50 Ways to Get Published: How to Make Your Writing Stand Out to an Editor

Actually, there are more than 50 ways to get published, but there is one thing you need to do. To be a writer who is going to stand out to an editor, which is the only way to get published, you have to be you—different from all the other writers who submit their work. That’s good news.

(100+ Grammar Rules for Writers.)

The trick is simply being you—and being good, which in the end comes out to the same thing. Let’s start with being good. First, there’s mastery of the language. You need to run with the language the way a figure skater glides on ice. You can have occasional slips, even falls. But you need to cut your edge into the language the way a figure skater cuts a skate blade into ice, maneuvering turns that command attention, accomplishing jumps that make people gaze.

To become yourself, on the page, you need to study and practice what one calls the craft of writing, which requires an obsessive dive into grammar and syntax. You must come to know intimately what sentences are and how to make them in a million ways. For starters, strive to know what makes you you (your thoughts and feelings), but gain a firm grasp on the manner, rhythm, logic, and style of your sentences. Language will reveal you to yourself, and to your readers. But first to an editor who is a keeper of a gate.

Given the large number of writers sending out numerous manuscripts by clicking a “Submit” button, only those who can translate themselves into truly expressive sentences will get plucked out of a slush pile and published.

I have experienced the slush pile from both sides. Like all writers, I have received rejections, though as an editor I have sent out far more. I read the slush pile for LitMag and Bard Books. The writers who do not rise above a first-round review are allowing their sentences to get away from them. Diction and syntax are not things they fully control. Their ideas are too tame, their locutions too common (sometimes diluted by cliché and worn language). To be you is to be uncommon, or at least to wear some difference.

In fiction and nonfiction that compels, the language is the author’s own. The reader notices the writer’s choices, which conduce to personal style, a twist of language that vivifies the world.

How can you know if you are doing in prose all the things required to be you? We call it revision, but it is nothing other than reading your writing as if you were not you. Put it in a drawer for as long as you can. When you look at it anew, read not only for weakness and error. Read for omission of your oddities and quirks, the moods and verbal nuances that allow a reader to see you as a vibrant soul with individual characteristics—subtle (or not so subtle) deviations from the snoozy norm that fascinate.

To be you, above all, it is necessary to keep your focus. If you are writing about one thing, do not digress to another. Bear down. Bore in. Take your story in its deepest, fiercest direction. Remember, your focus is your reader’s focus. Break the trance and your reader is gone. And if your reader is an editor, you have not cleared the hurdle. Not this time. You will need to submit a different story.

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The good thing about such momentary failure is your opportunity to try again. When writers try again, they can get lucky. A writer can hit on a subject that is so much part of her that she keeps her focus and writes in a fluid but unusual way that reveals her voice distinctly and makes the reader not only focused but amazed. If you are that writer and the reader is an editor, you have launched your writing into the ether of the acceptance zone, that desired imaginary realm that turns real the moment you get the email: “Dear Writer, Your writing has a special quality that grabbed our attention. Your wonderful story stands out from the large number of submissions we receive, and we would like to publish it.”