Find out what lit mags are looking for by reading the best of what they publish, once weekly. Time. There’s too little of it. Work, family, friends—everywhere you turn, obligations. And on top of all that, you want to write and publish short stories. But how do you spend your precious writing time? You just keep compiling that running list of H.L. Menken quotes. Toward what end? Seriously, it’s like you want to fail… “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear

Sometimes the mind creates memories to help us see things more clearly. When I ask writers what they think the most vital element in a short story is, the one that comes up before all others—before setting, plot, central conflict, theme, point-of-view, pacing—is character. If a story is going to reach readers emotionally, it needs to come by way of a proxy; a stand-in for you. This character, whether it’s a person, a pig who befriends a spider, a Black Beauty of a horse, a wo

Author of “The Four Winds” in Blackbird Journal Welcome back to our Friday feature: Shoutout Q&A. Check out our archives for access to great short stories published across the last half-year-plus, including this posting from March: an appreciation of Grace Spulak’s riveting “The Four Winds” in Blackbird Journal. A writer and attorney based in her home state of New Mexico, Grace holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and a JD from Harvard Law School. Her work

“God knows my heart, no matter what you think you know.” When I finished reading Kate Lister Campbell’s “Ape Opus” (7,100 words) in Salamander Magazine last week, I had a premonition: I saw it featured in the next Best American Short Stories anthology. From my keyboard to God’s…I want to type “ears,” but I guess modem? God’s ISP? The connection was obvious: This story of a woman’s religious epiphany, a full-on miracle, lining up squarely with my vision of Lister Campbell’s st

Author of “Breadcrumbs” in Hayden’s Ferry Review Welcome back to our new Friday feature: Shoutout Q&A. Check out our archives for access to great short stories published across the last half-year-plus, including this posting from May: an appreciation of Andrew Plimpton’s spellbinding “Breadcrumbs” in Hayden’s Ferry Review. Andrew lives in Western Massachusetts. His fiction has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Dalhousie Review, Heavy Feather Review, and The Write Launch.

“My head turns sound into taste and color.” “Manatees Don’t Dream of Electric Boats” (3,000 words) by Bethany Bruno in The Journal’s latest issue gives readers a vibrant, near-term sci-fi take on environmentalism. Its title is a nod to Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (on which the 1982 film Blade Runner was based.) There’s some overlapping story-DNA between the two in how animals fare in a world shared with humans. by Julia Joppien on Unsplash

Author of "The Vandal" in Solstice Literary Magazine Welcome to our new Friday feature: Shoutout Q&A. Check out this past Wednesday’s Story Story Shoutout: an appreciation of Vaidhy Mahalingam’s “The Vandal” in Solstice Literary Magazine’s Winter 2025 issue. Vaidhy was a San Francisco Bay Area tech worker for over twenty-five years. His writing explores the complexities and struggles within the prosperous Indian American community, and his published pieces are available in Ar

"Sometimes He takes away one thing dear to you, so you can see new paths." Reduce a story, boil it down to its essence, and what are you left with? If you’re an elementary school student, you’re taught it’s beginning, middle, end. If you’re an MFA student, it’s probably inciting incident, progressive complications, crisis, climax, resolution. But when the schooling is done, after you’ve learned the rules well enough to let them percolate on the back burner, I’d advocate for s

The knot and the knife. A treat this week—a solid baker’s-dozen-plus of shoutout-able short stories, curated and bound in one of those…whaddaya call ‘em…books. One stop shopping. I love the experience I had getting to know the work of Jess Row. I’d read a story in a magazine (“The Empties” in The New Yorker was my introduction), enjoy it and get on with my day. Then I’d read another one, months later, without making an authorial connection. Then another again before it hit me

"Forget coke, forget a mosh pit, forget a firefight in Kandahar, even." Full disclosure: I’m Frank Reilly, the writer who’s been knocking out these weekly short story appreciations, and yes, I’m putting my own wares on display this week. But there’s a reason for that! Beyond my standard issue aspiring-writer-cringey-need-for-attention… Let’s hover over this self-inflicted awkward moment to note that getting a story published is an event that needs to be celebrated because the

