The Most Important Part of Your Applications
How to Choose Your Best Writing Sample
Welcome to The Forever Workshop’s MFA Newsletter, a monthly column about career advancement in the literary space. Everything published here is free to enjoy, courtesy of our partnered universities. (Not interested? Turn off emails from this column here.)
The writing world is full of applications. Applications for MFA programs, for residencies, for conferences, for positions with literary magazines and presses, for fellowships and grants—even querying agents can feel a bit like an application! Yet all of these applications have one thing in common: the writing sample.
Talk to anyone who is on the side of saying “yes” or “no” to your application, and they’ll tell you that the writing sample is what carries the most weight. If you nail it, you have a good chance of a “yes.” And we all like getting that “yes.”
So how do you choose your best writing sample? What even makes a good writing sample? We’ll get into it below, but I want to add the caveat that the literary world is an incredibly subjective place. What reads as the “best” to one person may not read the same way for another. Everyone has their own personal tastes and preferences, and that factors into the “yeses” we may or may not receive. It’s silly to think that we, as artists, exist in an objective space. Still, there are things we can keep in mind when applying to help select our own “best” writing sample to send in.
How to Choose Your Best Writing Sample in Five Steps
(Note: Hopefully you have a number of pieces to choose from—if you don’t, it might mean that you need to keep writing before you’re ready to actually apply to one of these opportunities.)
Read the application guidelines. This sounds simple, but it’s the easiest way to begin narrowing down what pieces might be a good fit. Is there a word count or page limitation? Do they want a complete story, or is an excerpt OK? Do they want multiple pieces or just one? Are they looking for anything in particular, thematically or otherwise? Can your sample have been published before? The easiest way to get a “no” is to not follow the guidelines, so check this first and curate your list of potential writing samples accordingly.
Choose a sample that feels unique to you. The literary world is competitive, and that means many people applying for the same things all the time. Your best writing sample is going to be the one that speaks to you as an artist, that feels unique to your existence in the world and your vision of what art means and is intended to do. For example, my nonfiction tends to have an ecofeminist bent, and I often choose to submit work in alignment with that as it best represents my vision for my writing. Long story short: don’t choose a sample that feels generic or safe. You want to stand out.
Show your creativity. Choose a writing sample that feels bold and creative, that bends expectations and genre. If the writing sample allows for more than one piece (or if you’re a poet and can send in a packet of poems), lean into the diversity of artistic expression. Maybe you submit a combination of a lyric flash piece and a researched nonfiction essay. Maybe you submit a free verse poem, a ghazal, and a prose poem. Maybe one piece is in the second-person, and another is from the omniscient third. Showing your versatility as a writer can make your work shine through the slush pile. But a word of caution—don’t confuse creativity with accessibility. Make sure that the readers of your work can still understand and be moved by the writing you create.
Dig into the details (with a few trusted friends). While writing is largely subjective, there are some objective aspects that make a piece of writing good. These can be hard to notice in your own work, so here’s where bringing in some outside, editorial eyes can really help. Ask your trusted readers/friends for insight on the following questions: What piece (or pieces) has the strongest line-level writing? What piece has the most compelling narrative elements? What piece evokes the most emotion? Listen to any insights you receive—the readers of our work will often see things that we can’t.
Trust your gut. At the end of the day, your best writing sample is the one you feel the most proud of and confident in. What piece of your writing do you want to read over and over again? What makes you feel moved? There have been times where I’ve written something and known it was really good—that it was one of my best pieces of writing yet—and that instinct was rewarded with publication. Some of my writing friends have told me they’ve felt the same in their own work. These are the kinds of pieces you want to submit in your sample, the writing that makes you feel alive and excited.
There’s nothing easy about putting your writing out there for others to read, especially when that reading of your work comes with acceptance or rejection. But it’s an inevitable part of the writing world, and the best opportunities often come with the hurdle of a lengthy application.
So here’s the deal: Don’t rush the writing sample. Make it the best it can be (i.e. revise, revise, revise!), and try to trust that, even if at first you don’t succeed, there will eventually be a perfect reader for your work who will give you a “yes.”