I haven't submitted to more than a couple of magazines yet (I got rejection letters from both), and I was just curious. Is it relatively easier than getting a novel published or about the same?

Sorry if this topic's been done before.

It totally depends on the magazine, too; the biggest ones like, say, The New Yorker, are essentially impossible for newcomers. A lot of online markets are easier to break into.

two rejections is no reason to be discouraged. even if it's a good story, and you're targeting the right magazines, it can still bounce around numerous times before it finds a home.

There are thousands and thousands of magazines, with a wide variety of criteria and expectations - there are far fewer book publishers.

The short story market is (fairly) wide open for newcomers. Why? Because the guys who have already worked their way through the short story phase of their writing careers are busy writing novels (where the money is). With a few exceptions, the periodical market is pretty much wide open to new authors.

And I just can't keep repeating enough how incredibly important I think it is for new writers to be writing short stories. It's training ground. It's where you learn to write a story. It's where you learn how to play the game, find markets, work with editors, take rejection.

What does it take? Persistence.

And as far as the rejection rate quoted above, you MUST consider that 95% of the stories that these magazines receive are very clearly not publishing worthy. If your story is well-written, coherent, with no grammar errors, is written in the style and genre wanted by the magazine, is addressed to the correct editor, is formatted correctly, etc, you're already in the top 5%! If you keep at it, you can't HELP but hit paydirt eventually.

So do your homework, keep submitting, keep studying, keep revising. And like Mary reminded us, the cycle goes like this:

But someone said (anyone remember who?), "If there's anything that can distract you from writing, let it." I strongly believe this. There's no other reason to write than simple, unwavering desire.

And so, just yesterday, I finished my latest short story. Tomorrow I'm editing it and having it workshopped. The day after it will be in the mail. Why?

Because there's nothing that will distract me from writing.

But I also think that if you've finished your novel and it's all polished and perfect (or as perfect as you've got the heart to make it), it's time to start finding an agent, regardless of how many stories you've had published.

Many, many successful authors never break in with short stories. So, if you're a novel writer, write an irresistable novel.

Some write one and sell a novel. Some write for twenty years before finding an agent.

So my advice? Just write. Write some more. Keep writing. And then edit, and submit, and write some more.

Short stories and novels are different in a lot of ways, but there is one critical similarity. Your audience can put either down and take a nap instead. With a novel, it's very easy to fool yourself into thinking that your overall text is really good even though no actual reader will get past the first ten pages. It's much harder to make that mistake in a short story. In a short story, every page has to be worth the reader's time, and you know that.

Of course, the same is true of a novel. Every page should be worth reading on its own merits, even while contributing to the overall story. Every scene is like a short story, just one designed to contribute to a larger work. I emphasize that word because you simply cannot afford scenes that are relying on the rest of the novel to make them worthwhile or interesting.

Learning to write good short stories is the best way to learn to write scenes that will actually get read rather than skipped. It shows that you can write a story rather than just imagine it.

I tend to write "slice of novel" (someone said "life", but my stories aren't slices of life in the usual sense of the term) short stories. They are scenes, they open and end, but the world, characters, and events of the story aren't limited to the story itself. Now, a novel will have a good many scenes that aren't very good standalong stories...but there should be a clear beginning to the scene, something that happens in that scene, and some kind of ending so that the reader knows that the scene has ended. It may just be me, but when I read a book that has a lot of poor scene transitions so that I'm not sure where one scene ends and the next begins, there are whole paragraphs where I can't tell which characters are in what location performing the action of which scene.

Now, as it so happens, my short stories aren't always particularly interesting. It's hard for me to get really creative with the setting and plot and characters and all whatnot driving the story in something that's going to be less than 20 pages total. So I want to write long fiction. I don't feel that I can really express or fully explore my ideas in short stories. And to an extent, I'm rather pleased that should be the case. I feel that my long fiction will be better than my short stories, and that's as it should be.

If that's how you feel about short stories vs. novels, then...well, welcome to the club. Someone might have mentioned that short stories don't pay as well as long fiction. There are several reasons for that, but an important reason is because most readers feel the same way about the relative value of short stories vs. novels. In fact, this is one of the reasons that it is easier to sell short stories than to sell novels, you're not going to be asking for as much in the way of comphensation...at least, the tangible rewards.

It wasn't until a year and a half later that I started working on it. I've revised and rewritten it to death by now. Originally, it started out as historical fiction in the Middle East, but that got too complicated to write and so I changed it to the fantasy genre, which is my favorite genre and the most natural for me to write in anyway.

I like being able to play without the huge committment.