When we return, via email, a story or essay, we will include several important steps—from saving the file, to dealing with our tracked...

Ever since Submitit started handling creative nonfiction a few years ago, I’ve acquired the uncomfortable notion that many writers of...

My Editing Philosophy Like all good editors, I’m concerned with those elemental, essential aspects of writing, including plot,...

Submitit has recently (July 11, 2024) introduced a huge update: an (almost) magical platform. While in the past, Erik and Christine used...

For an introduction to these essays on style, click here.) In my last style post (section 1), I got into the art of writing short, simple...

The above is from Jon Fosse's brilliant Septology. My corrections are ironic. First of all, I’d like to forewarn the reader. The...

As some of you may recall, a few weeks ago I received an email from a certain Erik Harper Klass, which email contained a...

A few days ago I received the following review of my novella. The review was sent anonymously—or, I should say, homonymously—to my...

A good first step in developing style is to focus on the structures and combinations of sentences. All the great writers seem to...

I am enamored of style. Style—that destination, that endgame, of what I call the writer’s craft —encompasses the quality of a writer’s...

Since part of my job is to work on—which is to say, less euphemistically, “to fix”—formatting issues with the stories and essays I...

(First of all, am I the only one who can’t seem to get enough of the word ephemeral? It kind of rolls off the tongue. Never gets...

(This post was published in slightly different form in Chill Subs.) A selection, based on personal experience: 1. Since my...

I wrote a post not long ago about how I evaluate literary journals, focusing mostly on smaller and usually newer ones. These journals are...

Are you familiar with the prescriptivism vs. descriptivism debate in re grammar and usage? It’s a doozy. . . . The prescriptivists tend...

When it comes to the ethics of getting work accepted at literary journals, the submission gods hath spoken, the prophet hath come down...

(Preliminary note: The author does not recommend or condone using adverbs with dialogic attributives. In the title above, and...

If you’ve signed up for a Submitit submissions package, you know that we submit your story to up to twenty journals, in two rounds of...

Usually literary journals ask writers for a third-person bio. And a few ask for a story or essay “blurb” (generally optional) that...

I have learned over the years that it’s important to let my work sit for a while when I’ve completed a draft. I’ve come to call this...