over and ask yourself: what is different about the characters or the situation at the end of the piece compared to the beginning? What changed?

This problem can also occur by degrees; I’ve read several pieces that spend the first two pages of a three-page piece elaborating on their premise but not moving beyond it, only to hurry through a full beginning-middle-end story in the last page. The effect is that the first two pages feel unfocused, and the last one feels rushed and underdeveloped, since it was trying to do in one page the work of three.

As a reader for a flash fiction magazine, I get a lot of pieces that make me think the writer primarily reads novels instead of shorter forms and might “think in novels,” so to speak, instead of in flash. This is nowhere more apparent than in pacing; novels are very forgiving of excess, and flash fiction isn’t at all. If you’re having trouble deciding if you’re spending too long ‘setting up’ the action of your story, an exercise I find helpful is to imagine the piece scaled up to the size of a novel. Maybe spending one page out of three on setup doesn’t seem so long, but would you read a 300-page novel in which the action properly starts on page 100?

If you have a piece you feel is too rich in expositional detail, look it over and try to determine which details the reader has to know just to understand the story at all, and start by including only those. From there you might add in details you think meaningfully inflect the story, even if they’re not strictly essential. Be wary of falling in love with your premise, with the look of the stage before the play begins; however, pretty the set, we’re there to see what happens on it.

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The Piece Lacks Focus

Your friend is telling you a story. She begins by saying, “So, I was on the subway heading to work, and there was this guy with a guitar,” and you think: this story is about a subway busker my friend saw. But during his song, your friend says, she saw someone else in the subway car wearing a jacket sort of like the one Ryan Gosling wears in Drive, and it made her think of her ex, who she saw Drive with, and how he wanted to get a jacket just like that afterwards, and she had to talk him out of it; after she got off the subway – this is back in the story’s present-time now – she saw a driverless car love-tap a bicyclist and speed off after, and she thought, what a world, they’re trained to do hit-and-runs now.

What was her story about? Why did she want to tell it to you? It doesn’t seem to be about the busker, but she started it there. It could be about the jacket and the ex, but you wouldn’t need to mention the busker to tell that part. Maybe it’s about driverless cars or the dangers of unregulated technology, but in that case, she could have left the subway out entirely. I decline a lot of pieces as a reader because they’re what I call unfocused: they touch on many things but seem to have no clear through-line; they include many different scenes or details but in a way that suggests the writer didn’t know which ones were important and which weren’t; they begin by establishing one point of tension and end by resolving another. I’m left unsure what it all added up to as if I just perused the component parts of many different stories but didn’t experience any of them in full.

From my experience and speaking with other writers, I sense that this happens when a writer isn’t totally sure themselves what the ‘core’ of their story is. If you know that you’re telling a story about a driverless car hitting a cyclist, it likely won’t even occur to you to mention the subway busker. If you know that you’re telling a story about how someone’s jacket sent you down memory lane, your imagination won’t even leave the subway car. Sureness of vision will indicate not only what to include but also the much greater number of things it would be better to leave out.

If you think this describes your piece, go through it and locate the parts of the piece you feel best about, the parts that excite you and feel essential to your vision. These can be anywhere in the story, and they can be anything: a character, a relationship, an image, a particular quality of the prose (be careful with this last one; the quality should be something more than just that you think it’s pretty). Maybe your beginning feels right, but after that, the story seems to wander. Maybe your ending feels perfect but doesn’t correspond to the story leading up to it. Maybe there’s just a single moment in the middle where it feels like your intentions and desires as a writer become legible to you, and everything else around it was just so you could get to that moment. Whatever it is, try to think concretely about what it is that makes that part of the piece feel so essential, so ‘right.’ You have a fixed point in the sky now, something you can use to navigate: write another draft knowing that you want to keep that moment more or less as it is, and begin thinking about the things that would logically precede or follow from such a moment. You might find another moment that feels consonant with the first; now, you have two points in the sky. You are locating the core of your story, the really indispensable thing at the center of it, and you can gradually build around it until the entire story seems to reflect this indispensable thing, and feels not only right but inevitable: these scenes could only play out in this way, this ending and no other could round the story off, the piece could be no other way but how you have at last discovered it to be.

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The Theme is Presented Heavy-Handedly

“What is your story about?”

If you’ve ever been asked this question, you might have felt tempted to give two answers, not one: it’s about a hurricane in New Orleans, but really, it’s about generational trauma; it’s about a murder at a ski resort, but really it’s about capitalism. The first is the plot, the second the theme, and to say that a piece feels heavy-handed is mostly to say that the theme is overwhelming or crowding out the plot; the story has begun to feel less like a story and more like an essay or a treatise.

As a reader, I’m looking for some combination of fully realized characters, an engaging story, and a nuanced exploration of a richly depicted world or situation. A story begins to feel heavy-handed when its plot, characters, dialogue, and so on seem like they’re intended only to convey us directly to the author’s intended meaning; the experience of reading the piece is depleted, because there seems to be nothing to experience but its message.

This can take many forms, but here are a few of the telltale signs I often see:

• The piece depicts its tension or its characters in black-and-white, good-and-evil terms. If there are contrasting points of view in the story, only one is actually presented, or the opposing viewpoint is presented only very weakly so that it can be defeated. There’s some overlap here with the section about lived-in characters; characters without nuance never feel real.
• Characters or the narrator speak the message of the piece: they issue proclamations about the story and its meaning that nothing in the piece resists or complicates.
• The language of the piece is abstract and conceptual – truth, freedom, justice, trauma, etc. – rather than particular or specific. Emotions are invoked by name rather than depicted.
• The resolution of the piece is often unusually neat, to prevent a reader from interpreting it in any way but the intended one.

