Our Short Story Competition is now open! With just 1000 words to leave your reader gasping for breath, you'll find Guest Judge Rowana Miller's words of wisdom to be essential as you craft your piece!
You are the founder of the nonprofit organization Cosmic Writers, which provides creative resources and opportunities to young people. Given your experience working with young and new writers, what advice do you have for someone trying to get their work out there for the first time?
I find that, when you lower the stakes of getting your work out there, you’re much more likely to a) enjoy the experience and b) succeed. By “lowering the stakes,” I mean decreasing how much emotional energy you have invested in each effort to publish your work. There are several ways you can do this:
#1: Enter contests (like this one!). If you win, it’s great recognition, but if you don’t win, there aren’t any consequences.
#2: Submit to A LOT of places. The more publications to which you submit, the less you’re emotionally invested in each one, which makes the submission experience feel less intimidating. Also, on a practical level, you never know where your writing will resonate.
#3: Make peace with rejection. Of course this is incredibly difficult. But because rejection is inevitable, you need to find the way of coping that works best for you. (Ex: My fellow 2025 debut author Hien Nguyen got her first negative review embroidered on a sweatshirt.)
Underlying all of this is the requirement to genuinely believe that it’s YOU, not the publications to which you’re submitting, who determines your worth as a writer. You shouldn’t submit your work in order to seek validation from someone else. The reason to submit your work is that you already know it’s great, and publication is simply a vehicle for sharing your words.
Your debut novel, Secrets of the Blue Hand Girls, offers a complex storyline with secret societies and characters who must always contemplate who the true villain is. At what point did you know your story could fill an entire novel and wasn’t just a short story idea? In general, how do you decide which ideas work better as short stories versus novels?
In a lot of ways, I think that a novel is a nesting doll of short stories. Each paragraph is an extremely short story; each scene is a piece of flash fiction; each chapter is a classic short story; and a novel is an extremely long short story. I say this because I think each of these components requires the same key pieces to be successful: compelling characters, a clear sense of place, intentional pacing, and — crucially — some sort of progression from start to finish. To that end, I think an idea can become a novel when you know that you can build it out in all directions.
In the case of Secrets of the Blue Hand Girls, the core of the book is an ensemble cast of eight morally-gray girls. I wanted to grow those girls into a novel because I thought that each character had conflict embedded within her, and that those conflicts could interlace in a way that would engage a reader for 368 pages.
Sometimes perfectionism can make writers feel like their book will never be ready for publication. How long did it take you to write your debut novel, and at what point were you completely satisfied with your work?
…I’m supposed to be completely satisfied with my work?!
I’m listening to my audiobook right now after a few months away from the text, and as I listen, I’m realizing that I should have cut a paragraph here and there, and that certain pieces of dialog sound stilted. And every time I think something like that, I have to remind myself that there is no point at which I will feel that my book is 100% perfect.
To be clear, I’m very proud of the book. It took six years to go from drafting the first chapter to seeing it in Barnes and Noble, and that’s not counting the six years before that, which I spent writing two novels that were never published but that gave me the knowledge to write Secrets of the Blue Hand Girls. But I’m very grateful for the push-and-pull between my own perfectionism and the fact that publishing has deadlines.
Your stories often involve a variety of fantasy elements, mixed with mischief and secrets. With imagination being boundless, how do you decide which specific elements to focus on without overloading your story with too many ideas? What advice do you have for writers who are trying to home in on a central theme?
My best novel-writing hot take is that there’s no such thing as a subplot. I believe that, when you see your novel as a collection of subplots, it can feel unrealistically compartmentalized; we don’t think of our lives as composed of sub-divisions, but as single complex things that encompass intersecting threads. As applied to novel-writing, I believe that every character, every magical creature, every cultural element of every civilization should be part of the novel’s core plot, working to move it forward.
In order to identify this core, I think you should ask yourself three questions: when you tell someone what your project is about, what do you say? What is the piece of the novel that, if you removed it, would destroy the novel completely? What is your reader going to remember long after they’ve finished the book? That’s your core.
What are you looking for in a winning entry? Any tips for our young writers, especially those new to writing short stories?
Stories resonate because of their characters, particularly their main characters. The best advice I’ve heard for creating characters is: your character can be the most obnoxious person in the world — they can spit on children for fun, or fill their local fire department’s water hoses with gasoline — but if they have a dog that they love very much, your reader will root for them anyway. When your character cares about a living being, the reader cares about your character.
In this context, a “dog” can be a literal pet, or a human for whom the main character would do anything (ex: a grandparent, a romantic partner, a sibling). One important corollary to this rule is that a “dog” cannot be a place, an idea, or anything else without a pulse. Your character can care about other things as well, but the being-to-being bond is key to why this strategy works, because it has to show the reader that your character can receive love as well as give it.
So: I’m looking for characters with dogs.