How to Beat 20% of the Competition Every Time You Submit to a Lit Mag
Lesson 11 of 12: Sorry For The Inconvenience — A Submitter's Guide To Lit Mags
Since Friday’s lesson will mostly be me thanking you and offering lit mag recommendations to paid subscribers in a last-ditch effort to get you to upgrade, today I will provide the last of what I know. The dregs of my knowledge on submitting to lit mags. Consider it the last few tricks of an old dog before it goes back into the basement to chew on an old boot. Here we go. If you’d like to get a head start on the whole upgrading to paid thing, you can do that here.
What a bullshit title, huh? Sorry about that. Couldn’t help myself. I can’t give you an exact percentage on this sort of thing, but I can tell you what editors complain about that you can work on to improve your chances.
The biggest one is, of course, to “read the magazine to understand better what they publish.” So far in this course, I’ve beaten that horse to death, learned how to do CPR on a horse, performed said CPR until said horse sprung back to life, then beat it to death again. So, let’s give it some peace.
Be free, horse.
The second biggest, as we went over time and again last week, is to write, get better at writing, and write more. Different horse, same blunt instrument. If I say another word, I’ll have PETA to answer to. So what else can you do?
If you submit within the specifications a lit mag gives within the time frame they ask for it, you’ve already beaten 5-10% of the competition (Lessons 1-6).
If you understand what the editors want, then give it to them; you’ve beaten another 30%, easy (Lesson 9). So, already that 20% figure is kinda garbage.
Submit, Resubmit, Re-re-submit, re-re-re—...you get it
Hands down, the most common reason folks fail to get published is that they self-reject or are afraid of getting rejected. Don’t do this.
There is no Tiger Balm for rejection. I was rejected 13 times from a dream mag of mine before getting accepted. Most writers work at around a 90% rejection rate (and that’s good). Most top-tier lit mags have <1 % acceptance rates. I know we’re not known for our math around these parts, but those numbers don’t bode well.
Rejection says nothing about you or your work. Plenty of famous writers were rejected loads before catching their break.1
Keep in mind that when you submit:
Best case: You get published. Your work is beloved. You live a life of fame and glory until the whole death thing.
Worst case: You cannot submit that singular piece to that singular lit mag again.
Time and again, editors tell me how much they love publishing writers they see come up over and over. If you’re polite and keep at it, your chances will increase. Note special rejections if you get them. Ignore the rest.
Now, on to the work you’re submitting.
First, an easy one.
Don’t Ignore Titles.
If you can pique someone’s curiosity with a title, you’ve already started on the right foot. Don’t ignore them. The right title can make a story stand out. The wrong one can hurt it. Also, when you submit, take a second to double-check your capitalizations. This is a handy tool for that.
Second, a not-so-easy one.
Edit the fuck out of your work
A lot of editors have a number. Maybe ten, or five, or three, or even one. The number of mistakes they encounter in a piece before they stop reading. It’s just how it is. It is one of the first things editors tell me that leads to rejection while reading a piece.
If you have the money, hire an editor. You can find loads of copyeditors who are quite affordable. I did this until I left my job. It drastically changed my success rate, and seeing all of my errors each time made me better at avoiding them in the future.
As with everything in life, once I didn’t make money anymore, I had to make friends. Ew. And friends are nice. But friends aren’t always reliable. And how many copyeditor friends can one person have?2
So, what can you do? Well, there are a few fairly reliable grammar trackers out there, like Grammarly or Prowriting Aid. Hemingway Editor is still a thing, I think?
Another option is to become your own editor. Some good books for that are The Elements of Style, Garner’s Modern American Usage, and Dreyer’s English. I’ve taken some copyediting courses on Udemy that can be pretty cheap.
Other methods you might try are:
Line-by-line: Start with a paragraph. Break it into lines (like actually hit enter to knock it down a line). Go through each sentence individually until you are happy with how it sounds. Then, put the paragraph back together and move on to the next.
