Writing & Selling Short Stories & Personal Essays Read online

  Writing & Selling

  SHORT

  STORIES

  &

  PERSONAL

  ESSAYS

  WINDY LYNN HARRIS

  WritersDigest.com

  Cincinnati, Ohio

  “At a time when the publishing world appears saturated with how-to books on writing, author and editor Windy Lynn Harris has crafted a guide that truly stands out—an easy-to-read, no-nonsense compendium of original wisdom on the art and science of short prose. Unlike many other volumes on the market, Writing & Selling Short Stories & Personal Essays offers insights into two related but distinct challenges—writing successful stories and essays, and marketing those works once they are written. The book abounds with first-rate advice and draws upon numerous practical examples. Harris clearly has mastered the distinct crafts of writing and publishing—and she can help you do so too. If you’re only going to buy one book to launch your career as a writing professional, this is the book.” —JACOB M. APPEL, author of The Mask of Sanity

  “Better pick up several copies, because you will be handing them out to friends and students. Windy Lynn Harris’s Writing & Selling Short Stories & Personal Essays demystifies the process of writing and publishing short form writing with refreshing clarity and ease. There is something here for writers of every skill level and experience. Harris’s professional experience as a published author, editor, and consultant shine in this guide. Her patience and knowledge emerge from the pages as though you have a mentor to assist you along the journey.” —APRIL BRADLEY, writer, editor, and Pushcart nominee.

  “Windy Lynn Harris has succeeded in writing a thorough, engaging, easy to understand ‘how-to’ bible for the writing industry. It’s chock full of great writing samples, templates, and clear instructions on both craft and marketing. There is something for everyone in this book; both the novice and the published writer will gain much from studying these pages. I, for one, will keep a copy close to my desk, no doubt dog-earring pages and re-reading Harris’s sage advice again and again.” —ALICE KALTMAN, author of Staggerwing and Wavehouse (2018)

  “Windy’s book, Writing & Selling Short Stories & Personal Essays is a practical and user-friendly guide to add those coveted bylines to your resume. Each section of the book breaks down what you need to know to garner success in your writing career.” —RUDRI BHATT PATEL, essayist and co-founder/co-editor of The Sunlight Press

  “Finally! A straightforward guide to polishing, formatting, and publishing essays and short stories. Windy Lynn Harris demystifies the process and makes it easy to navigate the path to publishing. This book will have a permanent place on my desk.” —SUSAN POHLMAN, essayist and author of Halfway to Each Other: How a Year in Italy Brought Our Family Home

  “This gem of a book is chock full of helpful tips and advice for writers who want to break into the short fiction and/or essay market. Along with detailed advice on the craft of writing short stories and essays, you will also find databases and resources for publishing your polished work. Writing & Selling Short Stories & Personal Essays is a must-have for every writer’s bookshelf.” —JEANNE LYET GASSMAN, author of the Independent Publisher Book Award-winning Blood of a Stone

  “Writers, here it is—the one book you need to start your journey to writing and publishing. Windy Lynn Harris, herself a seasoned writer, is your sure-footed tour guide who teaches you the language of the locals. Part MFA professor, part cheerleader, and always your trusted mentor, Windy draws on her own experience as writer and writing coach to demystify the craft and process of writing and publishing short stories and essays. Beginners can rely on this book to teach them everything they need to know from the basic structure and scope of short stories and essays to where and how to publish them. Seasoned writers will learn more than a few new tricks of the trade. The numerous top ten tips alone are worth the price of admission. Though there are many books on craft out there, and others on publishing, this book is truly your one-stop shopping!” —JENNIFER KIRCHER KARR, co-founder of WordTango and winner of the Nebraska Review’s Fiction Prize.

  “Rooted in the context of the current short-form literary landscape, Writing & Selling Short Stories & Personal Essays is more than an excellent source of information. Each page is the best kind of companion—one who helps you out while also cheering you on. Functioning as both a craft book and an informative guide, Harris’s unique collection helps us first to find the most succinct way to put our experiences and ideas on the page, and then how to get our words out into the world. I’m not quite sure how anyone has been able to write effectively in the short form genre prior to this book’s existence.” —CHELSEY CLAMMER (author of Circadian and BodyHome)

  “Writing & Selling Short Stories & Personal Essays is a brilliant and concise guide to writing compelling work and getting it published. From sharpening the implements in your creative writing toolbox, to crafting a perfect cover letter, and identifying the best markets for your work, Windy Lynn Harris delivers expert advice for every stage of the process. When it comes to writing short work and getting it published Windy tells her readers ‘you can do this,’ and with her book you will!”—ELIZABETH PETTIE, co-founder of WordTango

  DEDICATION

  For Darin, always.

