Just the other day an editor I like and respect – and have sold several stories to – wrote this on her blog:

“Some good stories but not good enough to send up the line. Most stories start too slow to catch my eye… if I’ve past the first or second page, I think, ‘This would’ve been a great story if it started here.’ In other words, get to the point already.”

And I know what she means. I do. I do, really. Yes, a story should have a point. Tales that meander all over the place – tales that go no further than internal angsting of the characters – tales that basically consist of a beautifully described setting – aren’t engaging.

I christened them ‘New Yorker stories.’ Every time I’ve dipped my toe into the waters of New Yorker ‘literary’ fiction I’ve kind of found myself swimming with these myopic literary sharks, taking random bites out of anything because they can’t seem to focus hard enough or long enough to actually be dangerous. I’ve read stories labeled as ‘literary’ that were deeply brilliant. But on the whole, I do prefer my stories to be going somewhere, and taking me there with them. A point is essential; a story has to have something to TELL me, and something within it to change the characters who inhabit it to the point that I can tell that this has actually happened.

But in one sense the editor conflates ‘slow’ and ‘badly paced and starting in the wrong place’ – and I have to take a step back here, and speak up in defense of ‘slow.’

Starting in the wrong place is most often a beginner’s mistake. You kind of wander into your story through a side door and poke around the place for a bit until you find yourself comfortable enough to get on with telling the tale which you meant to tell all along.

But this is a fairly specific problem, and ‘starting in the wrong place’ is not the same as ‘slow’ – because slow can be beautiful, and a story that is all point and nothing else is just as awkward and uncomfortable as one that has no point at all.

Slow is depth. Slow is taking the time to know your tale. You take your story out and ply it with wine and roses by candlelight, you don’t slam it against the wall in a back alley and have your wicked way with it without first asking its name. Slow is waking to a perfect tropical day in a beach resort, wandering out to the verandah and stretching languorously as you watch the sun glitter on perfect pale-blue waters… and then remembering that you came here with the love of your life, that he wasn’t in bed when you woke this morning, and that he said that he might be wanting an early morning swim before breakfast, and that you’ve just caught a glimpse of something thrust under your door and half under the rug, a note from resort management which, when you pick it up, warns you that a hungry shark has been seen close to shore and that you should not go into the water until the problem has been sorted out. Cue ominous music.

But without that slow – without that first glimpse of paradise – the point of the shark is kind of lost. Unh, yeah, sure, there’s a predator in the water. But far more importantly than that, there’s a PREDATOR in PARADISE – and without the slow, without the establishing shot that gives you that paradise to begin with, all you’re left with is the monster.

Think of all those horrible B-movie slasher films with bucketloads of fake blood and monsters killing for no particular rhyme or reason. There is no ‘slow’ there. No subtle. Nothing but the fake blood and the teenage scream queen who’s about to become hamburger. Now think of some of the more subtle Stephen King efforts, where you are lulled by slow, where the small and pretty and innocent and innocuous Maine towns which King loves to set his stories in hide some ghastly horror beyond imagining – made