Writing advice

How to talk to an editor

If you write something shorter than novels and you want to see your poem, essay, memoir, cartoon, or story published, you can publish it yourself or you can submit your work to a literary magazine.

If you self-publish, class dismissed.

If you choose a litmag, carry on reading.

Litmags (I prefer zines, but litmag is by far the more common word) are staffed by editors. Editors are people just like us. They are in love with language. They have worked their way up from fetching coffee and bagels to reading the slush pile1 to assisting the editors to being the editors.

To find your target editor, choose a litmag. Do you like their material? Do you like how they present their material? When the saints go marching in, do you want to be in their number? Our example tonight, which I just invented, is Thrilling Wonder Stories. (I would call it Litmag, but there already is a Litmag.)

Thrilling Wonder is a scrappy little litmag that opens their submissions portal on the first of every month. They have a cap, though: They only read the first 200 submissions. Today is the first day of the month, so let’s move like we have a purpose, people.

Find Thrilling Wonder’s masthead. This is usually under About. The masthead lists all of the editors and everyone else on their staff. NEVER SUBMIT TO A MAGAZINE THAT HAS NO MASTHEAD. If you don’t know who you’re dealing with, go deal with people who aren’t in a Witness Protection Program.

Once you’ve located the editors, go to the Submissions page. Submissions does not involve whips and black leather corsets. This is writing, remember. It’s not that much fun. Submissions will include the litmag’s guidelines. Read the guidelines! This is where you find out all of the following:

  • The magazine is open or closed for submissions. They read all year or, like Thrilling Wonder, they have some kind of limit.
  • The magazine pays for what they publish. Or they don’t.
  • The magazine charges a fee for each submission2. Or they don’t.
  • What they want and what they don’t want. For example, Thrilling Wonder has issued a call for submissions based on a prompt: “For our spring issue, we’re looking for stories about heroic bloggers who fight every day for truth and justice.”
  • Word count. Don’t send them a 10,000-word poem if they only want a 100-word poem.
  • Just read the whole thing. You never know what you’ll find. They might accept reprints; they might not. They might make you wait a week for a reply; they might make you wait a year. Etc.

You’ve read the submission guidelines. You’re bursting with hope. There on the screen is a big fat SUBMIT button. This is it! Click!

Uh-oh, they want a cover letter.

Stay with me.

You’ve visited the About page, so you know who’s running this thing. That’s half the battle.

Thrilling Wonder has an executive editor, two fiction editors, three poetry editors, 12 people listed as readers (they are the ones who make the first pass through the slush), and the office dog, Romeo. That’s a bunch. When you write your cover letter, don’t begin by saying “Dear Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, and Golf.” They are not an accounting firm. I always say, “Dear Delta, your fiction editors, and your readers.” Or simply, “Dear Delta and readers.” Don’t get cute and write to Romeo.

The rest is even easier.

Dear Delta and readers: I’m submitting a memoir of 5,000 words, “How I Found My Car Keys.” Thank you for your consideration.

If you’ve published before, mention it.

Dear Delta and readers: I’m submitting a memoir of 5,000 words, “How I Found My Car Keys.” Thank you for your consideration.

My work has appeared in Crochet World and Gardeners World. I recently wrote about the World Cup for the World Almanac.

Regards, Steve Bieler

Editors are in love with language, but they have a staggering pile of manuscripts to read every day. (The exceedingly popular magazine Tin House reported, in 2019, receiving 20,000 submissions annually.) When editors start reading a story or whatever, they want to find out ASAP if they’re wasting their time and should move on or if they’re really onto something.

They want to be onto something. When an editor loves a manuscript, she can’t think of nothin’ else. So make her job easier. Read the guidelines, find the editors’ names, and write ’em a nice short cover letter. It’s the work that counts.

Bonus: What do you do if they also want a bio?

They almost always do. The best policy is to keep it short and keep it in the third person, as if you’re looking at yourself and trying to be polite. Or keep it short and in the third person, but with a twist only you can provide. I refer you to the best advice I’ve ever read on this subject: “How To Write An Author Bio That Isn’t Boring AF.”

That’s it. Don’t overthink this, but don’t skip any of these steps. And if you want to find out what life is like on the other side of the fence, I recommend this investigative piece from Chill Subs: “So You Want to Join a Literary Magazine?”

You can do this. Good luck!

1  “Slush pile” is a term for manuscripts the magazine didn’t ask for, but here they are anyway.

2 I hate paying for what most likely will be a rejection, but litmags are not rolling in dough. They can use some love. If I’m into the zine, I will do it.

10 simple things you can do to have more fun as a writer

If you want to read the Wizard of Earthsea, The Lord of the Rings, The Greenlanders, and all 800 Conan books, there are maps to guide you through those worlds. Even Kidnapped has a map—the island Robert Louis Stevenson painted on the wall of his stepson’s nursery.

There’s no such guide to the literary world. I’ve quested there for years, which is why my name tag at the annual convention of the American Association of Writing Programs reads STEVE THE CIMMERIAN. Can I help you navigate this world? Probably not. But I’ll try anyway with 10 simple things you can do etc. I’ll keep them short and expand on some of them in future posts.

1. Read.

Even at my nerdiest, when I was 12 and I devoured the Foundation trilogy in a weekend, I also read other things. I’ve met too many mystery writers who only read mysteries, too many romance writers who only read romances, and too many writers of mainstream, prestigious, mature novels who wouldn’t be caught dead curled up with a two-fisted Western. Read widely. Don’t limit yourself.