Read Your Work Out Loud (or have naturalreaders.com do it for you): Hearing your work aloud will help you identify mistyped words or rough patches in your prose. ← Bethany Jarmul recommended this one to me.
Print & Red Pen: If you have access to a printer (or iPad with an Apple Pencil), go through your doc line-by-line, paragraph-by-paragraph, and edit, make notes, reminders, ideas, and extrapolations all over it. Best to do this with a double-spaced document to have room to write. Then, rewrite it all into a new doc, paying attention to your edits & notes.
Note: Watch out for repeated words and cliched phrases → These are often hammered into the training for editorial work, so they’re a bit more stabby on the eyes.
Editing and rewriting are the cleanup after a party. Not many people like doing it. But you don’t want to invite more guests inside until you’re done, right?
That’s the kicker. The difference between a good story and a great story is how well you’ve edited the good story.
At the very least, edit the fuck out of that first paragraph so they’ll be more forgiving down the page.
Speaking of first lines…
The one, two, three rule.
Since mortality + (time - shit to do) = few people want to sit down and read, you’ve got about three lines to grab most readers before they’re pulled back into their own little world of, “For fucksake, what now?” It isn’t like the old days when all you were competing against was sunsets and dysentery. You’re competing against the internet.
Now, editors are likely the first folks to read your work who don’t love you. Your first lines are a promise, so make them count.
This is a copywriting trick. I don’t remember where I learned it. In some marketing book, so likely from a sociopath. But here it is.
Your title has one goal → Get them to read the first line.
Your first line has one goal → Get them to read the second line.
Your second line has one goal → Get them to read the third line.
Your third line has one goal → Get them to finish the first paragraph.
If you can keep someone engaged this long, you’ve earned their trust. They’ll keep reading. You can tell yourself all editors and readers are saints. But they’re just people. People, often with hundreds of stories to read, who know there are only a bare few they can accept. This means they are motivated to decide against accepting a story rather than slog through one that has already failed to engage them.
My partner’s favorite Lit Mag is JOYLAND. She recently sent me a piece that nails this so well:
1st line: A swan’s foot, like a duck’s, is a webbed claw.
2nd line: In traversing swan shit and mud, the claws gunk up and reek.
3rd line: Nobody in the history of the world, save another swan, has licked a swan foot while that foot was still attached to the swan.
Sold.
And now, for a lesson I learned from a poet.
Last lines matter
The first lines might not come as a surprise. But the last lines are as important, if not more so.
Sometimes, it feels like the prestigious side of indie lit is entirely made up of people who’ve never had an orgasm, all extolling the virtues of foreplay. Too often, a piece ends, and it feels like someone’s just assigned you homework. Foreplay is stellar. But if you’re the one who shows them where it can lead, you’re in.
Acceptances aren’t always made in the moments after your work is read. The editor or reader flags it to move on to the next round; then, they keep reading. At the end of the day, you want your story or poem to sit with them. Three days later, you want them to be still thinking about it. Months later, when all the maybes have risen to the top of the pile and editors are discussing what gets cut, you want that last line to have tape-wormed into their brain. Sadly, there is no copywriting trick to this one. In copywriting, my goal is to have you redirected to some checkout page before you get to the end, so…apologies. But humor writing has some interesting insights. Like how ‘callbacks’ work. A joke that refers back to a joke you made earlier in the piece. I wouldn’t be so blunt with it, but finding a way to connect the thread back to the beginning in an aha moment never hurt anyone.
Things to keep in mind while writing
OK, I’ll be brief here because I’m dipping my toes into the pool of writing advice, and too many folks have peed in that pool for my liking. But here are some general pointers.
Avoid common topics unless you’re being timely (as in, you’re honing in on the news of the moment). If the themes in your work have a lot of cross-over with the themes of your discussions over brunch, editors likely have seen it a lot. And they, like me, do not have the funds for so much horse corpse removal (← callback)
Finish your piece. No, really. Is your work finished? Has your character gone through their entire arc, or are they still sitting there at the top, afraid to get down? Does your poem end at the right time? Is your meaning clear?
