Today begins a two-part series on submitting your work to contests and anthologies. We’ve talked a lot about the nuts and bolts of writing short fiction. January is an excellent time to review your backlog of short works and see if you have something worth sending to a contest or a publication.
You can get your foot in the traditional publishing house door this way. Also, if you are happy as an indie author, having work that places as a finalist in a contest (or is accepted into a paying anthology) will increase your visibility and gain readers for your other work.
The first part of the year is when calls for new works begin appearing at Submittable or Submissions Grinder. Large publishing houses and reputable small and mid-size publishers willing to pay for your work use these platforms to advertise when they are open to reading work by new authors.
Many contests and publications use the Submittable platform year-round to accept and review the large volume of manuscripts they receive from writers. It’s great for us as authors when a publisher uses this platform. The Submittable app allows us to track what we have submitted and where it currently is in the process.
Also, the website at SFWA has a list of reputable publications that you might want to check in with every few weeks or so. These publishers regularly post open calls for submission, so it pays to check each magazine and publisher’s website for opportunities.
Submitting to contests is an excellent way to grow as an author. Why is this? Writing for anthologies and contests forces us to fit an entire story into a specific length.
Often, you must base your narrative around a particular theme, one you might not have chosen. This forces us to use our imagination.
So, what do editors of anthologies and magazines look for? And how are contests judged?
First, let’s be clear–editors don’t enjoy sending out rejections. They want to find the best work by new authors because they love to read. If you have a story that was a contest winner, you may be able to sell it to the right publication.
I regularly read for several literary contests and have edited several anthologies. Your work will receive a far closer inspection than from a casual reader.
Contests have a pool of editors and authors reading for them. These readers do their best to judge each entry on their merits. In many contests, two people will read the submissions. Each reader will have looked at the technical aspects of the piece as well as the overall story and characters.
Contest readers judge an author’s technical skill and professionalism as well as the overall story:
- Plot: the sequence of events and the overall story arc.
- Setting: did the world-building include a location, time, hints of the weather, and hints of the environment? Was the world solid to the reader?
- Viewpoint/narrative mode: how was the story told? Was the POV consistent to one or two characters? Did the narrative drift between verb tenses, making it confusing? Was it consistently told in the first-person (or second, or third, or omniscient, etc.)?
- Characters: Were the characters believable, and did they have an arc?
- Dialogue: Did the dialogue, both spoken and internal, advance the story? Did each speaker have their own voice and style?
- Transitions and hooks: Did the opening lines hook the reader? Did the narrative move smoothly from scene to scene without jarring the reader out of the story? Did each transition hook the reader, enticing them to keep reading?
- Showing versus telling: did the author understand how to show the action?
- Mechanics: Did the author understand grammar, punctuation, and industry standards? Did they follow word count and length requirements and obey formatting directions as listed in the submission guidelines?
Editors for anthologies will look at each submission with the above guidelines in mind, but they will have two more caveats:
- Theme: did the author understand and incorporate the theme into their story?
- Appeal: did that story strike a chord? Did it make them want to read more of that author’s work?
Contest readers/judges read every word in each submission and base their opinions on how well the first eight conditions were met.
Each editor for an Anthology or magazine will have a slightly different idea of what they will accept than a literary contest. Literary contests focus heavily on knowledge of craft as well as the ability to tell a story.
Anthologies and magazines will make some allowances in regard to grammar and mechanics for the sake of voice—as long as it is consistent and benefits the story.
The main difference between submitting your work to a contest and submitting to a publisher is the sheer volume of work they receive and the number of people/editors available to read it.
Anthologies and contests close on a specific date or after a certain number of submissions have been received.
The inbox of a large publisher fills up every day. Larger publishers may have gatekeepers reading submissions, but most editors do their own work. For this reason, the editor will look at the story’s first page, and based on what she sees there, she will decide whether to continue reading or reject it.
If all ten of the above criteria are clearly shown in the first paragraphs, the editor will read further. If the work continues to be engaging and professional, they will read it to the end. Each page she reads gets you closer to being published, so make those words count.
Some contests charge a fee for submissions. I’ve said this before, but it bears mentioning again. You have wasted time and money if you don’t follow the prospective contest or publisher’s submission guidelines, which are clearly listed on the contest page on their website.
Following those steps demonstrates your level of professionalism. Editors at magazines, contests, and publishing houses have no time to deal with unedited, improperly formatted manuscripts. Their inboxes are full of well-written and professional-looking work, so they will reject the amateurs without further consideration.
If you have any doubts about the quality of your work, consider running it past your critique group to hear their opinions on characterization, story arc, and other features of your work.
