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How to Get Published in a Literary Magazine: An Editor's Honest Guide
by Writing Workshops Staff
3 months ago
Most advice about getting published in literary magazines focuses on logistics: where to submit, how to format a manuscript, what to include in a cover letter. That information is useful, but it sidesteps the question that actually determines whether your story gets accepted or rejected. The question isn't where you submit. It's what happens when an editor starts reading your first page.
At WritingWorkshops.com, helping writers move from drafting to publication is central to what we do. It's why we partnered with Electric Literature as their official education partner, and it's why our faculty includes editors and authors who have worked at publications like Recommended Reading, The Commuter, Bat City Review, BOMB, and CrimeReads, among others. We think about the path from workshop to publication constantly, and we've spent years studying what editors across the literary landscape look for when they open a submission.
This guide is the result of that study. What follows is drawn from published interviews with editors, public craft talks, the editorial philosophies that magazines state openly, and the patterns that emerge when you read enough acceptance and rejection stories to see the shape of what works. None of it is guesswork. All of it is actionable.
The Slush Pile Is Not a Lottery
The most damaging myth in literary publishing is that getting published is mostly luck. That editors pull stories from a towering slush pile more or less at random, and the best you can do is send enough work to enough places and hope for a statistical miracle.
This isn't how it works. Not even close.
Editors at serious literary magazines read every submission. And experienced editors can usually tell within the first paragraph whether a story has the quality of attention that sustains across ten or fifteen or twenty pages. That's not because editors are impatient or superficial. It's because years of reading thousands of stories develops a sensitivity to prose that's doing something versus prose that's performing the idea of doing something.
Consider the difference between these two opening strategies. In one, a writer spends their first paragraph establishing setting with careful, deliberate description: the weather, the room, the season, the furniture. It's competent. Nothing is wrong with it. But nothing is alive in it, either, because the sentences are servicing an obligation (the reader needs to know where we are) rather than generating pressure, mystery, or desire.
In the other, a story opens mid-gesture. Someone is already doing something strange, or saying something that doesn't quite add up, or noticing a detail that reveals far more about the narrator than about the thing being described. The reader is immediately inside a consciousness, and that consciousness has texture.
Joy Williams opens "The Wedding" with guests at a reception who can't stop talking about the groom's first wife, how she drowned. There's no scene-setting paragraph. There's no weather. There's a dead woman haunting a party, and we're three sentences in before we realize the narrator might be the only person there who finds this disturbing. That's what editors mean when they talk about a story that "starts where it starts."
What This Means for Your Submissions
Before sending a story anywhere, read your first page as if you'd never seen it before. Ask yourself: is there a question here that would make a stranger keep reading? Not a gimmick. Not a hook in the marketing sense. A genuine question, the kind that arises when a voice is particular enough, or a situation strange enough, that you need to know what happens next. If your opening reads like setup, like throat-clearing before the real story begins, you haven't found your first page yet.
"Write What You Know" Is the Wrong Instruction
Emerging writers hear this advice constantly, and they tend to interpret it in the most limiting possible way: write about your own life, your own experiences, the things you've personally witnessed. The result is a submissions pile full of competent autobiographical fiction that reads less like literature and more like journaling with better punctuation.
The writers whose work gets published in magazines like Electric Literature, One Story, Tin House, and The New Yorker are doing something different. They're writing what they notice. The distinction matters enormously.
George Saunders has built one of the most celebrated careers in contemporary fiction by writing about amusement parks, corporate dystopias, and Civil War ghosts. None of these are autobiographical in any straightforward sense. But all of them are animated by things Saunders has noticed about American life: the way consumer language colonizes private feeling, the way kindness struggles to survive inside systems designed to prevent it, the way people narrate their own suffering in borrowed corporate jargon. His material doesn't come from his life story. It comes from the quality of his attention.
Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties fuses horror, fairy tale, and memoir in ways that would seem impossible if you were thinking in terms of "write what you know." But every one of those stories is saturated with what Machado has noticed about the female body, about desire, about the stories women inherit about themselves. The formal invention doesn't obscure the emotional precision. It amplifies it.
The question isn't "Have I experienced something worth writing about?" Everyone has. The question is "Am I paying close enough attention to the experiences I've had, the language people actually use, the textures and contradictions of ordinary life?" That's the muscle that produces publishable fiction.
When editors at literary magazines describe what makes a story feel fresh, they're usually describing this quality of noticing. A story about grief that captures the specific absurdity of choosing casket linings at a strip-mall funeral home. A story about marriage that renders the particular silence between two people who know exactly what the other is thinking and wish they didn't. Specificity, in other words. Not the specificity of personal experience (though that helps), but the specificity of attention.
