65+ Paying Fiction Magazines You Can Submit to Any Damn Time You Please
with a guest essay by Lizzie Lawson on the value of a submission break
This week, Lizzie Lawson shares her journey from relentlessly submitting literary work for publication to taking a break to focus on improving her writing. This pause proved to be wildly helpful and eventually led to her achieving publication success.
Somewhere around the time I started writing seriously, a mentor off-handedly said they were taking a break from submitting to literary journals. I balked at the idea. Why would someone take a break from submitting when their goal was to get published? At the time, I was hungry for my first publication and had heard the common wisdom that submitting was a numbers game—literary journals are flooded with so much more amazing work than they can publish, and writers should aim to send high qualities, something like 100 submissions a year.
Fast-forward to a year ago when, after I finished my graduate program, I decided to hit pause. I’d stacked up an enormous number of rejections from magazines, contests, residencies, workshops, and pretty much anywhere else I sent my work. I had thought I was doing my job as a writer by scattering submissions wherever I could and shelling out submission fees, but I wasn’t seeing much gain from it. Theoretically, the rejections were supposed to give way to a small percentage of acceptances, but that wasn’t exactly happening. And while it’s true that a lot of excellent work inevitably gets rejected, I could also tell my writing just wasn’t measuring up. In the heat of submission goals and potential publications, I wasn’t giving my work enough time to deepen and mature. I was sending stuff before it was ready and had become more interested in quick pieces over developing my more complicated ideas.
I needed to get out of the submission spiral, so at the beginning of 2023, I promised myself I would only write, not submit, for six months. Now it will take even longer, a voice in my head bemoaned about the next cool opportunity or byline I wouldn’t receive. I did my best to ignore it.
My submission pause ended up being more like eight months. I spent that time generating new words, sending the thought of publication as far from my brain as possible. I plunged into the first draft of a book project, wrote many pages that never turned into anything, and embraced my messier ideas. I gave myself space to experiment, take things apart, put them in a different shape, and change them back again. I also dedicated myself more to my reading practice, plowing through books with the time I used to spend searching for open submission windows and refreshing my email for responses.
It felt like a gamble to spend my time this way—what if nothing comes of it?—but by the end of the summer, I felt much more positive about my work. It was a little all over the place. But it was new, exciting, and challenging, and in the process, my writerly instincts and tastes had become noticeably sharper. In the fall, I polished up a few pieces, sent them to some of my favorite journals, and even ended the year with an acceptance.
All this to say, while I still think submitting—and submitting a lot—is important, I found it helpful to take a step back to honestly assess my work and how to take it where I wanted it to go. I still get caught up in the submission spiral (and will not say how many times I checked Submittable while writing this). But my hope for writers in 2024 is that we put the writing first. Give it everything it needs to flourish.
Lizzie Lawson is a writer and teaching artist from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her essays and stories have been published by The Rumpus, The Sun, Passages North, Wigleaf, Redivider, Volume 1 Brooklyn, and more. She earned an MFA in creative writing from The Ohio State University and can be found on social media, @lizziemlawson, and at lizzielawson.com.
We wanted to pair today’s essay with a list of magazines always open for submissions who pay their writers.
This way, if you ever take a break, you’ll always know where you can come back and start submitting right away without having to go through the hassle of checking reading periods. I will note, since I’ve been tracking magazines for a long time, sometimes magazines say they are always open, then get overwhelmed and go on hiatus, or change their policies suddenly. In the moment, it makes me tear my hair out because it’s my job to provide as accurate information as possible.
But, I do get it. Editors have lives. It’s a pretty thankless job, and it’s important to prioritize mental health and family. But just a heads up, it isn’t super common, but it is common enough that I feel obligated to let you know. Consider this list your best bets. For any magazines that said they pay, but I don’t know how much, I put a “DK” and I tried to note when magazines were open but only for online (like Gulf Coast).
All of these magazines publish fiction, but what they are “always open” for is not always fiction. I hemmed and hawed about deleting those who are always open for other genres but not fiction. There weren’t many so I kept them and just left a note when that was the case.
For this list, I’ve included descriptions, fee, pay details, response times, and max word counts.
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