I am enamored of style. Style—that destination, that endgame, of what I call the writer’s craft —encompasses the quality of a writer’s...

Since part of my job is to work on—which is to say, less euphemistically, “to fix”—formatting issues with the stories and essays I...

(First of all, am I the only one who can’t seem to get enough of the word ephemeral ? It kind of rolls off the tongue. Never gets...

(This post was published in slightly different form in Chill Subs .) A selection, based on personal experience: 1. Since my...

I wrote a post not long ago about how I evaluate literary journals , focusing mostly on smaller and usually newer ones. These journals...

Are you familiar with the prescriptivism vs. descriptivism debate in re grammar and usage? It’s a doozy. . . . The prescriptivists tend...

When it comes to the ethics of getting work accepted at literary journals, the submission gods hath spoken, the prophet hath come down from the mountaintop, and the commandments—only two!—have been delivered. And here they are: 1) Thou shall not decline an acceptance to a literary journal. If a journal has taken the time to read a writer’s story or essay and accept it for publication, we believe it is ethical for the writer to accept the acceptance . The time to, in essence,

(Preliminary note: The author does not recommend or condone using adverbs with speaker tags. In the title above, and occasionally below,...

If you’ve signed up for a Submitit submissions package, you know that we submit your story to up to twenty journals, in two rounds of...

As part of a cover letter, journals generally ask for a third-person bio. In addition, a short “blurb” about the piece can sometimes help. Writers often get both wrong. But before writing one more word about this, let me state clearly: in terms of whether a piece gets accepted or not, cover letters—the blurb plus the bio—matter about as much as the twinkling stars do to those fish that live near the bottom of the ocean (benthic fish, we call these). In other words, very littl

I have learned over the years that it’s important to let my work sit for a while when I’ve completed a draft. I’ve come to call this...

For a long time, I dreaded conducting field research for my fiction writing. I think this goes back to my early writing days: ah, those...

(A warning before you start this post: It’s a little wonky. I dive pretty deep into my algorithm. If you dislike detailed discussions of...

I’ve written a lot (most obviously here ) about the importance of submitting stories and essays to smaller, newer, and (ostensibly) more...

I write mostly fiction. I’m working on a (ridiculously long) novel, from which I occasionally submit excerpts as short stories to...

With the (Unasked for) Help of Jonathan Lethem One of the most common grammar errors—or let me put that in quotes: “errors”—I see when...

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay . I officially started submit back in October 2020. (Philip Kennedy-Grant, if you’re reading this, I...

As an editor, I frequently see the same recurring errors of typography. In this post, I want to focus on the three most common, having to...

I’ve been running Submitit now for about a year, and I’m happy to say that we—I must say we , since the stories are yours—have had some...

(Image used with absolutely no permission whatsoever.) Remember those old Hair Club for Men commercials , where a man (with a full head...