Once you find your story, or poem, or whatever, treat it like a fossil beneath the earth. Archeologists don’t just yank shit out of the ground. They find a corner, then get on their hands and knees with a brush and scrape or whatever and riggle that fucker out. Know what you have in its entirety before sending it out. Wanna see how far we can stretch this metaphor before it breaks? OK.
You: Archeologist.
Lit Mag: Museum.
Editor: Curator.
Readers: Museum guests.
Your Anxiety: The curse of the tomb you’ve robbed that comes back to haunt you every day until it kills you.
Don’t make your main character a writer. It’s like sending editors a dick pic. It is so self-indulgent and commonplace that everyone has become desensitized to it.
The advice I’ve talked about today isn’t my opinion. It comes directly from the horse’s mouth.3
Editors often talk about knowing whether a piece works from the first line or paragraph.
They get frustrated over finding many grammatical errors in a submitted piece they otherwise really like.
They often feel like a piece lacks things like believable characters or carefully thought-through line breaks.
They’re tired of reading about the same stories and themes over and over.
An editor has rarely told me that their #1 problem is, “Most of the work just sucks.” Often, they’re thinking, aw damn, this piece is almost there!
The Hollywood fairy tale where some brooding alcoholic genius plops out a manuscript and becomes an overnight success is only that, a fairy tale. Looking at famous writers throughout history, they were often privileged folks with built-in time, money, and connections to do what you must do between working two jobs, walking your child,4 reading your dog a bedtime story, and somehow making it through the apocalypse. If your work isn’t immediately well-received and praised, it isn’t you because it isn’t anybody. Except maybe Haruki Murakami. And, as we’ve established, fuck Haruki Murakami.
Final thoughts
So, I’d devised several “readiness checklists” for this bit but abandoned them. Being too systematic with this kind of stuff sucks all of the joy out of the room. It’s that guy at the party who insists nothing should be mixed with scotch and tries to sell you on IPAs. IPAs are, and this is true, the fucking worst.
The secret to increasing your chances is to find a way to enjoy the process. I know that sounds like when you get to the end of a movie, and the message is like, “The power of friendship!” But it’s the reality. There is no money, little chance of success, a lot of snobbery and competition, and despite humans writing for thousands of years, nobody has figured out a clear and definitive way to explain to somebody who doesn’t love it why the hell we do it.
Know that rejection is part of the process, and don’t let it beat you down to the point you become the writing world’s equivalent of an incel.
Know that it takes a lot of time you don’t have, but you’re going to do it anyway because when you were a kid, the concept of death finally sunk in, and you’ve never quite gotten over it.
Just keep at it.
There are no exercises or discussions on this one. It is my last “lesson.” Between now and Friday, I will work on compiling all tools, resources, further readings, and lit mags into a single spreadsheet for you to take with you. I hope this course has helped or at least entertained. And I hope it has been a clear(ish) introduction to how The Forever Workshop will work. Starting in March, if you see me in the comments, it will be because I plan to be a student for our upcoming courses. Thank you!
Neil Gaiman, Agatha Christie, Doctor Suess…
Seven
Look, raccoons have had their time. Horses need to catch up.
I think you also need to feed them. Hold on, my brother just had one. I’ll ask and get back to you.
"competing against was sunsets and dysentery." I've been chuckling through this whole post as I read it in a waiting room, much to two other people's annoyance!
Super clear advice - much appreciated. I'm intentionally working on my endings, specifically writing more endings that are fully completed and fleshed out. The best editors I've worked with have moved sections of my writing around to create stronger endings. They've often uncovered elements of a strong ending in a different section of my writing, and moving to the end. I was horrified at first, incredibly guarded & sensitive about my initial endings. But the finished product has always been significantly better after their edits. After about 6-10 edits, my pieces were ready to be released in the world. This lesson has affirmed that - thank you.