Everyone claims they want to include realistic dialogue in their stories. Publishers claim they want natural-sounding dialogue.
No, you don't.
Much of the work I did as a graduate student in linguistics required listening to or reading transcripts of real, natural conversations. They are rarely anything you'd want in a story.
Listen cklosely to the people around you as they talk. They interrupt each other, and themselves. They pepper their utterances with um, you know, like, uh, and other filler words that we don't usually want in fictional conversations. They will often stammer and echo their own words, like this: He took took the the the car this morning. Many people will stop for a long pause just before the key word in a sentence: I wish they would.... Would what? Digressions are common; they start to tell a story, then interrupt themselves with a secondary story, and sometimes never get back to the original point.
What we really want when we say we want realistic dialogue is a well-edited, idealized version of the things we say-- the version we hear in our thoughts rather than what actually comes out of our mouths.
We Love Your Work and Never want to See It Again
Looking again at publishers' guidelines, I see that many seek to limit the number of submissions and/or the frequency with which one may submit work to them. I get it: They don't want to be flooded with more than they can possibly read. Many are already flooded, and may take months to accept or reject (more often, reject) a manuscript.
I can understand why they tell authors who've been declined to wait a month or two months (or six months) before submitting again.They are gently (or not so gently) trying to avoid being relentlessly bombarded with manuscripts from the ultra-determined.
It's a little harder to understand discouraging authors who have been accepted. I've seen a couple of zines that tell accepted authors to wait TWO YEARS before submitting again. Yikes! As an editor myself, I welcome new submissions from my favorite authors. I want really good stories to publish, and I also know that stories by oustanding authors will attract more readers. Telling those top-quality authors to go away forever (and, really, two years might as well be forever) is counterproductive.
The great zines are known for regularly publishing works by the readers' and editors' favorites. Some even brag about having monthly stories from a particularly well-loved author. Of course, publishers should be open to work by new or lesser-known writers, but many would see a real decline in overall quality and readership if they adopted the two-year rule.
At this, point, though, I don't have to worry, since none of the zines with a two-year (or one-year or never-again) rule have accepted any of my work.
Fun For the Whole Family
I'm reading the submission guidelines for a zine that wants 100-word stories. I sometimes write 100-word stories. The guidelines seem pretty reasonable, until I get to the part explaining that they want only "family friendly" stories, stories that you'd be comfortable reading out loud to a 12-year-old.
I'm not writing shocking stuff with a lot of violence and gore. I definitely don't include explicit sex scenes. Even so, I think of myself as writing for adults. Looking back over a list of recently published pieces, I'd say several of them fit the family-friendly definition, but others don't come close. When I want to tell a story, I tell that story, and I don't stop to ask who might be offended.
Could I just write something specifically for that zine? Maybe. My past attempts to write to some else's specifications have not been comfortable. My incliniation is to write something and then look for a suitable publisher. Some people go the other way. They pick a publisher and then write a suitable story. I knew someone who had some success writing flash stories for a zine that provided photos as prompts. The problem was that most of the stories didn't make sense without the photo.
What I'd like to do is place the stories I've already written. Then maybe I can try conforming to someone else's prompt, theme, or keyword.
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