Grabbing Attention (originally appearing in Once Upon a Time)
by Dana Cleveland Konop

           Every once in a while those fortune cookies can have some pretty deep stuff. Think Zen koan. In fact I’ve carried the following fortune in my purse for fifteen years and have just now come to grasp even more of its meaning: “Your journey will reveal itself. Trust your instincts.” 

I’ve been going to writers’ conferences and listening to editors for years.  Whether the editors are twenty-something or twenty-something plus a few decades, when asked the mother of all questions, “What are you looking for?” it seems as if they usually say about the same thing: “Write what you know.”, “Write what you’re passionate about.”, “Surprise me.”, “I don’t look for anything in particular, just something that reels me in.”

Instead of the pages of meticulous notes I used to scribble; now I just listen.

However, it wasn’t until a recent trip away from the kids with my husband to Chicago, that I fully grasped the meaning behind what all those editors were really saying.

My husband and I were seated at a Second City improvisational comedy performance. To my surprise, the entertainment took off like an innovative variety show unlike the traditional stand-up comedian with an opening act. Shrieks of laughter filled the dimly-lit black theatre.

Amidst constant gut wrenching guffaws, my attention drifted. I imagined the editors I’d been listening to sitting in a similar audience in Manhattan, (any time they pleased – Do editors have children?)  swimming in a hub of information and creativity from the “city that doesn’t sleep.” Editor-gods are surely surrounded by innovation, multicultural art, multimedia, and culture from an unending variety of restaurants to a smorgasbord of people, entertainment, and a drowning slush pile from subdued lackluster suburbia across the country.

To capture the attention of an editor bombarded with originality and a thick-as-whale-blubber slush pile, the elements of surprise, inventiveness and plot twists suddenly took on an entirely new meaning. 

It was Thursday. We still had two more days to relax in peace without the kids, but I couldn’t wait to get home. I settled for making copious notes on a tablet from the hotel gift shop while longing for my computer.

As soon as my children went back to school the following Monday, I ran upstairs to my writing alcove. With newfound insight and inspiration, I began searching my writing for uniqueness, life, plot twists, and just the right touch of sassiness to grab the guts right out of an editor and make them care about my writing as much as I did.

I pondered how I could make things worse for my protagonists. 

Much of my revisions also came down to the basics of using vivid description and sensory detail to make my writing “stand up and walk.”  For example, “Opening the door to the courthouse, cool air greeted me,” became “Opening the heavy door, chilled musty air from the antique courthouse fell on my sun-baked face.”

For weeks, my keyboard sizzled with feverish tapping. Papers flew out of my printer amidst gritty revisions of unsold articles, novels, and short fiction. 

Here’s hoping that Chinese fortune cookie wisdom works for you too, and “May your submissions rise to the top of the whale blubber!”