The Biggest Problem in Most Rejected Stories Isn't What You Think
Writers who receive rejections tend to diagnose the problem in one of two ways. Either the story "wasn't good enough" (a judgment so vague it's useless), or the magazine "wasn't the right fit" (a comfortable explanation that requires no revision). Both miss the most common reason stories get passed over.
The story stops taking risks.
An editor reads an opening page that's alive, surprising, genuinely compelling. The voice is working. The situation is strange in a productive way. There's energy on the page. Then, somewhere around page four or five, the story settles. It starts explaining things the reader had been pleasurably figuring out. A character delivers a monologue that tells us what the story is "about." The pacing goes slack because the writer has shifted from discovery mode into delivery mode, from asking questions to providing answers.
This pattern is so common it might be the single biggest obstacle between talented writers and publication. Lorrie Moore once observed that she often begins a story knowing very little about where it's going, and that the writing stays interesting only as long as she doesn't know. The moment she figures out her ending, she has to work hard not to let that knowledge flatten the prose leading up to it. It's a discipline, not just against bad writing, but against the comfort of knowing.
Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son is a masterclass in this kind of sustained risk. Every story in that collection could go anywhere at any moment. The narrator's damaged, unreliable consciousness creates constant uncertainty. Even when Johnson lands on moments of extraordinary clarity and beauty, those moments feel earned because they emerge from chaos rather than from a plan.
A Diagnostic You Can Use Right Now
Pull up a story you've been submitting without success. Read only the first three pages and the last three pages. Then ask: does the last third of this story have the same energy as the opening? Is the prose still taking chances, or has it gone safe? Are you still discovering something on the page, or are you delivering a thesis?
If the energy drops, that's your revision target. Not the opening (which is probably working), and not the concept (which is probably fine). The middle-to-late section where the writer stops exploring and starts concluding. That's where most rejections are born.
Build the revision skills that get stories published. Our online workshops are led by award-winning authors and editors from publications like Electric Literature, One Story, and CrimeReads.
Browse Workshops →You're Probably Targeting the Wrong Magazines
There are thousands of literary magazines publishing fiction in English, and most writers submit to roughly the same fifteen. The New Yorker. Tin House. Granta. One Story. The Paris Review. These are extraordinary publications, and there's nothing wrong with sending them your best work. But if they're the only places you're submitting, you're playing a game with terrible odds while ignoring publications that might be a far better home for what you're actually writing.
The writers who build sustainable publication records don't just aim at the top of a single hierarchy. They read widely enough to understand the ecosystem. They know that Conjunctions publishes formally adventurous work that might feel alien to The New Yorker's aesthetic. They know that CRAFT has a particular interest in stories that experiment with structure. They know that American Short Fiction and One Story tend to favor longer, more immersive narratives, while Electric Literature's Recommended Reading and The Commuter have carved out distinct identities: Recommended Reading publishes fiction the magazine has described as "intelligent and unpretentious," while The Commuter is home to flash fiction, poetry, and graphic narrative.
Reading a magazine before submitting to it seems obvious, but an astonishing number of writers skip this step. They read submission guidelines (which tell you what a magazine accepts) without reading actual issues (which tell you what a magazine loves). The difference is everything.
How to Read Like a Submitter
Pick five magazines you'd love to publish in. Read at least three recent stories from each one. As you read, don't just notice what the stories are about. Notice the pacing. The sentence-level style. The level of resolution in the prose. How much white space appears on the page. Whether stories tend to be plot-driven, voice-driven, or image-driven. Whether endings resolve or remain open.
After reading fifteen or twenty stories across five magazines, you'll have something more valuable than any submission tracker: an intuitive sense of which magazine's aesthetic overlaps with your own. That's the magazine you should submit to first. Not the one with the most prestige, but the one whose published stories make you think, yes, my work belongs in this conversation.
Cover Letters Matter Less Than You Fear (But More Than You'd Hope)
Writers agonize over cover letters. They rewrite them endlessly, second-guess the tone, and worry that the wrong phrasing will doom an otherwise strong submission. Relax. A cover letter has never gotten a bad story published, and a mediocre cover letter has never sunk a good one.
That said, cover letters do communicate something. They signal whether a writer is a professional or a hobbyist, and that signal can affect how carefully an early reader engages with the first page. The best cover letters are short, specific, and free of desperation. A few sentences: your name, the title of the piece, a brief note about why you're submitting to this particular magazine (one genuine sentence, not flattery), and a line or two of relevant publication credits if you have them. If you don't have credits, skip that line entirely. Never apologize for not having credits. Literary magazines actively seek debut writers. An empty bio line paired with a riveting first paragraph is one of the most exciting combinations in a slush pile.