  TABLE of CONTENTS

  Introduction

  PART ONE:

  Writing Short Stories & Personal Essays

  1: Defining the Short Story

  2: Defining the Personal Essay

  3: Voice

  4: Scene Writing

  5: Setting

  6: Characters

  7: Point of View

  8: Dialogue

  9: Theme

  10: Crafting a Short Story

  11: Crafting a Personal Essay

  12: Finding Your Way to a Best Final Draft

  PART TWO:

  Selling Short Stories & Personal Essays

  13: Five Steps to Publishing Success

  14: Categorization

  15: Where Short Stories & Essays Get Published

  16: Cover Letters

  17: Formatting Your Manuscript

  18: Submitting Short Stories & Essays

  19: How to Deal with Rejection

  20: My Best Writing Advice

  APPENDIX: The Step-by-Step Submission Plan

  Contributors

  INTRODUCTION

  Writing short stories and personal essays is a marketable skill in publishing. These types of short pieces are submitted and accepted every week. And the great news about this kind of writing: Writers don’t need a literary agent to participate in the process. We can independently market our prose and land bylines that make us proud. It just takes sending our work to the right editor, at the right time, and in the right way.

  In 2009, I founded the Market Coaching for Creative Writers program to help writers get their short stories and personal essays published in magazines. In that program, I teach writers how to create targeted cover letters, professionally format their manuscripts, and find hundreds of perfect markets to match their voice. They study magazine guidelines and submission etiquette, learn the difference between copyright and the rights available to sell, and set up a system for keeping their submissions organized. By the end of a Market Coaching session, writers are not only able to submit their work to viable magazine editors with confidence; they’re able to repeat the process for every piece of short writing they produce in the future.

  Writing & Selling Short Stories & Personal Essays is going to teach you all of those things, too and more. This book is a complete conversation on the topic of publishing short works.

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bsp; The first part of this book is dedicated to storytelling because we must create the best version of our prose before reaching out to magazine editors. To learn how to recognize sharp prose, we’ll start by examining contemporary short stories and personal essays. Then we’ll study voice, scene writing, setting, characterization, point of view, meaningful dialogue, and theme. We’ll discuss how to craft publishable short stories and essays and how to revise them effectively.

  All of these topics will likely be familiar to you already, but in this book we’ll study them through the tightly focused lens of short-form writing. Every craft chapter is specifically designed to help you excel in economical storytelling. You’ll learn to pay attention to every single detail.

  The second half of this book is a complete guide to getting your work published. You’ll learn the five steps to submitting short prose and how to stand out from the crowd. You’ll learn how to market yourself before you have any writing credits and how to showcase yourself as an experienced, published writer. You’ll even learn how to become a larger part of the literary community. By the end of this book, you’ll know how to cultivate relationships with magazine editors and how to put together a support team of like-minded writers.

  You won’t be alone on this journey. I’ve invited along published writers and journal editors to share their advice and anecdotes in these pages. These wonderful people have gifted their best tips, biggest regrets, and true stories of publishing success.

  My hope is that you read these pages and know you aren’t alone when you submit your short work. You are part of a wonderful community of writers and editors who want to see you succeed. We want you to write what’s in your heart and then submit your work for the rest of us to read.

  Now, let’s get to work; shall we?

  Part One

  WRITING SHORT STORIES & PERSONAL ESSAYS

  1

  DEFINING THE SHORT STORY

  Before we look at the building blocks of great storytelling, I’d like to talk about contemporary short stories and personal essays. We’ll start with the short story. A short story is a short work of fiction. Many of the same craft techniques used to write novels are used to write short stories, but the short story stands apart as a separate form of prose—one delivered with concise language. The use of compression and microscopic storytelling makes short stories unique. A short story isn’t a chapter from a book but a complete experience delivered in a small package.

  Besides length, short stories are unique because the action usually revolves around a single dramatic event. It is a glimpse of a character’s life—perhaps one year or even one hour. Every moment in the story is a dance between action and reaction that is related to a single dramatic event. These stories begin as close to the main conflict as possible, giving an unmistakable immediacy to the prose.

  Short stories can be enjoyed in one sitting, but that time frame varies from story to story. Short stories can be as simple as six words or run eighty pages long. Most short stories published today fall somewhere between one-and seven-thousand words, but longer stories and shorter stories can still find homes. There is no hard rule to follow with word count.

  The terms “flash fiction” and “microfiction” refer to the very shortest of stories. Microfiction is a story that tops out at one hundred words. Flash fiction is anything between one-hundred to one-thousand words. Anything above one-thousand words (and up to twenty-thousand words) is simply called a short story.

  “One common definition of flash fiction is that it is a complete story in fewer than one-thousand words. But I dislike this idea of flash fiction as merely a very-condensed short story. I believe strongly that it is its own unique and fluid form. The most exciting flash fiction I have read—and I have read a great deal—is what’s been published in recent years. New writers particularly have taken the form and run with it, innovating and experimenting and stretching the boundaries of storytelling. With a limited number of words at the writer’s disposal, flash fiction lends itself well to playfulness, form-bending, risk-taking. And the results are thrilling.

