Five Handy R’s About Writing for Literary Magazine Publication in 2024

1. READ: If you haven’t heard it enough, here’s reiterating it one more time. READ. Publications that you’re fond of, publish what you love to read (plain logic). Send them what they’ll read with interest rather than pushing something which might be new to them, say a piece where you’ve experimented with form. From my experience, established places are unlikely to serve their readers with something that the readers are least expecting. Conversely, newer magazines might be more keen to accept what might be risky, new, trail-blazing, unexpected, experimental, and even, erratic. Send them those pieces, and trust me, it’s worth the risk. Check the Mission Statements or Guidelines page: Some of them out there (including even certain older, illustrious publications) explicitly say that they’d like to be surprised. Good! Try something that you have not read on their pages and is likely to blow their mind!
2. RESIST: Resist the urge to send in work for consideration that you’ve just crafted, or that was crafted from a prompt in a recent workshop (it’ll be lost in a crowd of similar stories from other workshop-participants that’re also likely to end up there!), or that does not comply with the guidelines/match the theme set for the publication’s forthcoming issue.
3. REMOVE: Most first readers are overworked, so they sometimes skim over the rest of those stories where they were not invested in initially. That is, stories in which the opening didn’t impress them. Remove fat from the opening. Keep the introductory sentences crisp and interesting.
4. RIGOUR: Be thorough and meticulous about submissions as much as you are about writing. Simultaneous submissions are essential but keep careful records. The conditions of the publishing market are demanding, and often harsh, but being persistent with your efforts pays in the long run.
5. REVIEW: Again, from experience I have learnt that periodically reviewing where you stand in your writing growth helps a lot. You’ll need to keep track of how many times you’ve submitted a poem, story, or essay; the places that are open now, and when they are closed to reading submissions; money you’ve spent on fees; the status of your submissions; and what work received a tiered response from which publication. Of course, it is different for unpublished writers. Do lit mags ever publish unpublished writers? The short answer is yes. Every writer started out unpublished. In fact, many magazines take pride in being the first places to publish writers who’ll be future literary superstars. So review your strategies from time to time. Organize, shuffle, submit.

To summarize, REMEMBER not to forget these five R’s. A lot of us have no connections, no training, except reordering and presenting all that we know, all that interests us, and all that we have experienced. If there’s any secret to becoming a published writer, it is perhaps how we RECONCILE with the most common R in writers’ lives— R-E-J-E-C-T-I-O-N! Stay happy, keep writing!