We read over 7000 stories & essays. Here are our top 9 submitting tips!
+ Upcoming Free “Gabo” Reading Period | 24-hours only
Our next reading period is coming up on March 6 (Gabriel García Márquez’s birthday) for 24 hours only, midnight-to-midnight.1 Submissions are free and we pay $200 for long-form writing, and $50 for short-form. Read the full submission guidelines here and get ready to submit!
We’ve now read over 7000 submissions to Strange Pilgrims (and sent out 95% of responses from our first reading period). Stories and essays from six continents (still waiting on you, Antarctica). Flash pieces written, we suspect, in single sittings at 2 AM, and novel chapters trimmed to fit our word count like a foot squeezed into a glass slipper (yes, we notice, and no, we don’t hold it against you). Some arrived with cover letters longer than the pieces (not kidding…). Some arrived with no cover letter at all (totally cool). Some made us forget we were reading from so-called slush-pile on a screen way too late into the night.
What follows is something I’ve been meaning to write for a while. After reading this many submissions, there are certain things we wish we could tell every writer before they hit send. So here they are!
Alongside other perks, paid subscribers can also access exclusive writing exercises here (a lot more to come!):
1. The first paragraph is doing more work (or rather a different kind of work) than you think.
I know a lot of people say that the opening of a piece should instantly hook you. Or there should be action galore. And while both these things can be useful (especially, say, for agents reading a novel), when it comes to shorter work, for us, what we’re really looking for is a reason to trust you as a writer.
The best opening paragraphs we read (and indeed you can see this in what we’ve published so far), don’t feel like artificial attempts to reel you in. Rather, they settle into a voice so specific and alive that we forget we’re reading a submission at all. Ultimately, the actual opening might well be just a single beautiful sentence or perhaps be a paragraph-long description of a kitchen. What matters is that it sounds like you and no one else.
2. “Interesting” < “Alive”
We’ve read plenty of submissions with fascinating premises — time travel, strange rituals, elaborate alternate histories — that somehow felt inert on the page. And we’ve read stories about a woman folding laundry that made us hold our breath. The difference is almost never concept per say. In the hands of a good writer, any kind of idea can take root and shape up into a weird and wild and elegant creation. We’re particularly enlivened by the degree to which the writer is present in the sentences, making choices that surprise even themselves.
3. More stories die from neatness than from chaos.
We were surprised by this one ourselves, to be honest: the submissions that came closest to acceptance but ultimately didn’t make the cut weren’t the, well let’s just say, “messy ones”. Rather, it was those pieces that were…a little too tidy. Think stories that do everything right—competent prose, clear structure, a twist or an epiphany right on cue—but feel like they were written with the door closed, so to speak. Between ourselves, we refer to this as “workshop-proof” writing. Which is to say it’s the kind of story or essay or flash that would likely survive a craft seminar without so much as a scratch. And yet, that’s sometimes exactly the problem.
4. Send your strangest work
We named this magazine after Márquez for a reason!! We believe—maybe naively—that the borders between realism and fabulism, between essay and story, between the expected and the uncanny, are mostly imaginary. And yet, time and again, we receive cover letters that say things like: “I’m not sure if this is the right fit, but…” or “This one’s a bit weird, so I understand if it’s not for you.” More often than not, those are the submissions we end up loving. Please, for goodness sake don’t self-reject.
5. Read your dialogue out loud. And then delete it all and redo it x 7
Look, most of us write really bad dialogue in our initial drafts. I’m sorry, it’s just something we see repeatedly. Maybe we’ll do a whole post on dialogue at some point.
We estimate that in about a third of the fiction submissions we receive, every character speaks in complete, emotionally articulate sentences. They say exactly what they mean, right when they mean it. And it kills the story.
Look at what Carver does: his characters talk about the objects on the table, the weather, what’s for dinner—everything except the thing the scene is actually about. The weight lands in the gap between what’s said and what’s meant. Or Coetzee in Disgrace, where the narrator pulls so far back from the conversation that you’re almost reading a report of what was spoken rather than the speech itself, and that distance is the point, because in that book, the character can’t close the distance with anyone in his life, either.
In short, if your characters are saying exactly what they feel, you might be making the reader’s job too easy, and too boring.
6. Said with so much love, we swear to Gabo: Fuck your world-building
This applies to speculative fiction especially, but also to memoir and essay. We don’t need a paragraph explaining the rules of your world or the context of your family history before the story begins. Drop us dead-center. Let us figure it out the way we figure out a new city — by walking around, noticing things, getting a little lost. Confusion, in small doses, is a gift to the reader. It means something is happening that requires their attention.
7. Record yourself reading your story/essay & listen to it!
For real, read it…the whole thing! Open your phone, hit record, and read it like you’re reading it to someone you love. Then play it back. You will hear everything—the sentence that trips your tongue, the paragraph where your energy dips, the section where you start rushing because even you’re getting bored.
Most people think rhythm is a poetry thing. But as editors of both a poetry and a prose mag, we can tell you it most definitely is not. Look at it like so: poetry gets to announce its rhythm. Line breaks, meter, stanzas, all of it is scaffolding that tells the reader: pay attention to how this sounds.
Prose doesn’t necessary get that scaffolding. Rather, it must build its rhythm invisibly, inside the syntax, through the length and weight and fall of every sentence. Which means, in a way, rhythm matters more in prose because if it’s off, there’s nothing structural to catch it, the whole thing just fizzles and the reader puts it down without knowing why.
A lot of the submissions we read had this problem. The writing is smart, the story works, but it reads like it was written and never heard. Record yourself. Listen back. You’ll find things no amount of rereading on a screen will catch.
8. Read the magazine you’re submitting to
We know what you’re thinking….damn self-aggrandizers. Lol, okay hopefully you’re not thinking that. We dislike every time I magazine says this too, but there’s a lot of value in this advice. Even if you read the latest thing a lit mag’s published, and it’s a lit mag you want to submit to eventually, this is worth it. Generally, if we have little time, we’ll read the latest issue and then a few pieces from the recent archives before submitting anywhere. More than anything, this will help you get a sense of your short story or essay roommates — the other pieces your work will hopefully shine alongside.
9. Submit anyway.
My friends, this is the most important one. We’ve published writers who had never submitted anywhere before. We’ve published writers who’ve been rejected literally hundreds of times. And yes, we’ve published award-winners and writers with actual paying careers. The only submissions we can’t publish are the ones we never receive in our reading queue…If you have a story, an essay, a flash piece that means something to you, send it. Even if it disregards all the above tips, and you want to send it, freakin’ send it. You have free will. You’re a writer. Be your crazy creative self. Be a strange pilgrim!
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Ty! So helpful and encouraging.
Very helpful advice for submitting work to literary magazines!