  Having said all this, though, the flash-fiction story still needs to “work” on some level, right? Absent a template or hard rules, what defines a successful short short story? I believe it is the presence of three necessary elements: emotion, movement, and resonance. A flash-fiction-length story can succeed without one or more of these, but it cannot, in my opinion, be truly great without all three.”

  —KATHY FISH

  Well-written short stories are highly desirable pieces of prose. There are plenty of markets to place this type of work. You’ll find short stories in literary magazines (The Literary Review, Black Warrior Review, Passages North, etc.), genre magazines (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, etc.) children’s magazines (Cricket, Highlights, Ladybug, etc.), and commercial magazines (The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, Reader’s Digest, etc.). Some are even sold as digital shorts on Amazon or other digital retailers.

  I mention the caveat “well-written short stories” because even though there are many outlets for short stories, the competition to earn a space on the pages of a journal is quite stiff. For any writing project, you must create, revise, and polish your work until it meets the standards of the market to which you’re submitting, and in the world of short stories, that standard is skyscraper tall. Short stories are some of the most clever, experimental, urgent, and fresh prose being written today.

  Part of the reason is the long-respected history of great storytellers and their iconic short stories, such as Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers,” Flannery O’Connor’s “Greenleaf,” and William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.” I could go on for quite some time before running out of names, but the point I’m making is that short-story writers still aspire to equal the masters. This category’s authors and publishers will always hear the echo of notable writers in the distance. So today, editors search for contemporary yet barrel-aged stories that have been given enough careful crafting to mellow into greatness.

  WHAT IF MY STORY IS MORE THAN 20,000 WORDS LONG? WILL IT EVER GET PUBLISHED?

  The answer is this: probably not. And definitely not as a short story.

  This super-long short-story problem happens during some early drafts, and it might mean that you have a lot of editing ahead of you but perhaps not. If you are writing a short story and you’re still going strong forty pages in, you might actually be writing a novel instead. There’s always a climactic story moment waiting in the distance when you’re writing, but you never know how far away that moment is until you actually finish your story.

  Along the way, if you see interesting subplots forming, you’re heading into novel territory. And if you’ve developed immediate hurdles for your character along with a big-picture problem, you’re probably writing a novel then, too.

  Conversely, if you’re stretching out scenes or narrative passages for no purposeful reason, you are probably advancing a short story’s plot at a sluggish pace. Unlike novels, short stories do not have room for meandering. They require the use of compression and tight scenes. Think you might have this problem? Take a look at one of your key scenes. If you can cut it down by a quarter or more, do it. Then tackle the rest of your story the same way.

  GET TO KNOW SHORT STORIES BY READING

  Reading short stories is a great way to absorb the concept of condensed prose. There are many styles of stories being published today. Each journal has a unique aesthetic. Reading a variety of different magazines will help you understand what the current literary landscape looks like, and it will also help you see which ones publish work that is similar to yours.

  You can find short stories online and in print at various literary journals. Several short-story writers have also published collections of their stories. I like to buy the Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses anthology each year because it showcases stories from several different magazines.
r />   To get you started, I’ve gathered some stories here as examples of what is being published in journals today. The first story is a piece of flash fiction by Kathy Fish called “Düsseldorf.” I chose this story because it’s a terrific example of the three dramatic elements of flash stories that Kathy mentioned earlier: emotion, movement, and resonance.

  DÜSSELDORF

  by Kathy Fish

  Published in Yemassee 23.1.

  I have not left the room in three days, and the maids are impatient to clean it. [From the first sentence, the mood is set.] It’s October, and my husband has brought me along on his business trip. We’ve been to London and Paris. Now we are in Düsseldorf, and the sun never shines. I keep the drapes closed, order room service, nibble kuchen under the eiderdown. The room smells like rotten apples. [The emotion is clear by the end of this first paragraph: Loneliness pervades everything.]

  There’s an art museum somewhere. I could take a cab or walk to the museum, or I could lunch by the river. According to the map in the guidebook, we are not far from the river.

  In Paris, in a smoky brasserie, my husband spoke at length about his client. He said she is smarter than any man and young but wise and savvy.

  “I hate the word savvy,” I said. “And all women are smarter than men. It is no great accomplishment.”

  When he talks to her on the phone, his voice changes register, as if he’s been told he’s won a major prize. I wonder what she looks like.

  The maids pound on the door again. I go into the bathroom and lock the door. I can hear the rattling of keys, their stout, German voices.

  The bathroom door knob turns back and forth. I wait for them to give up and leave me in peace.

  “Frau? Frau?”

  There’s nothing to it. I open the door, smiling, grab my sweater and my bag with the guidebook and an umbrella and leave them to the clutter.