Fresh and leading edge - a dose of jumbo-jumbo

I've spent some time this week reading submission guidelines for various magazines and small presses.   They've left me wanting to tear my hair out.  'We want fresh voices', they say.  Or perhaps they want 'stories told in experimental forms'.  'Surprise us', another says.  And the most infuriating of all 'we don't know what we want until we see it.'

How is a writer supposed to divine from these statements what sort of story a magazine will be interested in?  I  suspect this is a particular disease of SF magazines, who all vie to let the reader know how 'leading edge' they are.  And how about 'we want stories that push the boundaries'?

These statements infuriate me.  It's impossible to diviine from this meaningless mumbo-jumbo what it is that the magazine's editors want.  What are 'fresh voices'?  And then there's the old chestnut of stories told in 'experimental forms'.  We can use letters or texts from the dead, or telepathic communications.  We can use multiple viewpoints and get our characters jumping about in time, but to my mind it's all window-dressing.  Because what we're about here is story.  And stories have structure and substance.  If the story at the heart of all that experimentation is slight and doesnt have a recogniseable structure, or emotional depth, it isn't going to draw me in.

'Stories that push the boundaries' always has me scratching my head.  What are the boundaries?  And how will I know when I'm pushing them?  You might give me the old advice to read the magazines I'm submitting to first.  But I'm submitting to twenty or so markets.  I can't afford to subscribe to them all, only to find out when I read them that I can't write anything that would match that editor's taste.

And there's a deeper question here.  It's the age-old tension between writing what I'm passionate about, what I care about, versus writing for the market.  After reading these vague submission requirements I've decided that I haven't a chance in hell of divining what the market wants.  So I'm going to go on writing what I want, and hope that one day my passion and advocacy finds the right target.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com