The Short Story Writer: Outside the Ivory Tower

The first thing you need to do in starting a career as a short story writer is write. This is the advice given to you in every how to write book ever known to man: write and write every day.

A body of work is the most important thing for a short story writer because you must produce and produce often. Once you have short stories that you believe, or the peers of your writer’s workshop believe, or your creative writing teacher believes, that are good, you must sumbit them to magazines, anthologies, anywhere that publishes short stories in your genre.

The best advice that most magazine editors give is to research ahead of time the magazines that best fit your story. Do not only submit to the New Yorker or the Paris Review because they actually pay you, but to places that seem to have the same genre that your story has, the relative same length, the same style of prose. All of these things will help you get published, which to make it as a short story writer you need to do, and do often.

Once you have published short stories, the next step is to pitch your body of work as a collection of short stories. This is how the short story author progesses if they only write short stories. You publish many pieces and then those pieces are collected and turned into a collection of short stories. A book that can help you start your career as a short story writer and as a writer in general is Aerial Gore’s “How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead”(buy it here on amazon http://www.amazon.com/Become-Famous-Writer-Before-Youre/dp/030734648X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271277927&sr=8-1 )

Also as you are trying to get published, or publishing but haven’t reached the point that you have enough of a body of work to have a collection, you can get grants or literary awards to help pay the bills while you write. My friend Margaret Malone is a short story writer and she submitted previous stories that were published along with a clear outline and proposal for her collection of short stories to the Oregon Literary Fellowship.(they pay you to write) If you’re at that point you can go http://www.literary-arts.org/fellowships/ here and try to get some free money to support your art.

Grants and fellowships are important to short story writers because most liteary magazines do not pay, or pay very little. But even if you are only paid in copies of the magazine, your goal is to be published, as often as you can, to build your name, your platform, to get to the point that you are published in The New Yorker, a place that pays a great deal for short stories.