In my experience, this kind of oversimplicity often comes from a lack of confidence on the writer’s part – confidence in what their story is about or confidence in their ability to convey it. In my own writing, I tend to find that my first drafts are very heavy-handed: the characters are two-dimensional and constantly speak the subtext of the story, and the plot telegraphs its ending right from the beginning. I’m not sure what the story is yet, and I can only paint in the broad strokes of its shape. For me, confidence comes with revision. I’ve figured out what I’m writing about – in both senses – and I can find more subtle and specific ways to express it. For instance, you are reading the seventh or eighth version of this paragraph.

If you want to revise with an eye towards combating heavy-handedness and making your story’s theme flow more organically from its characters and plot, try this: write down as many words as you can think of that represent the theme or themes of your piece, then write a fresh draft of the story, in which you are not allowed to use any of those words. What does your grieving character do? What does the loss of freedom look like, scaled down to a public park in Sacramento on a sunny Tuesday morning? What is the meaning of justice in the fourteenth row of a Chicago Bulls game, or a DMV, or a Shake Shack?

The stories we keep coming back to – the Shakespeares and the Austens of history – continue to call us back because we never seem to have quite wrung all the meaning from them. Different people can find different things in them, and the same person might even find different meanings over time. What compels me more than anything else as a reader is basically this: that the piece has life in it, that I am not just reading it but conversing with it.

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The Prose Gets in the Way of the Story

There’s no one particular prose style that every writer should be trying to use; each story will have its own voice. Generally, what I’m looking for in a Fractured submission is simply prose that feels “right” for the story; it signals to me the writer’s intended tone, rhythm, and so on, which helps me know how to read the piece. That can mean lyrical prose, and it can mean pragmatic, utilitarian writing; both can be wonderful. What I want to do in this last section isn’t give specific stylistic recommendations but discuss three sentence-level decisions I see a lot of writers make that shut me out of the story, either by flattening it and making it seem less alive or simply by making it hard to follow.

Clichés

Clichés make a story feel less alive because they’re substitutes for meaning, for specificity: if a character avoids something “like the plague,” the phrase acts as a shorthand, telling me what the writer wants this sentence to mean to me without their having to write a sentence that would actually mean it. It also makes the piece feel generic since it calls to mind all the other thousands of times I’ve heard that phrase. The fix here is simple: go through your piece and look for phrases that feel familiar to you, like you’ve heard them before; consult a list if it’s helpful. Consider ways to say the same thing in different language, but also consider that sometimes an idea presents itself in cliché language because it’s a cliché idea. If the most natural way to phrase what you’re trying to say is a cliché, it might mean you need to do more to make your characters, plot, or setting feel specific. (Clichés in dialogue can sometimes work because some people do talk that way, but they will usually make the character who says them seem boring or unimaginative, so only use them if that’s your intention.)

Too Many Close-Ups

I’m borrowing a film term to describe a particular kind of writing I see in a lot of submissions:

“Speakers throb. Feet tap to the beat. Ice melts in drinks as they’re lifted to parched lips.”

These kinds of details can be very effective when they’re paired with more clarifying scene-setting language. If the next sentence of that example is

“Every inch of the Electric Lounge is packed with dancing people, sweating through their clothes in the cramped, neon-lit space.”

then the introductory details work fine, settling easily into the broader picture. But often I see pieces that stack close-up onto close-up without ever establishing their setting or even characters. The effect is that the piece seems to take place nowhere, and I can never see the characters or the action clearly.

Having done this myself, what I found to be the cause was that I could picture the Electric Lounge very easily, so it didn’t occur to me that the reader could only picture the things I showed them. This isn’t a hard fix. Try to forget what you know about your setting and go through your story, picturing each image in turn and then as a combined sequence. If it’s hard to picture the entire space your scene is in, add a sentence or two describing it in broader terms – an establishing shot, you could say. This is also a situation where it’s very helpful to just show your work to someone else and see if they find it confusing.

Disembodied Action

“Five nights a week, Trevor would go to the lot out back of the baseball fields, where stories of batting prowess would mix with laughter and expressions of admiration.”

In the previous section, I described a common tendency in writing that makes settings hard to picture; this is similar but applies instead to characters, especially minor characters. In this sentence, who is telling the story of batting prowess? Who’s laughing, who’s expressing admiration? These things appear to be being done by no one. I’m not having difficulty picturing the place, but rather the people: the sentence is clearly meant to establish the world of this story and the things that happen in it, but the world seems depopulated, Trevor showing up to an empty parking lot.

You’re probably familiar with the advice that writers should be careful with the passive voice, but there’s no passive voice in the example above; this can happen in other ways. Be on the lookout for descriptions of action that don’t have a person attached to them. It can be helpful, if you’re writing a scene that depicts a large number of minor characters, to ask yourself: exactly how many people am I putting in that parking lot? Where are they positioned relative to each other? Are they sitting or standing? What are they wearing? Even if you don’t plan on naming all the characters, being specific with yourself about their number and position in the scene will help you make sure to give each action a body to go with it.