Bookninja points to this long blog post about why most of the stories in the recent Willesden Herald short story competition were rejected. As a reminder, that's the competition Zadie Smith judged and decided not to award a winner. That blog post is interesting and comprehensive, and feels especially relevant to me now that we're reading through all of the Wabash prize submissions. (Don't worry: unlike Zadie Smith, we are most definitely awarding and publishing the winner Richard Bausch chooses from the finalists, and probably publishing a second story from the pool as well.) I'd say the big thing that's making me pass on the entries, though, boils down to whether the story makes me care about it, which I think is the hardest thing a story writer has to overcome. No matter how well written, a mean-spirited or didactic or trivial story won't win over the reader, and no matter how generous and moving a concept is, a sloppily written story won't win over the reader. The polls are all showing people don't read as much, and the cold reality is that most readers are extremely busy, or emotionally distracted, or just have a bad headache and a low attention span, and the best fiction somehow manages to win those readers over (though if I knew how, I'd sell it and get rich).