What We Look For
Stone Soup’s Editorial Criteria
Stone Soup has published the work of young writers and artists since 1973. In fifty-three years, the question we ask of every submission has never changed: Is there a living voice on this page?
We do not ask whether a piece is good for the writer’s age. We do not grade on a curve. An eight-year-old who writes a competent but lifeless story about a dog has written a competent but lifeless story about a dog. A twelve-year-old who channels Ginsberg has written something that demands to be read on its own terms. We publish the second and decline the first. Age tells us which section a piece belongs in. It tells us nothing about whether it belongs in the magazine.
What follows is not a checklist. A piece does not need all of these qualities. But it needs enough of them that we can feel a specific person behind the words.
Voice
The first thing we look for, and the most important. Voice is the quality that makes you feel a particular human being is speaking — not performing, not completing an assignment, not imitating a favorite author, but actually talking to you. It is the thing that separates a letter from a form. You recognize it the way you recognize a friend’s handwriting: not by any single feature, but by the accumulation of choices that could only belong to one person.
A child who writes “the dog’s tail went like a question mark when he saw me” has voice. That image belongs to that child. A child who writes “the loyal dog wagged his tail with excitement” has written something that belongs to no one.
Voice is not style. A quiet, plain-spoken piece can have tremendous voice. A baroque, ambitious piece can have none. Voice is presence — the sense that the writer is in the room with you.
Texture
Good writing breathes. The sentences are not all the same length. The paragraphs are not all the same shape. There are fast parts and slow parts, dense parts and open parts. The rhythm changes because the writer is responding to the material, not following a template.
Uniform texture — every paragraph the same length, every sentence the same construction, every beat arriving on schedule — is the single most reliable sign that a piece is dead on the page. This is true whether the uniformity comes from inexperience, from over-editing, or from a machine. Life is irregular. Living prose is irregular.
Stakes
The writer cares about this. You can feel it. Not because they tell you they care — “this was the most important day of my life” — but because the writing itself carries weight. Something is being worked out on the page. The writer isn’t reporting; they are discovering.
Stakes are not the same as drama. A quiet piece about watching rain can have enormous stakes if the writer is genuinely seeing something in that rain. An action-packed adventure can have no stakes at all if the writer is just moving pieces around a board.
Surprise
A word you didn’t expect. An image that stops you. A turn in the narrative that makes you reconsider what came before. Surprise is proof of an imagination at work — a mind that is making choices, not following a path of least resistance.
Surprise can be small. It doesn’t need to be a twist ending or a shocking revelation. It can be a single adjective that reframes a sentence. It can be a line break in a poem that creates two meanings where there was one. It is the moment where the writer shows you they are thinking, not just writing.
Specificity
Details that could only come from this writer. Not “the beautiful sunset” but the particular thing they saw. Not “she felt sad” but the specific, physical, embodied experience of this person’s sadness. Specificity is what separates observation from cliche. It is the proof that the writer was actually there — in the scene, in the feeling, in the moment — and not assembling a scene from parts.
Earned Emotion
The hardest quality to describe and the easiest to feel. Earned emotion is the difference between a piece that makes you feel something and a piece that tells you to feel something. It is the difference between showing the reader the rain on the window and telling the reader “it was a melancholy afternoon.”
Young writers are often told to “show, don’t tell.” The deeper truth is: trust your reader. A piece that trusts its reader to feel — that provides the experience and lets the emotion arise from it — has earned whatever it makes us feel. A piece that insists on its own emotional importance has earned nothing.
What We Do Not Penalize
Roughness. A rough sentence with life in it is worth more than a polished sentence that could have been written by anyone. We are not looking for perfection. We are looking for the spark. Ambitious writing that stumbles is almost always more interesting than careful writing that never risks a fall.
Unconventional form. If a young writer has chosen to write in fragments, or in second person, or in verse paragraphs, or in a structure we haven’t seen before, that is a signal of creative intelligence, not a mistake. We evaluate the choice on its own terms.
