Happy May Day, everyone! And for all you writers in distress–perhaps you’re shouting Mayday! Mayday! into the void right now–I hope the following five essays and articles on the writing craft will help:
- “Stop on red!“ In this essay, Frazzled Lit editor-in-chief Jennifer McMahon offers eight helpful tips on what potential submitters to FL‘s upcoming short story competition should not do. “Everyone has their own style and ideas for how a story should be written, and we want you to write your story in your own unique way, so what I offer below should be taken as no more than suggestions,” Jennifer writes, adding: “Remember, we are your cheerleaders, and we’ll be reading the queue with a view to accepting, rather than rejecting, your story. We want you to succeed, and what this article is really about is putting you in the best possible position to do so.” Great tips not only Frazzled Lit‘s 2026 short story competition (which open June 1; mark your calendars and bookmark this link), but for submitting to any lit mag.
- In “Start Here: Submitting Short Stories,” Devon Halliday offers a step-by-step approach from writing your story to finding the right places to send it to tracking your submissions. This one is worth saving for occasional reference.
- In “On writing: Tools for the Hand and Mind,” Dave Swan shares his take on some vital tools for any writer. These aren’t fancy notebooks, sharp pencils, or a copy of Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird, although Swan has nothing against those things. He’s talking about the tools of will a writer needs to step up to the challenges of submission and rejection, daily writing, handling the less appealing aspects of the craft, and more. It’s an entertaining take worth reading.
- “Writing the Best Dialogue on the Planet,” an essay by Junot Diaz on his StoryWorlds Substack, is a must-read for anyone wanting to improve their dialogue-writing ability. “You’ve heard the old saying kill your darlings—well, one should be extra terminator with their dialogue,” he writes. “Doesn’t matter whether you prefer your dialogue verbose, terse, or some gradation in between. Whatever your baseline prolixity preferences, always triple check whether a line of dialogue deserves its seat at the table, because folks will notice weak dialogue the way they won’t a weak line of exposition.”
- Rejections got you down? Don’t give up. Read Meg Pokrass’s interview with Allison Field Bell, a multi-genre writer who, in 2022, placed a longish (7,500-word) short story in The Gettysburg Review after five years or submitting and 60 rejections. Submitting to literary journals “is really so much about rejection,” Allison says. “A writer has to be incredibly willing to be rejected over and over again. … That’s just the reality. I get rejected far more than I get accepted.” While this interview and Allison’s experience with this story offers hope to writers everywhere, the bittersweet part of the story is that The Gettysburg Review is no more. Gettysburg College administrators shut down the journal in 2023. That too, unfortunately, is the reality these days.
Image via Pixabay.
Andrew Careaga 