Interview with womag legend Clare Cooper

Clare Cooper's last guest post was so popular that I simply had to plead with her to come back. I'm delighted that she's not only agreed to an interview, but has offered to answer some of your questions too!

There's a new fiction editor at WW now and preferences and requirements vary from magazine to magazine, but I feel there are more similarities than differences between womag short stories. Do you agree?

Definitely. I think everyone wants to read stories that engage them and draw them in, stories with warmth and integrity, believable characters in believable situations that resonate with the reader. I know I do!

What do you think are the key ingredients to a good womag story?

Everything I have said in my comment above. Something to make you think, laugh and cry, to coin a cliché. The ones I remember most of the many thousands I read were those that made me cry and that struck a chord in some way.

How many stories did you receive at Woman's Weekly in an average week/month?

Impossible to say for sure. Several hundred maybe. It varied hugely; for instance, summer holidays and Christmas would see a slight dip in submissions.

And you were there for 29 years! I've done the maths and factoring in your holidays, that works out at... umm, LOTS. I'm guessing that, due to space constraints, you sometimes had to reject stories which didn't really have much wrong with them?

Holidays or not, the stories still had to be read! We would never return a story we liked enough to publish unless, for example, it was a Christmas or other seasonal story that had just missed the deadline, in which case we would ask them to resubmit it in good time the following year, if they still wanted to.

Another scenario would be if we had just bought/were about to publish a story on a similar theme. We would have to hang on to the new story for a very long time before we could use it, which would be unfair to the writer as they could try to sell it elsewhere first. Especially since, under the new Desknet payments system, stories can’t be paid for until they are assigned to a specific issue.

One of the reasons you gave for rejection was 'well-worn theme'. Which themes cropped up far too often?

Brace yourselves! Relationship break-ups, retirement, weddings, age-gap stories of both sexes, difficult stepchildren, school reunions where the narrator hopes/dreads bumping into someone they used to lust after, or the school bully (or both), or they turn out to have been the school bully themselves, lonely elderly people being befriended by their new neighbours’ cheeky young children, bringing them out of themselves and becoming their surrogate grandparent, blind date stories, or ones where the narrator’s partner was “stolen” by their best friend and they have a chance to make it up years later - or not! Evil mothers-in-law. Awkward daughters-in-law. “Surprise” anniversary parties. Affairs from both sides. Adopting rescue animals and ending up with the man/woman from the rescue centre, or the vet, or someone they meet while out dog-walking. Someone sorting through the contents of their loft, reflecting on the past, etc. People you thought were real but who turn out to be ghosts. Confirmed bachelors set in their ways being forced to look after someone’s pet or child and having a change of heart. Wives getting their own back on their miserable, mean husbands, to the point of murder sometimes (I would write in the margins: JUST LEAVE HIM)!!

These are the ones that spring immediately to mind but there are many more! Of course, there are no new themes under the sun, it’s how the writer tells the story that matters and we have used all of the above themes ourselves over the years.

What were the most common reasons for rejection?

The dreaded well-worn theme. In other words, no real surprises, which was another way of saying too predictable/guessable. Stories that seemed to be about more than one subject, disjointed and hard to follow. Stories that were, to put it bluntly, too soppy, twee or sentimental for our market or where the plot is too slight. Endings that tailed off in a limp, unsatisfactory manner. They are hard to do for a lot of people and we often tweaked them ourselves. Sometimes it was only a matter of adding a line or swapping the final two or three paras around to strengthen the whole thing. Ex WW Editor, Diane, hated endings which were, as she put it, “Wrapped up in a bow”. In other words, “And they all lived happily ever after.” Too neat, too cosy, too safe. So long as there was some hint of resolution, or hope on the horizon, that was usually enough. Never anything too hopeless, downbeat or miserable, though.

Another reason for rejection is “too far-fetched and unlikely”. Often, we would say this and then the writer would come back and say that it really did happen to them, or a friend of theirs.  My reply to that would be a true event doesn’t necessarily always make for a good, “proper” well-rounded story.  Sometimes we just have to accept that truth really is stranger than fiction and leave it at that!

Can you offer any tips to make sure a story grabs the editor's attention for the right reasons?

As with novels, you can usually tell from the opening sentence if a story is going to grab you or not. Certainly, by the end of the first para/page you will have some idea. We would always advise writers to study the magazine over several issues to get a feel for our tone and style. At the end of the day, though, you have to write in your own voice, as Fiction Editor Gaynor used to say. Read other people’s stories but use your own voice to tell yours.

Did you see any avoidable errors which resulted in stories not being accepted? 

Yes, a lot of people don’t realise that magazines have to work weeks and weeks ahead of the printed issue, so for Christmas stories it’s never too early, as I always used to say. By now, the Christmas and New Year stories will have been chosen and worked on for both Woman’s Weekly and the Fiction Special. Easter, Mothers Day, Valentines Day, etc - get them all in well before Christmas!!

No contact details and even, in some cases, no name or title on the story, let alone pages not numbered and words not counted used to drive us potty. Imagine the scenario: You have just printed out 30 or 40 stories which have been emailed to you and now you have to marry up story and writer, write their details on the copy, go back into the story to check the word count and write that and the page numbers down as well. A laborious and time-consuming job which happened far more often than it should have done!

However, for the unsoliciteds, our assistant Maureen kept a large file marked “No details” and it was sadly full of stories such as these. So those people who grumble that they have never heard back from a magazine should realise this could be the reason why!

Despite the frustrations involved, we would never outright reject a story just because it wasn’t presented correctly. That would be pointless. Or if the number of words wasn’t right for our needs. In that case, we would ask the writer to go back and either trim the story down to a one-page, or increase the wordage to a two-page, if the plot could take it. A comment I often heard was, “Do you read them all?” My response to that was always, “What on earth would be the point if we didn’t?” We needed the stories, simple as that. The only stories we rejected outright were the hand-written ones, as they were almost always impossible to read and, in any case, if accepted would have had to be either scanned and corrected or typed up by us.

Was there any 'magic' ingredient which would improve a story's chance of success?

There’s no magic ingredient, sadly. Just a well-written story that grabs the reader from the start. Presentation is important, of course, but the best presented story in the world won’t make it if it’s not well written or doesn’t hit the mark.

Sometimes contributor letters asked for particular styles or lengths of story. Was there anything which was generally in short supply?

While it could fluctuate at times, we always found the one-page stories to be the hardest to get right. To fit everything into just under a thousand words yet still have a fully-rounded story in there, with not-too-obvious a twist (or slight bend) is incredibly difficult to do.

Writing is hard. We know that. And on that cheerful note, I wish you all the very best of luck!

If you have writing related questions for Clare, please put them in the comments and she'll select some to answer. (Please use a name or nickname to help her with replies.)