Submitting to literary journals is a tough process. For one, rejection is extremely likely, no matter how experienced you are with writing. For another, writers will experience the steep learning curve of submitting to journals and continuously practicing their craft. But what should your literary journal submissions look like? What do journals look for when they read your work? Check below to find out!
Proper Guidelines and Format
This one might seem obvious, but there are plenty of easy, unnoticeable mistakes when submitting. Especially if a journal requires specific rules for how they want a piece to be written or how they want to receive that submission. Articles will always tell you to follow ALL the directions. This is vital since failing to do so could mean that your piece doesn’t get read at all. That seems harsh, but if a journal doesn’t stick to its reviewing process, things can crash and burn easily. They need you to respect their guidelines so every submitter gets their work adequately reviewed.
A lot of journals include guidelines such as:
1) Manuscript format. This includes Times New Roman or Garamond font, 1″ margins, black ink, and more.
2) How to submit. They could have a submission system like Submittable or want you to send an email with a specific headline.
3) When to submit. Journals also include the deadlines for their reading periods with the phrase “Your piece will be deleted unread” if you submit outside those periods.
4) What they want and don’t want. Some journals might not mind violence or sensitive subject matter. Others might only want speculative poetry, ecofiction, or horror. Literary journals make it clear what they want and what they don’t want, and anything outside of that will always be irrelevant to the publication.
Obviously, every journal is different. But don’t let your work be all for nothing! Make sure you follow these guidelines and avoid one of the biggest pitfalls you can make when submitting to literary journals.
No Spelling or Grammar Mistakes
Now let’s move on to the story itself. This is another obvious one, but one that gets lost. You might think, of course, lit journals don’t want to see mistakes! But writers aren’t immune to any mistakes. Even the most experienced ones miss a misspelled word, put a comma in the wrong place, or do something else minor. So how do you prevent them?
A couple of things to do include:
1) Use helpful software. I personally like to use Grammarly when I write, even if it’s just an email that I want to send out. But there are plenty of writing resources out there to help aid your writing!
2) Ask for another pair of eyes. Before submitting, asking someone else to read something you wrote might help weed out anything you missed. A fresh pair of eyes examines things from a different perspective. With more people reviewing your work, you might even learn that there’s something confusing about your story itself. By changing it now, literary journals won’t catch it.
If you make only one or two mistakes, that doesn’t necessarily threaten your chances of acceptance. But you need to fix as many mistakes as possible! Keep editing, revising, and rewriting rather than rushing the writing process in favor of getting your work to journals. And speaking of revising…
A Complete and Revised Story
What do I mean by a complete story? I mean one that has a beginning, middle, and end that doesn’t confuse the reader. Because sometimes submissions don’t have this. Stories might end in a way that doesn’t feel complete, or it ends on a note that leaves the reader asking questions. The end might even frustrate the reader because it took an odd turn at some point in the story. So when writing for a journal (or anywhere for that matter), be sure that:
1) Nothing confuses the reader. This means checking for plot holes, convoluted details, or anything that is not immediately clear to the reader. If a reader is confused about where a character is or what you’re describing, it’s likely they’ll move on to the next piece.
2) Nothing frustrates the reader. Every step in the plot must make sense. Characters shouldn’t make decisions that go against the arc you set up. The little worldbuilding you do for a short story shouldn’t all of a sudden break its own rules. Most importantly, the ending shouldn’t ignore loose ends or worse, leave the reader asking “Wait, that’s it?” or “But what does that mean?”
Also, when submitting to journals, authors don’t often revise enough or they revise too much. They might perform a quick read-through before submitting, leaving behind tons of mistakes. Or they might spend so much time revising that they eventually start to hate what they’ve written, and they might not even submit to literary journals at all because of that. Find a balance between both. Find and revise as many mistakes as you can but don’t obsess or overthink about what you’re writing. It’s likely that an editor might offer some suggestions before publishing anyway because it won’t be perfect. All you can do is submit then move on.
A Story that Stands Out
Not many people think about this one as much, but they should. I was talking to a colleague the other day for a literary journal I read for and he mentioned how he was reading a story that he had heard a few times before. I asked him if it was it by the same author, who was submitting the same story after. revisions? No, he said. It was the same subject matter and it just didn’t stand out to him like other stories about the same idea that he had read.
This is prevalent in any type of writing, whether fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or anywhere else. We experience a lot as human beings, and many times we’d like to express ourselves. But lots of people have written about their childhood or a breakup poem, or they’ve written a story about a dragon invading. There’s nothing wrong with writing about any of this, but how do you make your story stand out from the rest? How is the experience or idea unique to you, and how does it make for something that a literary journal might be interested in?
In the End, It’s Subjective
You might have heard it say that you must convince a literary journal reader (or whoever reads your story) to keep reading from the first line. In some ways, that’s true. But most of the time, literary journal readers won’t read past the first paragraph. Some journals receive hundreds, even thousands(!), of submissions, and they just don’t have time to look at them all. In some cases, they can only read the opening paragraph. And if they see just one tiny thing that they don’t like, they move on to the next piece.
Doesn’t seem fair, does it? But this daunting process doesn’t define whether your piece was good or bad. Many times, it’s just subjective. One reader might not like how you worded a sentence. Another might like your writing style but not the subject matter you chose. There’s plenty of that subjectivity in writing. You might do everything else listed above right, and you could still face rejection. If you do, rest assured that the journal you submitted to isn’t the only one. You have plenty of options out there.
This might seem like a daunting process, and it is. But that doesn’t mean you should give up. Knowing these guidelines in advance will greatly benefit not only how you write a story but also how you approach rejection and the submission process. As you take your own path as a writer, you’ll experience that subjectivity. But slow down, take a deep breath, and try again. You will see results.
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