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

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

"That was the condition: If the water was okay. Everything depended on that." Have you read David Foster Wallace’s 2005 college commencement address “This is Water”? It’s a great reflection on modern life and the necessity of keeping the idea of the mundanity of existence at the center of our consciousness if we are to live compassionately. Foster Wallace uses the idea of a fish not being able to recognize the enormity of the presence of water in its life as a stand-in for th

"I listened like someone pressing her ear to the wall of another room." Well, here’s a first for Short Story Shoutout: I was so moved by E.P. Tuazon’s “The Fishless Cycle” (4,150 words) in Reed Magazine’s latest issue, that I felt it was time for a break in form. Rather than front-load my gushing reaction to the story, I thought it would be better to provide the link to the work here and—after strongly encouraging you to read it—revisit with a proper appreciation on our usual

"This game began, with no explanation, the summer I turned seven." The author notes for “Breadcrumbs” (2,600 words), by Andrew Plimpton in the fall / winter 2025 issue of Hayden’s Ferry Review, tells us that Plimpton is a playwright. This is no surprise, as his entertaining and ambitious story uses subtext—the playwright’s best friend—to do a lot of the heavy lifting. Most great stories are, at their heart, mysteries. From the prosaic (Was it Colonel Mustard in the library wi

The Mob Point-of-View “Because he served the tourists too well, we threw the hotel manager into the pool." This is where we start in Gordon Brown’s short-but-sweeping “Death of a Hotel Manager,” (650 words) in the Spring edition of The Baltimore Review. And I use we advisedly. We are a mob. This story’s point-of-view is the mob’s point-of-view. Many great stories are rooted in what seem like simple choices, like choosing a point-of-view. “Where you place the camera” in the wo

"I've been carrying this scream all my life." The more I read, the more I realize how important it is for writers to play with form. I’ve made reference in these columns to the saturation of story telling in popular culture, about how we’ve become so accustomed to tropes and cliché that we sometimes accept them as set-in-stone features of a story. There are more writing guides than are countable that break out immutable genre laws (“when writing a romance, these beats are req

"You can't actually burn down a golf course." What makes for a good story title? Writers often fall into the trap of using a reference that’s deeply embedded in their work—something that’s loaded with meaning but only in the context of their story—and expect that to work as a lure into the piece for the completely uninitiated. I’m looking at you, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Jess Row’s “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” (2,000 words) in the current issue of The Massach

A continuous journey away from family. Olufunke Ogundimu’s “ The Bird That Cries Mayday ” (3,950 words), in Prairie Schooner Journal ’s spring issue, starts with a bang. It’s 1942 and we’re alongside a German warplane that’s “sputtering a dark plume from its distressed engine.” The engine stalls, the plane nose-dives. There’s only a brief mention of the plane’s “three occupants.” Other than that, nothing but intense circumstance. How often do we get that in short stories? We’

“Always a river. Sometimes in your mind. Sometimes in the gorge. Either way, a river.” Karen Joy Fowler is a writer you likely know. Maybe from her 2022 historical novel “Booth,” which tells the story of the Booth family—John Wilkes and his siblings—leading up to Lincoln’s assassination. Maybe you’ve read 2013’s “We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves,” of which Carmen Maria Machado wrote “I took reluctant breaks from the final pages to be comforted by my girlfriend, wanting

Don't give them 4, give them 2 + 2. The focal point of Kathryn Kulpa ’s story “ Keep Your Visions to Yourself ” (in Trampset Journal ) is its unabashed emotionality, its Stevie Nicks-ness. This super-short story (450 words) is immediately celebratory about a particular type of foolishly-close relationship, the kind that dangles bare feet out car windows, where “toes danc[e] in the wash of exhaust-scented highway air.” “We wanted a world full of drama and magic. Held seances i