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How to Walk a Slanted Floor


Now that I’m on hiatus from publishing The Centrifugal Eye, I’ve begun submitting my own poetry to the markets again. I’m experiencing a little bit of disconnect with some of the current writers’ markets I’ve been researching, because I’ve been hunting for theme-related calls for submission, but haven’t found many currently. I’m used to themes, you see— TCE is a theme-based literary journal, and despite some writers being put off by having to tailor their work to subject or concept, I’ve always found speculative goals to be stimulating.

Having edited many articles that need to relate to a given theme, I find it difficult to get into stories, essays, and reviews that are too generalized. And on the other side of the desk, creative fodder is always welcome to prolific writers; they’ve told me so. And that’s how I feel, too — I welcome some sort of prompt to hook into, to spin a poem, essay, or non-fiction article into something a little more “other” than just an a-b-c narrative.

So, guess I’ll have to play the roulette game with random subjects a little more often than I’d hoped. It’s harder to compete with a broader influx of general submissions than with specific ones, but I suppose most every other writer does, too.


It’s not that I totally mind having a wide-open playfield, either — a theme-less journal that calls for “anything is fair game” is like being invited to splash about on a white canvas, or fill up a blank page with whatever your mood prompts. Both challenging and carefree.

But that doesn’t mean that I can’t make up my own themes and unusual topics to submit to a theme-less journal. Besides considering themes, there’s something else even more exciting I can use to stimulate whatever I write: SLANT.

The word slant means several different things in the various internal fields of writing, so which do I mean? There’s the much-quoted Emily Dickinson line, Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. Many writers interpret this declaration to mean “write what’s true, but you can tell lies to make it work better.” (I largely agree, but that’s a post for another day.) And there are “slant rhymes.” Also known as “half-rhymes,” these are words in which the consonance sounds similar.

And then there’s the slant of an article, to which I refer for my purposes.

If the main subject or topic of a story or an article is its floor, then slant is the floor’s angle. If, as an editor, I wish to see essays covering the writing life, I will be disappointed if each of those articles doesn’t also have some sort of slant that obviously differentiates itself from the others. Most editors want to see creative slants from their contributors, I assure you. Especially the ones who deal with specialized subjects and so therefore get submissions on the same sort of material, over and again.


Of course, creating a good slant can be tricky. It must slope far enough away from the general topic to be interesting (subtopic), but not so far that the author falls off topic completely (entirely unrelated subject). My advice for carefully (but creatively) walking a slanted floor is this:

When considering a topic or theme to write about, brainstorm a list of related subtopics. Then create a second list of unrelated subjects that you may have already been thinking about writing or researching. Go do that research and see how your main topic, subtopics, and seemingly unrelated subject might somehow connect. Choose the most interesting subtopic and unrelated subject to work with. Once you have a connection (find it, create it), it’s time to write an outline or a rough draft. Work on giving the general theme a strong slant by staying focused on the subtopic, but be sure to somehow merge the newly connected subject so that it flows; be sure to make sense of the merger for your readers. Show them how these things relate without necessarily telling them so. Follow a train of thought that moves away from the subtopic toward the unrelated-now-semi-related subject or reflection, but then circuitously returns in a logical direction to the subtopic.

When writing poetry, marrying a seemingly unrelated subject to another is done by using it as an image, a metaphor, or another type of poetic device. Likewise, this method can work for lyric prose.

If you’re not used to applying this technique in your writing, practice slanting a few articles before you submit them. If you’re more honest with yourself than Emily proposed adults should be with children and each other, you’ll know when your slants work and when you’ve tilted the floor a little too steeply for safety. But do slant — you’ll find a lot of editors excited to receive your refreshingly distinctive stories, poems, and articles.

The articles that I have slanted the most have been my most popular with readers in the past. I need to remember that. I suspect that if I stay focused on playing with slants on a regular basis, the irregular, submission calls for themes won’t feel quite so infrequent as they do for me at the moment. This sort of prompt to creativity is exactly the stimulation I need. You might discover you feel the same way. If so, I'd like to hear about one of your experiences with slanting an article or story.

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