Wendy N. Wagner is the editor-in-chief of Nightmare Magazine and the Managing Senior Editor of Lightspeed. Hugo-award winning and Locus-award nominated for her editing, she’s also been nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award with her short fiction. Her latest book, Girl in the Creek will be released by Tor Nightfire in 2025. I was over-the-moon when she agreed to talk to me.
The full interview will be released later on Horrortree.com, but here is a sneak peek at her more awesome-sauce hints.
AF: As an editor of two of the most coveted short stories markets out there, I’m sure you get a huge slush pile every month. Are certain kinds of stories overdone? What should writers avoid submitting to your magazines?
WW: I know there are magazines with lists of tropes and story elements they won’t consider, but that’s not the case at Lightspeed/Nightmare. Both John Joseph Adams (the editor in chief at Lightspeed) and I are always really excited to see something classic explored in an exciting new way. We are both most interested in really human approaches to genre fiction—so fiction with strong voices and powerfully drawn characters.
At Nightmare, my goal is to find horror stories for all kinds of people, so I like to explore a very broad expanse of the genre. That probably means that if I’ve published a story about vampires that year, I’m not going to publish another vampire story for a while . . . unless it’s doing something very different with the topic! But honestly, the only thing off-limits at our magazines is AI-generated content.
AF: If you had a wish list for stories or themes you wanted to see more of, what would they be?
WW: I almost never see genuinely scary science fictional horror, so that’s something I’d love to see. And as an outdoor enthusiast, I would love to see more adventure horror.
AF: Do you have any tips for nailing the opening of a story?
WW: I think there are three things to remember about story openings. The first is that a beginning is often sculpted in the revision process, not in the drafting. Writers often need to start a story in a place that isn’t the best spot for a reader to enter the tale. So write as much as you need to, but after you’ve finished the first draft of the story and understand what it’s really about, go back and evaluate the beginning to see if you’ve actually started in the right place.
Picking the right starting place is the second most important thing to keep in mind. A good story needs to start in a place of tension. That’s why the first sentence of Kafka’s Metamorphosis—which opens with, gasp!, someone waking up—is still one of the most riveting opening lines in literature: Gregor Samsa doesn’t just wake up; he wakes up to discover he’s been transformed into “a horrible vermin.” Not a pony, not a butterfly: a horrible vermin. That’s how he describes himself! That kind of self-loathing is tense.
The last thing to think about when designing your opening is that, as super-agent DongWon Song says: “In an opening you need to focus on stakes, not outcomes. Give us a moment to understand what a character wants. And what they want will tell us about who they are. And once we see who someone is, we’ll start to give a damn about the rest of it.” I think this is such stellar advice. A good short story is more about risk than about happenings.
AF: If you could give young Wendy one piece of advice when you first picked up your pen, what would it be?
WW: Have faith in your stories and just keep writing—no matter what!
My dream is to make it into Nightmare mag someday...ty for posting.
This was a very insightful interview! Thank you and Wendy for this guidance on short stories!