2. Write.

Every day. Of course, you won’t write every day. Life will intervene. Someone will get sick. A crisis will erupt at work. While you’re off having a root canal. Your partner might want to interact with you. Partners always want to interact with you. Some nonsense about relationships.

Don’t despair. Play nice with your lover. Clean up the crisis. Work will always wait, unless you’re the safety director at a nuclear power plant. You’ll write tomorrow. I can’t say this enough: You can write your novel in 15 minutes a day.

3. Music? Silence? Write on your phone? Write on the sidewalk with chalk?

Rudyard Kipling, in his poem “In the Neolithic Age,” wrote, “There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,/And every single one of them is right.” “Tribal lays” means songs. Whatever works for you, works.

Everyone quotes this line. But few mention that in “In the Neolithic Age,” the writer hero deals with his competitors by killing and eating them.

4. Take a class.

Every community college has writing classes. Take a few; find an inspiring teacher. Listen to the experts; listen to your fellow students. Learn how to gratefully receive feedback and how to gracefully dole it out.

Should you go to school to get an MFA? I’m not the person to ask. I don’t have one. The last time I had anything to do with academia, the Berlin Wall was still a wall, phones connected to a wall, Pink Floyd had not yet released The Wall.

If I had had the money and the time back then, and if I had wanted a job teaching writing, I might have gone for an MFA. Looking back, I’m content with attending a writing conference every 20 years and taking the occasional class.

5. Join a writing group.

“To get published, you have to do what every writer in history has done,” Chris Offutt wrote. “You have to sit for thousands of hours and hundreds of days in solitude.”

Many people like that degree of solitude; it’s been the ruin of many a poor boy, and God, I know, I’m one. I’ve even heard the term “desk ecstasy,” which I thought meant having sex on your desk until I was informed I was mistaken.

But many more people don’t like solitude at all.

One thing you can do to alleviate the loneliness is to join a writing group, either in person or virtually. You might find people on your wavelength in one of your classes. You might find them online. Warning: You’ll be critiquing each other’s work. Other people’s reactions to your work are incredibly valuable, but you’ll have to sacrifice many hours to reading and reacting to their work. It’s only fair. But that time will have to come from somewhere.

6. Find someone you trust to read what you write.

Your partner, who is already cheesed off about you spending so much time behind a closed door having sex on your desk, is not always the best choice. Haruki Murakami’s first reader is his wife, but they fight so much about his drafts that he refused to name her in his memoir, Novelist As a Vacation.

My wife is a good critic. No, you can’t borrow her. But last year, in addition to her reading, I gave the first draft of my novel to somebody who didn’t give a shit about me. I hired an editor, who did a wonderful job. I was fortunate to find someone just starting out who was willing to charge less to gain her first paying client. There are plenty of professional freelance editors, if you can afford one. Start saving.

7. Don’t be afraid to rewrite.

Sooner or later, Robert A. Heinlein’s rules for writing show up in lists like this one. Heinlein said you should never rewrite unless an editor tells you to. I’m sure that saves time—for the writer. It makes the editor’s job harder because you end up bombarding him or her with half-baked pastry. Heinlein formulated his rules in 1950, when there were dozens of markets in the science-fiction field and a desperate need for content, most of which was created by amateurs, dolts, subliterates, and people who were happy to perpetuate the racist and sexist stereotypes of the past.

When English critic Kingsley Amis (father of Martin) published his survey of science fiction, New Maps of Hell, in 1960, he said that Jules Verne had established a standard of low-quality writing, which his successors had “reproduced with great fidelity.”

Writing standards are far higher today. You can’t get by with an original idea and a vague gesture at intercourse. Finish a draft. Put it away for a while. Your instincts will tell you if that means a day, a week, a month, or a year. Reread it. Too many glittering sentences? As we say in the writing game, kill your darlings. That glitter might be a stumble for a reader. Maya Angelou said, “Easy reading is damn hard writing.”

Since I mentioned Kingsley Amis, here he is again with one of my favorites: “If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing.”

8. Don’t be afraid to not rewrite.

If you have a story or multiple stories or just a clever opening from earlier in your career that you have never been happy with but can’t part with, don’t rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. Move on. Start fresh. That thing you wrote when the world was new is calling to you out of nostalgia. Or maybe you hate waste. Or it just needs a polish. It’s this close to being done.

I have been in this position too many times. My advice: Give up!

Though John Updike is the only writer who ever died and left a hole in my heart, it was years before I understood what he was trying to tell me: “If a thing goes, it goes for me, and if it doesn’t go, I eventually stop and get off.”

I keep all my fragments and false starts and stories I can’t sell in their own folder. After a few years, I don’t feel like opening them anymore. In the case of one story I couldn’t leave alone, despite the passage of many years, I took drastic action. I deleted it.

You’ll decide for yourself what’s a practical expiration date.

9. Read your work aloud.

A working novelist told me that she read the publisher’s proofs of her latest book to her husband while he was driving them on a long trip, and in so doing she discovered errors and inconsistencies that she had missed—as had her editor, copy editor, and proofreader.

I find that reading my work aloud always gives me a new perspective. At the very least, I hear weak verbs and suboptimal word choices. Reading aloud is the secret weapon in Jack Hart’s A Writer’s Coach: The Complete Guide to Writing Strategies that Work. The book is aimed at journalists, but any writer can profit from it.

Before you start declaiming to an empty room, negotiate non-interruptible time with the rest of your household.

10. Stay off social media.

Do I really have to say this? You will never get anything done if you spend your time trying to go viral or updating the world on the health of your cat or constantly checking your email. Don’t like. Write.

I hope your cat is OK.

Next week: 10 more things you can do to have more fun as a writer!