It’s hard to hear a critical view of something you have struggled with and labored over. We believe it to be perfect, but we don’t have an objective view of it. This is when you must step back and rethink certain aspects of a piece before you submit it. The external eye of your writing group can help you see the places that don’t work.
On Monday (next week), we will discuss the expectations of publications and contest editors regarding the work they want to read. I will show how most contests and publications want submissions formatted, offer screenshots, and explain why they have these uniform standards.
My antagonist is a woman whom we’ll call Bad Grandma for the sake of this post. She takes what she wants and damn the consequences.
Cooking has become a primary activity for me. The weather here at Casa del Jasperson has been cold, with a layer of frigid, applied to the general iciness of the Arctic blast. As I write this post, it is a warm and balmy 18 degrees (minus 8 Celsius). It is clear and sunny, and the thin layer of snow that fell four days ago, less than an inch, is still there.
I’ve turned laziness into a fine art. I love my bread machine because it takes the work out of making the dough. However, I rarely bake my bread in the machine. It makes too large a loaf, and the crust can be a bit too crunchy.
The constable in that town is unaware that Bad Grandma has murdered a mage but knows she’s wanted for smuggling and other crimes. However, our Bad Grandma is slippery and escapes the noose by murdering the constable.
At this point in my writing process, I need to know what Bad Grandma is doing because my protagonist, the mage who is investigating the murders, has to respond to her actions and plan how to catch her. I am writing the scenes that she is featured in, and soon, I will have the ending of the novel written. Bad Grandma’s meeting with karma resolves the central problem in this tale of woe. Once I have that solved, winding up the other threads will be easy to write.
Artist: Ivan Aivazovsky (baptized Hovhannes Aivazovsky) (1817 – 1900)
When we write about mild reactions, wasting words on too much description is unnecessary because mild is boring. But if you want to emphasize the chemistry between two characters, good or bad, strong gut reactions on the part of your protagonist are a good way to do so.
The novel was inspired by a youthful romance Fitzgerald had with 
Fitzgerald shows us Nick’s emotions, AND we see his view of everyone else’s emotions. We see their physical reactions through his eyes and through visual cues and conversations.
If you have no idea how to begin showing the basic emotions of your characters, a good handbook that offers a jumping-off point is 
Students taking college-level classes in literature and English are often required to read The Great Gatsby and other classic novels from that era, such as 
After we survive the middle crisis, we have falling action. We receive the crucial information, the characters regroup, and we experience the unfolding of events leading to the conclusion. The protagonist’s problems are resolved, and we (the readers) are offered a good ending and closure.
These small arcs of action, reaction, and calm push the plot and ensure it doesn’t stall. Each scene is an opportunity to ratchet up the tension and increase the overall conflict that drives the story.
Transition scenes must also have an arc supporting the cathedral that is our novel. They will begin, rise to a peak as the necessary information is discussed, and ebb when the characters move on.
Plots are driven by an imbalance of power. The dark corners of the story are illuminated by the characters who have critical knowledge. This is called asymmetric information.
When we write a story, no matter the length, we hope the narrative will keep our readers interested until the end of the book. We lure readers into the scene and reward them with a tiny dose of new information.
If you have been a computer user for any length of time, you know that hardware failure, virus attacks by hackers, and other computer disasters will happen. They’re like the 
This year, I met a young man who, being new to using a word processing program, forgot how he named his 2022 manuscript. He couldn’t find it when he decided to start writing again. I showed him how to search for files by date, taught him how to name documents, and taught him how to create a master file for all the files generated in the process of writing his book.
I work out of Dropbox, so when I save and close a document, my work is automatically saved and backed up to 
One thing I hear from new writers is how surprised they are at how easily something that should be simple can veer out of control. The worst thing that can happen to an author is accidentally saving an old file over the top of your new file or deleting the file entirely.
I make a separate subfolder for my work when it’s in the editing process. That subfolder contains two subfolders, and one is for the chapters my editor sends me in their raw state with all her comments:
We are at the same latitude as Paris, Zurich, and Montreal but usually get a lot more rain than those cities. The North Pacific can be wild at this time of the year, which makes for some great storm-watching.
By the time the authors got to the meat of the matter (which was late in the second half) I no longer cared. Truthfully, when the fluff is carved away from this book, you might have 20,000 or so words of an interesting story—a novella.
I’m planning two volumes because one will feature stories set in the world of Neveyah, and the other will be random speculative short fiction pieces.
I have talked about this novella many times, as I consider it one of the most enduring stories in Western literature. The opening act of this tale is a masterclass in how to structure a story.
“Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.”
As I mentioned before, this book is only a novella. It was comprised of 66 handwritten pages. Some people think they aren’t “a real author” if they don’t write a 900-page doorstop, but Dickens says differently.
Life in the Realm of Fantasy 