What to avoid: plot summaries of your story (the story should speak for itself), lengthy autobiographies, lists of workshops or degrees unless they're highly relevant, and any language that reads as self-deprecating or overly humble. You're a writer offering a magazine the chance to publish your work. Be matter-of-fact about it.
Why Learning from Working Editors Changes Everything
Most writing instruction happens inside a workshop model: a group of writers reads each other's drafts and offers feedback. This is valuable, and a good workshop can reshape how you see your own work. But workshop feedback is peer feedback. It tells you how other emerging writers respond to your prose. It doesn't tell you how an editor would respond, and those are different experiences.
An editor reads with acquisition in mind. They're not just asking "Is this good?" but "Does this opening earn the next page? Is this voice distinctive enough to stand out in a magazine alongside work by established writers? Does this ending land with enough force to justify the reader's investment?" These are more specific, more practical, and often more useful questions than what a peer workshop typically generates.
This is one of the reasons we built our workshop program around working editors and publishing professionals, not just accomplished writers. Our faculty includes editors who have acquired and edited fiction for Electric Literature, Bat City Review, and BOMB, as well as contributors to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, and McSweeney's. When an editor who has spent years reading submissions leads your workshop, they're bringing a fundamentally different lens to your draft than a peer critique group can offer.
That editorial perspective is also what drives our partnership with Electric Literature. As their official education partner, we share a commitment to making literary community more accessible and to helping writers develop the craft and confidence to get their work into the world. Current and former Electric Literature editors teach workshops with us both online and at destination writing retreats in Paris, Dublin, Iceland, and Tuscany.
Want sustained mentorship from an award-winning author or editor? Our IndieMFA programs pair you with a dedicated instructor for a full year of work on your manuscript.
Explore IndieMFA Programs →The Long Game: Building a Publication Record That Matters
Getting published in a literary magazine is not the end of anything. It's the beginning of a relationship with the literary community, and the writers who sustain careers are the ones who understand what that means.
A single publication credit opens doors: it makes the next submission easier because you can cite it in a cover letter, it introduces your work to a new readership, and it creates a professional connection with an editorial team that might publish you again. But no single credit changes your life. What changes your life is the cumulative effect of writing regularly, submitting strategically, and getting better with each story.
WritingWorkshops.com alumni have signed with literary agents, published books, been selected for the TODAY Book Club (Read with Jenna), won the Halifax Prize from American Short Fiction, and won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction from Sarabande Books. They've been admitted to funded MFA programs at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Michener Center for Writers, Syracuse, NYU, Columbia, Michigan, and UC-Irvine. They've received fellowships from Tin House, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, PEN America, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. You can read their stories on our Alumni Success Stories page.
None of these writers got there by accident, and none of them got there overnight. They wrote. They revised. They learned to read their own work the way an editor would. And they kept showing up.
A Submission Checklist
Before you send your next story anywhere, run it through these questions. They aren't about perfection. They're about putting your best work forward.
Does your opening paragraph create a genuine question? Not a hook, not a cliffhanger, but an authentic reason for a stranger to keep reading. If your first paragraph is pure setup, your story hasn't started yet.
Does the energy hold through the final pages? Read the last quarter of your story aloud. Is the prose still alive, still surprising? Or has it settled into explaining and concluding? If the ending feels thinner than the opening, you have more revision to do.
Have you read the magazine you're submitting to? Not the guidelines. The actual stories. At least three recent ones. If you can't articulate why your work fits alongside what they publish, you're guessing.
Is your cover letter under 150 words? Name, title, one line about why this magazine, credits if you have them. That's it.
Have you let the story sit? Put it away for at least two weeks after what you think is the final draft. Then read it cold. You'll see things you missed. Every experienced writer knows this, and most of us still have to remind ourselves to actually do it.
Are you submitting to at least five magazines simultaneously? Unless a magazine specifies no simultaneous submissions, send your work out widely. Rejection is part of the process. If you're submitting to one place at a time and waiting three to six months for a response, you're not building momentum. You're waiting for permission.
WritingWorkshops.com is the official education partner of Electric Literature, the nonprofit digital publisher whose mission is to make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Work published by Electric Literature has been recognized by Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, the Pushcart Prize, and the O. Henry Prize. Our partnership reflects a shared commitment to helping writers develop their craft and find their way to publication.
Ready to write in extraordinary places? Explore our destination writing retreats in Paris, Dublin, Iceland, Tuscany, and beyond.
View Destination Retreats →WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we've helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.
