New Writer's Crash Course

Learn to turn daydreams into action by finding submissions, formatting manuscripts, generating ideas, and networking to build an audience and market your work.

Kick off the new writer's crash course by covering a lot of ground fast, encouraging you to pause, replay, and practice to make concepts stick.

Discover practical steps to submit short stories, craft cover letters and bios, understand submission guidelines, find magazines and submission calls, and even self-publish while tracking real-world results.

Explore how to find open submission calls, read guidelines for format, payment, and response timelines, and use tools to submit your short story, serial fiction, or poetry.

Create a free submittal account, use the discovery tab to find calls, upload manuscripts via the form, and track submissions with email notifications while building your bio and cover letter.

Set up a professional Gmail account, use Google Drive and Google Docs for cloud backups, share and edit in real time, and streamline manuscript submission.

Leverage social media to start your writing career by joining open submission calls and writers groups, building an audience before publishing. Follow guidelines, share small details, and seek peer support.

Build your writer brand on facebook by growing a personal page and an author page, posting regularly, sharing work, and supporting fellow writers.

Learn how to engage fellow writers on social media by posting positive, relatable updates about writing progress, books, and reviews to grow a supportive audience.

Explore Kurt Vonnegut's eight rules of writing: root for a character, reveal or advance action in every sentence, write for one person, and share information quickly, not for everyone.

Explore how weird news serves as inspiration for flash fiction and short stories, as a man drags road kill into a convenience store and a memorable story unfolds.

Draw on personal experience to create authentic horror fiction, shaping real characters and emotions from trauma, addiction, and resilience, as the author demonstrates through heirloom and other stories.

Reading current issues of magazines you want to publish in motivates you, reveals editors’ tastes, and guides your own writing. Read peers’ work online to research fit and start writing.

Practice rapid ideation by writing 200 ideas in two minutes, generating settings, characters, and plot lines to surface one or two usable story ideas.

Write every day, even if it's just a sentence, to build a habit. Journal train-of-thought notes, jot words that come to mind, and let ideas grow into stories.

Explore the added video on voice and style to complement the course's focus on editors, networking, and submitting work, and share feedback for ongoing improvement.

Write a clear, concise bio for submissions, pair it with a photo, and keep a simple blog or links page so editors can find your published work.

Accept rejection letters as a normal part of writing and keep submitting multiple stories to publications to stay productive toward publication.

Compare per-word rates, stipends, and flat fees to choose professional markets with fair pay. Don't work for free; submit high-quality stories to paying outlets and expect to get paid.

Embrace rejection letters as an initiation into professional writing, revise with trusted feedback, and send stories to multiple magazines to maintain momentum.

Apply the lessons from this course to build a writing community, share work, and navigate rejections and acceptances. Consult resources like the grammar handbook, grammar tools, and submission round up.

Final thoughts on promoting a published work through social media, including one-post-per-page, Facebook ads, and using StumbleUpon and Miles Bakker guidance.