I am starting to get more confident
in my writing and the feedback I have received all seems very positive so I
decided to submit something for publication. How, where and what were the problems
that faced me next.
The in-laws
bought me The Writers and Artists Yearbook for Christmas and I decided to trawl
through that first. It’s great for telling you which magazines are out there,
but as to who accepts what and how to go about submitting, there is not really
that much advice. I have built up a number of followers on twitter who are
writers and so I sent out a tweet asking how to go about writing a submission
letter for a short story. Within the hour I had a link to a blog post from @davisac1
which gave me the set out of an enquiry letter and details of things I should
include in the main document. These included my address and real name, which I
never realised had to be on each document, as I have only entered competitions
before and with those you only put your name on the title page and make sure it
is nowhere else in the document. Also included in the blog were details of
magazines that would accept flash fiction (stories of less than one thousand
words) and who you should email your submissions to. These were mainly horror
or suspense stories with a twist and I had a piece of flash fiction which I
thought would fit the bill. The biggest problem I have is that as I have
committed to release a story each week on my blog I am not building up a group
of stories that can be submitted to magazines. However I decided to give it a
go with a story I had written based upon a prompt from a flash fiction group I
am a member of.
Firstly I had to
make sure that I wouldn’t be let down by my spelling or my grammar. So I read
the story through three times and then sent it off to my mum. She came back and
had managed to spot another couple of mistakes. This definitely highlights the
value of getting someone else to read my work as I was convinced I had checked
it well and still I had missed some things.
So the story was
polished and I picked a publication. I looked at a number of publications and
the one I chose fitted all the criteria and had a turnaround time of only three
weeks. Some publications can hold your work for six months before they even reject
it and as this was my first attempt I really wanted feedback quickly. In a
weird way I was not expecting to be accepted so I wanted the rejection to come
back as soon as possible so that I could learn from it.
As predicted two
weeks later I received my rejection email. You know what? It wasn’t the end of
the world. It was short and sweet but it didn’t say “please never submit anything
else to this publication”, it didn’t say “don’t quit the day job”. What it did
say was that for that publication flash fiction had to be extra special and
unfortunately mine wasn’t. However as I said in my first post, it took me a
long time to become a really good accountant, so I am not going to become a
really good writer overnight.
So I think we
should perhaps rename this entry to ‘My first submission’. It took time to get to
this point and the feedback and support I have received from total strangers,
through my blog, twitter, The Telegraph Creative Writing group, to name but a
few has been invaluable. All I need now is to build up my portfolio and keep
trying to improve and grow based upon this feedback. I will then look to submit
more stories until one day I can write a post called ‘My First Acceptance’.
No comments:
Post a Comment