Hints for Winning Our Contests

On The Premises is contest-based. We publish the stories judged as the best of all those submitted to us. We judge all entries “blindly,” and if your entry contains lots of problems, it won’t win, even if we later find out that you’re famous.

We hope to get our magazine the attention we want by earning a reputation for publishing excellent fiction. If you want your story to contend for first place, consider the advice below.

The basics

1. Your story should contain NO spelling, grammar, formatting, or other syntax errors, unless your story convinces us you made those errors for artistic effect. And please watch for spelling errors that spell-checkers never catch! (Dew ewe sea watt eye mien?)

2. We prefer standard American manuscript formatting (double-spaced text, 12-point font, one-inch margins, etc.). EXCEPTION: Stories saved as plain text format (.txt) should use single spacing within paragraphs and double spacing between paragraphs.


What judges want to read

3. Your story should be CREATIVE. That doesn’t mean it has to be speculative! Genre is not the issue. The issue is, how many times have we read (or seen) stories similar to yours, in any genre?

4. Your story should be COMPELLING. Make us care about your story and the characters in it. Grab our attention at the beginning and make us want to keep reading.

5. Your story should be WELL-CRAFTED. More than anything else, that means every word is chosen with great care. It also means there isn’t one unnecessary word or idea in your story. The parts of your story form a perfect whole.

6. Your story should CLEARLY use the contest premise. If our premise is that a story has to be about a dog, make the dog a major character. Don’t have a dog appear in the first paragraph, then never be seen again. And don’t make the story about a secret organization whose initials are D.O.G. The more obvious your use of our premise is, the better.

Additional hints

7. Your story should not rely on extremely graphic depictions of anything—sex, violence, gore, stuffed animals, anything—to accomplish its goal(s). We think “shocking” usually means “boring.”

8. Your story should not yell at us or be some thinly-veiled political tract. We don’t like stories that assume no intelligent person could possibly disagree with the author on some matter. Closed-minded characters can be the stuff of great literature. Closed-minded authors annoy us.

9. Your story should be aimed at adults. However, we won’t categorically rule out fiction that younger readers would enjoy, as long as older readers would enjoy it too.

Finally, some generic advice

10. Marc Raibert, an expert on technical writing, says, “Almost all good writing starts out bad,” and, “Good writing is bad writing that was rewritten.” We couldn’t agree more. So if you want to win one of our contests, free yourself from the prison of high expectations and write an awful first draft. Then rewrite it, get it critiqued, and repeat the process. We’re giving you between 60 and 90 days for each short story contest. That’s enough time for several rewrites, in our experience.