In July 2013, I served as the “editor-in-residence” for the Codex Writing Group, which meant basically I was asking a month-long AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) interview. With Codex’s permission, I’m re-posting the Q&As here on my blog. The questions were all provided by members of Codex.

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You say there are a couple of occasions where you rejected a ton of stuff by a particular writer, only to see them turn a corner creatively, and all of a sudden you like a lot of their work.  That’s very intriguing. What has turning the corner looked like in these situations? Is it usually a matter of the writer getting better at voice, dialog, description, structure, or other matters of craft, or is there something more basic that kicks in?

I’m not really sure! I wish I could offer a more useful response, as I can see why it would be a very interesting thing for writers to know. I expect to figure it out I’d have to spend a lot of time analyzing the writer’s previous work and comparing it to the new work to determine what it is that changed. And of course that would only be possible if the writer’s other work was published elsewhere. I can think of a few examples where the writer was indeed publishing elsewhere, but his/her stuff never worked for me, so I could feasibly conduct that inquiry, but frankly I don’t think I have the tools for that particular experiment!

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