Difficult content. Literary daring is a quality we value, not a problem we manage. Young writers who tackle difficult subjects — loss, identity, injustice, the body, the sacred — are doing what writers have always done. We do not confuse maturity of subject with inappropriateness. We have a Younger Readers section and a Teenage section; content guides placement, not acceptance.
Imperfect grammar or spelling. Mechanical errors are the least interesting thing about a piece of writing. If the voice is alive and the story is real, we can fix a comma.
What We Decline
We decline work that is competent but lifeless. This is the most common reason for a decline, and the hardest to explain to a young writer, because the piece may have nothing technically wrong with it.
Competent but lifeless writing reads like it could have been written by anyone. The prose is smooth. The structure is correct. The vocabulary is varied. And nothing is happening underneath. There is no voice — no sense of a specific person making specific choices. The writing is performing competence rather than communicating experience.
We also decline work that is:
Stock language assembled into a narrative — pieces built from phrases that belong to no one: “a wave of emotion washed over her,” “little did he know,” “she couldn’t help but smile.” These are borrowed clothes. We are looking for the writer’s own skin.
A school assignment with a creative veneer — the five-paragraph essay dressed up as a story. The research report with a character pasted on top. These pieces have structure but no impulse. The writer was completing a task, not following a need.
Emotionally insistent without earning it — pieces that tell us how to feel on every page, that underline their own importance, that narrate the character’s emotions instead of creating them. The writer doesn’t trust the reader, and the reader can feel it.
The Maybe
Some pieces live in the space between. They have a signal — a moment of real voice, a genuinely surprising image, an ambitious structural choice — but the signal isn’t sustained. The voice flickers. One paragraph has it; three don’t. The attempt is visible but the execution isn’t carrying it yet.
These are the pieces our editorial committee reads most carefully. They are the pieces where human judgment matters most, because the question is not “is this good?” but “is there enough here?”
A Note on What Great Writing Is
There is a quality that separates the first tier of writers from excellent writers who are not quite at that altitude. It is not craft, because both tiers have craft. It is not intelligence, because both tiers are intelligent. It is not ambition, because a modest masterpiece outranks an ambitious failure.
The difference is this: in the first tier, the prose itself is the experience. You don’t just follow Herman Melville‘s story in Moby-Dick (1851); his language induces the vertigo it describes. You don’t just understand Jane Austen‘s characters in Pride and Prejudice (1813); her sentences contain two simultaneous meanings — what the character believes and what Austen knows — and you hold both at once. Virginia Woolf, in To the Lighthouse (1927), writes prose that moves the way consciousness actually moves. Toni Morrison, in Beloved (1987), writes sentences that arrive in your nervous system before your intellect processes them. Charles Dickens, in Great Expectations (1861), makes you feel his breath on every page — a living mind talking to you across a century and a half.
In the second tier — and these are wonderful writers, writers you love, writers you reread — the prose carries the experience but doesn’t become it. You are gripped by the story, moved by the characters, but you are following the writer rather than being transformed by the language itself. Stephen King‘s The Shining (1977) terrifies you, but by what’s happening, not by how the sentences work. Agatha Christie‘s Murder on the Orient Express (1934) is a brilliant puzzle, but you never stop and reread a sentence because the sentence surprised you. Wilkie Collins‘s The Woman in White (1859) is a terrific novel — but Collins’s prose doesn’t alter your perception the way Melville’s or Austen’s does.
We are not expecting this distinction from young writers. But we are looking for the seed of it. The child who writes a sentence that does something — that changes your perception, not just your understanding — has shown us something remarkable. And we want to be the magazine that sees it first.
The literary critic Harold Bloom called this quality “strangeness” — an originality that cannot be assimilated entirely, that resists reduction to the familiar. In The Western Canon (1994), he argued that what makes great literature endure is not its moral instruction or historical importance but this irreducible strangeness: the sense that a particular mind has seen the world in a way no one else has, and found language for it. That is what we look for in young writers. Not perfection, not precociousness — strangeness. The voice that could belong to no one else.
StoneSoup.com since 1973