How
to Win 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. (See our
guidelines.)
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.