On first lines
Flickr CC-BY-ND welcometoalville
On the subject of pantsing and first lines, I thought I’d share an interesting literary magazine with you called The First Line.
At the start of each year, they put up on their website the first sentence of a story (a writing prompt) for each quarter and tell you to have at it, ensuring you submit your story or stories to them by each edition’s deadline on the 1st days of February, May, August and November. According to their submission guidelines, The First Line will pay for fiction and non-fiction submissions that are accepted for print.
Their Mission statement:
The purpose of The First Line is to jump start the imagination-to help writers break through the block that is the blank page. Each issue contains short stories that stem from a common first line… The First Line is an exercise in creativity for writers and a chance for readers to see how many different directions we can take when we start from the same place.
Just to make it clear in case you missed it the first time: you can become a paid and published author for simply doing well what many of us were asked to do during creative writing lessons at school. You can see why it excited me, I’m sure.
If you’re like me and want a copy of an earlier edition before submitting, you can buy individual back issues via their online shop. I have their Spring 2008 (v10n1) edition of ten stories, which cost US$3.50 plus $5 international shipping to the UK. The book is about 21x13cm and 5mm thick, which is about the dimensions of a Commando magazine, but half again as tall (or was when I read them as a boy).
There are many of these kinds of literary magazines out there, to cover every genre and style, and come in various formats from glossy magazines to online PDF delivery. If you can’t find a listing in your Writer’s Market or equivalent, I suggest trying your preferred Internet search engine.
To give you a basic idea, I spent a couple of hours a few months ago and discovered the following:
Then there are magazines your parents could probably tell you about:
And lastly special-purpose publications such as the Hope #1 and Hope #2 anthologies, which were created to raise funds for the Australian Red Cross Victorian Bushfire Appeal 2009. (I find this amazing and inspiring).
The world is your shellfish.
