by Smrithi Senthilnathan
As founder and editor-in-chief, I’ve been running this literary magazine for about a year and a half now, and it has been the most rewarding experience! We constantly have new people joining our community though, so I figured it would be a good idea to make a list of our likes and dislikes — both for new writers and artists who want to be published in our issues and blog, and for familiar faces who want to orient themselves with our process. Let us know if you have any questions in the comments!
Likes
Unique Take On Theme
Our themes usually tend to be broad overarching themes that can be interpreted through a lot of different lenses. To give you an example, our most recent theme was “dreams of a caged bird”. Some people chose to interpret this literally, and wrote about caged birds of various kinds. Others approached it from a more figurative perspective and spoke of societal restrictions and trapped desires through the metaphor of a caged bird. Our published issues have a good mix of both of these kinds of submissions, but so do the pile of pieces we did not choose to publish. However, our chosen pieces stood out in the fact that each of the pieces had a unique take on a simple theme. We had pieces about closeted queers and pieces about the constraints of choosing socially acceptable careers. A lot of the pieces we don’t publish in our issues tend to be direct and generic and although the writing is excellent, we’re looking for unique pieces that stop us in our tracks and make us rethink the theme we have set (in a positive way!).
On this note, please also don’t title your pieces as the theme itself. For example, if you’re submitting to issue vi: dreams of a caged bird, don’t title your piece “dreams of a caged bird”. For you, it may be a unique title, but for us it’s the 10th person who has used the same title. A title can convey so much about a piece, especially because we use titles to tease excerpts on our social media accounts, and intriguing titles hook readers and lead them to download our issues. Try to think outside of the box for your titles, and give your piece a title that would make anyone want to immediately read the issue right away.
Humor
Humor is not something that comes naturally to everybody and we definitely don’t want you to force it! This is especially true because some of our most wonderful writing comes from the most vulnerable places, and humor can be out of place in a raw emotional piece birthed from your darkest times. However, some of our themes are specifically geared towards a more light-hearted and humorous side (like issue v: jabberwocky, and our current theme games and are meant to solicit humorous works! We’d love it if you used these themes to bring out your writing ability through humorous work. Although we will still accept more serious work for these kinds of themes, we definitely lean towards light hearted work that makes us keel over laughing and brings tears to our eyes from laughing so hard. We also are intrigued by morose and dark humor in pieces for our more serious themes, however be careful about how this is being used.
Personal connection to theme
Your story is wonderful simply because nobody else can tell that story the exact way that you can. Nobody has lived your life and gone through your experiences, and thus nobody can reproduce your stories like you can. We want to see this personal aspect in your stories. For instance, one of our authors wrote about cooking success and being a chef for issue iii’s theme, “kindle the flame”. At first glance, this may seem unconnected to the theme, but the author explained to us in a note that their parents owned a small bakery which inspired the piece and a passion (or flame) for cooking. This added another layer of depth to the piece that we enjoyed seeing. We want to see your humanity and your personality shine through your pieces!
People Who Use Our Submission Form Judiciously
Our submission form is quite comprehensive and definitely longer than what you’d see at other magazines! We apologize for this, but we believe that all the questions asked are helpful for us to decide whether your piece is a good fit for our magazine and issue. A lot of the questions are optional but we love people who respond to them. There’s one mandatory question that asks “How does your piece relate to the theme?” and then there are two optional questions that ask “Tell us more about the creation of this piece” and “Tell us a random fact”. The mandatory questions help us understand your piece’s connection to the piece, especially if it isn’t immediately obvious. I do know that some magazines and authors believe that “the piece speaks for itself” and while this is definitely true, since we have a group of different editors with different perspectives, the author’s responses to these questions help contextualize the piece! If the author expanded on their personal connection to the piece and the process of creation, this helps us understand how the work was born and the behind the scenes process of it. Adding to this, we also LOVE when authors type up individual paragraphs for when they submit multiple pieces. Give each piece the respect it deserves, instead of lumping the theme for them all into one sentence. We also adore it when people respond to our optional fact question, because that just helps endear them to us more. Give us all your random facts!
Dislikes
Not Adhering to Submission Guidelines
This is something implicit that all submitters would follow but it baffles me how few people actually do follow it. Our submission guidelines are quite easy to follow and are available on our Submit page. These guidelines are set to ensure uniformity and ease of reviewing submissions for our editors. The next time you submit to any magazine, please look into their formatting guidelines, accepted number of pieces, and the kind of work they publish. Please don’t submit fiction to our non-fiction blog. Please don’t submit 3 poems to a feature when we specify one piece per artist. Please don’t send us work in a cryptic font even the greatest cryptographer of all time wouldn’t be able to decipher. We want to publish your work; please do what you can to make it easy on us. We do have a warning and blacklist system for people who don’t follow guidelines, but we’d really prefer not to enforce it!
Not Replying to Emails
Our policy at RTS is to respond to all our emails (except unsolicited promotions). Whether we choose to accept or pass on your piece, you will get an email from us when we choose to release decisions. If we choose to accept your piece, we’ll follow up with a lot of communication regarding the layout of your piece, edits if necessary, the issue release party, and how to download the issue once it’s out. We really really appreciate it if you can take the time to acknowledge these emails, since we’ve had cases of contributors wanting to change things in their submission after the issue has been published. We took time to review your piece, so we’d appreciate it if you could take the time to help us publish your work! Even a one word email with “Ok” could work; we just want to make sure you’re in the loop.
Pieces That Barely Connect to Theme
We understand that as submitters, you submit to a lot of different magazines and that not a lot of magazines have similar themes. It’s okay if you didn’t write your piece specifically for our theme. However, we want to publish pieces in our issue that correlate to our theme. But we do provide a box for you to detail how your piece relates to our theme. Even if it’s not a direct connection, please use this box. We also sometimes get submissions where the responses in this box have no relation to the piece itself. Please try to base your piece around our theme, and tell us your thought process of how it relates!
Use of AI
We do not condone the use of AI to write your pieces at all. Using it to help with finding synonyms or generating prompts is fine, but please don’t use it to write any of the pieces themselves (due to the newness surrounding AI, we’ll be reviewing submissions that involve AI on a case-by-case basis). We also often see people use AI to fill the questions about how the piece relates to the theme. This is less severe than using AI for the actual work, but it still immediately turns us off. We’ve seen pieces that were splendid, but the connection to the theme part was AI-generated. You guys are writers. We know you can write. Even if it’s 2 sentences, we’d prefer if you wrote it yourselves than sending us a two paragraph AI-generated copy-paste. Do better, guys.
To summarize, please go through the submission guidelines on our website, and read our past issues to get a sense of who we are. This goes for any magazine that you submit to, and not just RTS. We may be teenagers trying our best, but we still have a standard we strive to maintain and we’d like for our submitters to respect this as well. Some of the points here are things that don't necessarily make us discard pieces entirely (like not adhering to the theme) but they don't help your case either. Others (like not respecting submission guidelines) will cause us to discard your piece and issue a warning—and it also gives us a bad vibe from you. That being said, if you’ve done any of these in the past, it’s alright. This isn’t a call-out post; we understand people make mistakes. We only ask for accountability and more diligence in the future. At the end of the day, it’s all about uplifting young and upcoming authors, and promoting a love for literature and art. Respect our process so we can respect your work. Thank you for all your continued love and support, we can’t wait to see what the next issue will bring <3
Follow the Smrithi @theunwrittenstories101 for more!
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