Good Places To Submit Essays

It’s not your usual dead parent story, or your usual childhood trauma story.It’s complex, and intimate, and leaves room for doubt and imperfection.

It’s not your usual dead parent story, or your usual childhood trauma story.

Those should go through Narratively’s other Submittable channels, which you can find here.

The nitty gritty: Pay: Yes, we pay for all published work.

If you’ve read all of this, hopefully you have a pretty good idea of whether your story would be a good fit or not.

If it belongs on my list of best Narratively memoir stories ever, submit your completed draft through Submittable here.

The rate for personal essays starts at $300, and can go up from there if it’s really epic, if it includes reporting, etc. Submissions: We require completed submissions for personal essays.

This is not because I enjoy making writers do extra work, but because so much of a personal essay is about tone and execution, and there’s no way to know ahead of time if it will work — especially if I’ve never worked with you before. There’s some flexibility there, but if it’s under 1,500 words or over 4,000, it probably won’t work for us.

Start with an experience that changed you — not something that slightly shifted your perception just enough to write a “huh, never thought of it that way” piece, but something that truly shattered and reconstructed your world.

Or start with a question at the heart of who you are, something that’s obsessed and confounded you for as long as you can remember. A few more important general notes: Remember that the publication I work for is called Narratively.

They try to make a decision within 3 days but sometimes takes a little longer. Jellyfish Review is looking for insightful flash fiction. They love work that is real, gritty, or outlandish.

They try to make a decision within 10 days but it often takes a little longer.