Christina

**The Writer’s Toolbox series are resources I’ve found that have helped me in developing my writing and my writing career.  I hope you will find… Read More »Writer’s Toolbox: All I Need To Write by Grant Snider

**The Writer’s Toolbox series are resources I’ve found that have helped me in developing my writing and my writing career.  I hope you will find them as useful as I do.  All copyright is retained by the original writer. 

Original article found here.

 

Ask most fiction editors how to avoid rejection, and you’ll hear the same thing: Read the guidelines. Review the publication. Don’t send a science fiction story to a literary magazine, and vice versa. Don’t send a 10,000-word manuscript to a magazine that never publishes anything longer than 5,000 words. Spell check. Proofread. Check your grammar. Format your manuscript correctly. Be professional. Failure to observe these basics, many editors say, accounts for more than 80% of all short fiction rejections.

But what if you’ve done all that, and your stories are still coming back with polite, form rejection letters? I asked nearly 50 fiction editors — from traditional literary publications to flash fiction ezines — what types of problems resulted in the other 20% of rejections. These are the problems that plague stories that meet all the basic requirements, but still don’t quite "make the grade."

Read More »Writers Toolbox: 5 Fiction Mistakes that Spell Rejection by Moira Allen