Hello students! This morning, Brevity (one of my favorite nonfiction publications) published a piece on their blog about how writers make their work better. Spoiler alert: it's basically just Shameless Magpies without the catchy name. You have finished writing your short stories. That means that you are all now creators of things. However you feel about your short story (proud, ambivalent, invested, uninvested, relieved it's over), you made it. It's yours. You wove it out of words from that mysterious place in your mind where your creativity resides. So you made a thing. Now what? I hope that some of you will consider submitting your work for publication. There's nothing quite like readying your work for submission. In some ways it's like preparing your college essays, I guess, because you know someone will read and evaluate your work. But the stakes are lower with a piece that you submit, and no one in the whole world is dictating to you what you must write. You are in complete control of your work, which is liberating and terrifying at the same time. If you decide you want to submit your work for publication, the first thing you have to do is find a call for submissions that matches your piece. Some calls for submission are very broad: basically the only requirement is that the writing be good and that your piece fits into the often unknown specs of the magazine or literary review a group of editors is preparing. Other calls are more specific and require a piece to explore a certain theme or genre or writing. Some calls for submission are for all writers, while some are specific to young people or people from a certain part of the world, or at least writing about a certain part of the world. Some publications have free submissions, some require the writers to pay fees that range from $3 to $25. My strong recommendation is to stick to the free ones. If you find yourself interested in submitting, here are some resources to help you start exploring publications:
After you submit your work, there are two possibilities. Your piece will either be accepted or rejected by the publication. Please remember that the majority of pieces submitted to any call are rejected for many different reasons. I recommend approaching the process with a kind of measured hope. If you receive a rejection, read it carefully in case there are any insights embedded within it about your work. Then shrug it off, and possibly revise and submit the piece to a different place. If you are accepted, I recommend dancing around your house in celebration. There's nothing quite like sharing your work with readers out in the world.
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AuthorI'm a Houston high school teacher. Welcome to my adapted, socially-distanced, quarantined AP English Literature and Composition classroom. Archives
May 2021
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