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Little makes me more uncomfortable than watching a new writer attempt a triple-triple lutz without sufficient control of language or grasp of form. That reading experience sometimes starts like this: second person (okay, that’s fine, sort of) on a prewedding trip to Barcelona; florid or jerky language and vast generalizations about gender (now “I” secretly prefer the leggy barista in a café with luminous cleavage to my willowy and controlling grad student fiancée); excessive description of the rain in Spain that overtly reflects “my” inner state (ugh); sudden switch to first or third person (uh-oh); cut to barista naked on top of “me” (and I’m out).
- Heidi Pitlor, series editor for The Best American Short Stories
The best part of trusting your readers to guess that a barista is in a café is that you can write “the leggy barista with luminous cleavage” instead of “the leggy barista in a café with luminous cleavage,” which suggests the café itself has cleavage.
If I seem hostile, it’s because I had to radically revise a short story after reading Pitlor’s words. It takes longer than I could have imagined to switch every Barcelona reference to a Madrid reference.