Are you capitalizing on the power of voice in your short fiction? The first thing that struck me while reading Courtney Pasko’s “The Flatlander” (2,000 words) in Grist Journal is the piece’s voice. I read a lot of published stories for Shoutout, and I’m surprised by how many of them are hyper focused on things like setting description or pacing or character development, dialogue, without giving the voice that carries the whole its due. Seeing as it’s the pack mule that gets y

‘Give her her eyes and her mouth, since her heart is an accurate witness.’ If you were to equate short stories with meals, “Accurate Witness” (7,000 words), by Nell Freudenberger in The Sewanee Review, offers a healthy alternative to the sugary rush that comes with big, emotional, barn burning story climaxes. Let me make a case here for this more muted, nutrient-rich dish. “Accurate Witness” delivers what literary fiction is purported to provide. And to make sure we’re on the

I’m sorry, she said. Can you remind me who you are? If pressed for one defining characteristic that has run across the two-dozen wildly different short stories I’ve written Shoutout appreciations for this year, I’d note the outstanding execution of a particular story element in each (character development, let’s say, or theme, setting, point-of-view) that likely raised each story above other submissions enough to get them published. This week’s story bucks that trend in a gre

"...gamify what is actually a labyrinthine submission process." What if I told you there’s a way to see lit mag rejections as a positive force in your writing life, one you can embrace? What if I told you that you can submit your stories, poems and essays with abandon and that you can check on your Submittable queue with joy, not apprehension? It all begins with a reconsideration of what you think is happening behind closed doors when your work is being considered for publica

Bringing the mythic to a small town near you. Let’s start with an opening paragraph: “Sharks are older than the North Star and gingko trees are the last of their kind and Shasta Lee was the first waitress at Diamond Jim’s Steakhouse to carry three forty-eight-ounce porterhouses, tray perched atop her fingertips. […] Now here she was, thirty-four with a trick knee, and in a tough spot at Diamond Jim’s — Young Mike trying to marry her, and her not wanting to piss off Young Mike

“The only thing worth a thing in this life-thing was a dollar, better yet millions of them.” “UFO” (3,400 words) by Stanley Delgado in The Adroit Journal’s latest issue is engaging on plenty of fronts. There’s a good-sized cast of characters for a short work, and significant shifts in settings and tone. Delgado paints with every color on the emotional palette, too: joy, humor, fear, anger, resentment, pride, humility, you name it, it’s in there. The singular thing that recomm

"I’m changed by every light gone out, just as the sky is changed." Some of the best-known stories are allegorical. We continually resurrect George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick,” Aesop’s fables, from one generation to the next. Why is that? Certainly for their powerful themes. But also because the lenses we view these stories through are odd enough, are epic enough, are entertaining enough to make their deeply moral arguments digestible. Preach to us di

What we've got here is failure to communicate. How often do you think about theme? It’s a thorny subject for writers. Some consider the thought of it the first step on the road to preachiness. Others think it vital. I’m in the second camp. What are you writing about, after all? Even that question could do with some dissection. There’s the specific subject you’re addressing—in Mina Austin’s “Walk” (3,200 words) in Post Road Magazine, that’s working to understand a horse’s affl

Doing it the pioneer way. Serious short story writers are endlessly laboring over the opening words, sentences, paragraphs of their work because they know they only get one chance to turn an editor’s head. They’re constantly working to make the telling of their stories clearer; by establishing their main characters precisely, defining their story locations in just enough detail, setting an appropriate tone, and figuring out the best way to pose a crisp thematic question. Well

A study in expectations. The first thing that jumped out at me about “Van Cleef” (3,100 words) by Caroline Giudice’s in BULL, is its period-piece-ness. It feels like it’s trapped in the amber of some long-ago, while somehow remaining a tale tailored for today. That old-timey feeling is there in church halls that “smell faintly of hymn books,” in characters that are able to feel “scandalized,” in valises at the station, and the dropped receiver of a telephone transmitting bad