In the previous essay, I discussed my method for curating a list of literary magazines that I enjoy reading and would love to submit my stories to. In this one, we'll discuss how to read those magazines not as a reader, but as a writer.

What to read?

To recap, once you have selected a magazine, start by reading its most recent issues, since they best reflect the tastes of the current editors. 5-10 stories will give you a good idea about whether the journal publishes the kind of writing you do.

If the magazine publishes once a month or quarterly, it would be a good idea to read everything they've put out in the last year. If they publish more frequently, such as on a weekly or a daily basis, read stuff from the last 3 months. (Again, these are rough guidelines, not strict numbers.)

Save your favorites

As you read, save the stories you liked--or loved--reading. If you want, note down a few thoughts on why you liked that story, or rate it on a scale of 1-5 (or 1-10). This is not necessary, and I've not done it often. But I have found it helpful when I did do it, because there was something in the story that got me excited. Most often, it was the discovery of a possibility: You can write a story in the form of a list? You can write a personal essay about an ongoing epic fantasy series?

I noted down these observations and discoveries so that I too could experiment with these new (to me) ways of storytelling, or, if I already had written something that I didn't see often, such unique methods gave me reason to believe that my unusual stories might find a place in magazines too.

Ask questions about the stories

Once you have a list of your favorite stories published by a magazine, you'll now come to them as a writer, asking questions about the story to get an idea of common themes. For example, if you find that every story has a happy ending, then it's best not to send your heartbreaking story to that particular journal.

Here are some other questions to ask:

1. Despite the given word count, are most stories leaning towards the shorter end of the range, or the longer?
2. What sort of titles do the stories have--enigmatic, straightforward, funny?
3. What's the writing style like--is it casual, as if you're speaking to a friend, or is it more literary, or does it have an abundance of flowery language (or a total lack of it)? Is there a lot of swearing?
4. What's the point-of-view through which the story is told? Is it always the second person, for example?
5. What's the central conflict here? I'd highly recommend checking out this lecture by Mary Robinette Kowal on writing short fiction, where she explains the four main kinds of conflicts stories have: Is the character dealing with an external foe or an internal one? Is the story recounting a series of events, or is it more introspective, showing us how a character's internal world changed?
6. What sort of protagonists do the stories feature? Are they mostly women? Mostly people in their 20s? Are many stories about parents, or kids, or dragons?
7. Are the stories set in the present world, or in the past, or in a world that doesn't exist?
8. What sort of endings do the stories have? Happy? Sad? Unresolved? Open to interpretation?

You could go further and ask a lot more questions, but I've usually found the above to be adequate--any further and I lose all interest in a story I enjoyed, and the whole task ends up feeling like English homework.

Our goal is to get a broad idea about the kinds of stories a magazine publishes. Your story may not be similar to the published ones in some of the respects mentioned above, but that's fine. This a list I used to understand a magazine's tastes, and is not a measure for how good your stories are or whether they'll be accepted by the journal in question.

Ignore what doesn't work

I used this list when I started taking the idea of submitting very seriously, but later on, I ignored it entirely--the magazines I ended up submitting my work to were the ones I enjoyed reading anyway. I'd become familiar with them simply because I loved the work they put out, not because I was hoping to be published by them. Then, as I kept writing, I sometimes ended up with a story that I thought magazine A or journal B would love, and submitted it accordingly.

So why write about it when I don't use it? One of the goals of this book is to share everything I've learned, and I believe that includes mentioning the things that didn't work, or, in the case of this list, worked only for a while. I guess there are writers out there who have stuck to just one way of writing their entire lives; I'm unfortunately not one of those. I get excited by the things others do and want to try those things myself, so over the years I've experimented a lot. Most of those attempts didn't even last a week and made no difference to my writing whatsoever.

This list helped me in the beginning, until I abandoned it simply in favor of reading a lot, which is something a writer must do anyway--no matter what we discuss, we will eventually return to the core rule: read a lot and write a lot. Play with stuff, but stick to the fundamentals. No amount of interviews with editors or books on polishing your writing will be a substitute for this.