Do You Have Any Tips for Getting Published?
Virtual Office Hours #8
Note: This is one of a series of “ask me anything” posts I did for a group of writers I worked with in fall 2024.
Q: I’m writing a memoir. While I’m working on it, I’d like to start publishing some essays, maybe some parts of my memoir. Do you think this is a good idea or a bad idea? And do you have any tips for how to get my essays published?
A: I absolutely think this is a good idea. Publishing short pieces is one of the best ways for a writer to begin building a platform, and I’ve heard it said by some reputable people who know what they’re talking about that one of the best ways to get an agent for a memoir in particular is to write an essay that goes viral.
I’ve published some of the short stories from my linked short story collection. Besides building a platform, this is a way of having my work vetted by the publishing industry, so that when I query agents, they can see that publishing professionals have decided my work has merit. This might make them more likely to read my pages. (Be careful, though, not to publish more than 20-25% of your book as essays or short stories.)
Of course, whether an essay we’ve written goes viral or not isn’t completely within our control, but the first step is getting published, and that’s something we do have some control over. Last year, I was asked to put together some notes for a panel presentation on getting published. I’m going to share some of that information here because there are some things you can do to increase your chances.
I’ve been an editor at various literary journals for the past seven years, encompassing book reviews, fiction, essays, and poetry. As an editor, I can tell you that I want to love your piece. I go into reading every submission hoping I will love it, and I get so excited when I begin reading a story or essay and it’s good. I want to love it because I am looking for content for the particular journal I’m reading for. I also want to love it because supporting writers is fulfilling for me. I will never forget my first essay acceptance and my first short story acceptance, and every acceptance is a brick in the wall of building my writing career. It’s exciting to help another writer get their first short story, essay, or poem published.
For last year’s panel on getting published, I was asked to put together a list of things to avoid. For the most part, these can apply equally to fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry, because for the most part, it comes down to behaving like a professional and exercising common courtesy.
So here they are—if you’re trying to get published, here are some things that may get your piece rejected:
1. A poor balance of narrative prose to scenes with dialogue, the “proportion problem.” Straight narrative prose is often made up of exposition and telling vs. showing. Absolutely no scenes or dialogue in a story is almost always a no.
2. Dialogue that is boring and doesn’t serve its intended purposes: to characterize, to evoke emotion, and to advance the story.
3. Not starting in the right place—paragraphs of throat clearing. It’s like being on The Voice—you have a couple of paragraphs to make me turn my chair. After that, I’ll keep reading, but it’s now an uphill battle to get me to change my mind. Start where the story starts, and engage readers with a killer opening line and interesting and engaging opening paragraphs that draw them into the story.
4. A mushy middle. I’m so sad when a story starts out like gangbusters and then becomes disappointing as it progresses.
5. An unearned, trite, cliché, super predictable, didactic, or boring ending. As Aristotle said, story endings should be surprising but inevitable. I’ll add that endings shouldn’t be too on-the-nose or tie everything up too neatly in a bow. I want to be surprised, but then I want to say to myself, “Ah yes, it really couldn’t have ended any other way.” And although it’s not necessary for an acceptance, I tend to personally lean toward story endings that leave me room to imagine and keep me thinking.
6. Shifting point-of-view and shifting tense.
7. Too much telling vs. showing, including exposition (especially info dumps and dialogue that is actually exposition); fancy dialogue tags (stick to “said” and “asked” for the most part); and overuse of adverbs. And adjectives for that matter.
8. Flash fiction that is not a story. Making it short doesn’t make it flash fiction. It needs not only brevity, but a plot, and is often marked by a twist or a surprise ending. Much of the flash fiction I see reads more like a rough draft of a short story that hasn’t yet been fully fleshed out.
9. Not keeping the reader in mind, e.g., self-indulgent prose.
10. Not sending in a clean draft, which means a manuscript fairly free of errors in spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Should spelling, grammar, and punctuation matter if your story is amazing? Maybe not. Don’t we have a copyeditor for that? Yes we do. But also, editors are human, so if an editor has two stories that are both just as close to a yes, and they have to choose between them, and one is clean and one is a mess, they’re probably going to choose the one that’s clean.
11. Know your submission etiquette. Withdraw your story if it’s accepted elsewhere. For a recent issue of Kelp Journal, I spent hours reading and rereading a story, then asked some other staff members to read it as well. But when we notified the author we were accepting the story, she told us it had already been accepted and published elsewhere. This left us a story short for the issue. I’d like to say I won’t hold this against the author if they submit again, but I’m human, and it may affect whether I am willing to spend hours on their submission and ask staff members to do the same with the risk of the same thing happening.
12. When a journal accepts your story, don’t respond by asking if you can send them a revised draft. Send them your best work, your finished work, and then stop fiddling with it and write something else. There are a couple of reasons this is considered bad form. First, editorial staff already spent time on the draft you submitted. Now you’re asking them to consider a new draft, so you’re adding to their work load. Second, the editor may or may not consider this new draft as good as the one they accepted. For example, I recently had an author submit a revised draft of an essay in which she had removed much of the openness and honesty that the nonfiction editor had loved about the original. The nonfiction editor might not have accepted the essay in its new form.
13. Yes, let us know if you disagree with a suggested edit—we will listen and 99.9% of the time, we’ll do it your way! But no, don’t try to copy-editor-splain to an educated and experienced copy editor. Don’t do something that makes an editor regret accepting your story. This has happened to me twice now, once for Kelp Journal and once for The NightWriter Review.
14. Don’t be rude, arrogant, and demeaning during the editing process. Although we give our authors creative license, and 99.9% of the time, they have the last say on whether they wish to accept or reject a suggested copyedit, there are rare times when copyedits to correct spelling, grammar, or punctuation are mandatory in order to achieve consistency and to protect the journal’s reputation for quality. Refusing these kinds of copyedits and claiming that such clear errors are a part of the author’s style, while being rude, arrogant, and demeaning to the editor, the copy editor, and the journal, may result in your story being withdrawn from publication even after acceptance. Which is what happened with one of the authors who made me regret accepting their story, above.
Last, it probably won’t get your story rejected if you don’t paginate or follow industry standards for formatting your submission, but it will likely score points and help you get accepted if you do.
Industry standard formatting: Times New Roman, 12-point font, one-inch margins, double-spaced. This is your industry, so know the industry standards.
Pagination: In the header, right-justified, paginate like so: Last Name/Story Title/Page Number.
Bonus Tip: If you include word count, round it up or down to an even number, e.g., 4,962 is 5,000 or 5,223 is 5,200. Exact word counts makes it look like you’re an amateur. And you’re not!
Another Bonus Tip: Don’t include “copyright” information—this marks you an amateur.
Good luck!
Leanne