A Letter to the Brevity Blog Community—Let’s Keep Talking

Dear Writers,

Thank You—let’s start there.

Thank you for being part of the Brevity Blog, as both writers and readers. We launched the Blog in 2006 as a companion to our flagship magazine Brevity, and it quickly became a vibrant and ongoing conversation about the art and craft of creative nonfiction writing. To date, we’ve published more than 3,000 of your essays.

We don’t call them posts, because what we publish are essays, with a beginning, a middle and an ending, with the arc and movement that all good essays have, and in which the writer comes to a recognition, or a realization, or sometimes an epiphany. We look for that throughline and a reader takeaway that questions, teaches, inspires, and/or entertains—something to fuel their writing that very day.

The Blog has always encompassed a wide range of topics: editing, publishing, conferences, workshop and classroom experiences, platform, prompts, the writing life and more. Yet, we often get asked: What are you looking for? We are proud of every essay we post; each contributes to the conversation in its own way, but perhaps a few examples from the last year will show the Blog’s range of content, format, writing styles and what we think works best.

• Patrice Gopo’s On Emergence and Transformation: A Timeline Essay deftly segments and compresses time as she takes us on her twelve-year journey across countries and continents writing about childhood, race, immigration, and home, all in under 1,000 words.

• In Dear Me, Sincerely You: First Drafts, To-Do Lists & the Forever-Present in Life Writing, Sarah Barnette plays with form and structure in a letter to her writer self, including a list of instructions with insights and practical advice on tackling the first full draft of a memoir.

• Denise Mills shows us how to tell a good story and get down to writing with great scene making, well-chosen details and dialogue, and poetic language in Just Write a Paragraph: On Assignment in Outback Australia.

• In How to Write Respectfully about Nonbinary People, Rey Katz shares their personal experience and provides clear, timely writing guidance along with imparting an important call to action.

• Drawing from her teaching experience with a playful second-person point of view, Maddy Frank shows us how to explore our awkward past in How to Write About the Boy You Once Loved: A Guide by My 18-Year-Old Students (and Me).

• In Zen and the Art of Querying, Deborah Lindsay Williams braids memories, metaphor, and humor as she shares the hard-earned lessons through the difficult process of querying a book.

• And, Brevity’s social media editor Allison K Williams, a regular Blog contributor, is an ace at tackling the hard writing questions with her signature how-to-with-humor style. Here she is on the big ideas behind OpEds and essays, making readers cry with you, and dispelling the myth that platform is for extroverts.

We don’t shy away from the important issues writers face, and love entertaining the reader with humor, irony, or a bit of irreverence. If you go that route, make sure it’s not offensive and that it is funny. Hint: Read it aloud to a writer friend with good instincts who you trust will be truthful.

We also get asked: Why do essays not get published on the Blog? First, we are fortunate to receive a large number of quality submissions and can only publish a subset. Sometimes we say no to good work because the essay submitted is very similar to an essay recently published or accepted for an upcoming Blog slot.

But most often, we’re looking for more of these three things: content, clarity, and/or coherence.

Content. The Blog discusses issues related to the writing of creative nonfiction, including book-length memoir, narrative & personal essays, literary journalism, and a range of subgenres such as food writing, nature writing, and spiritual writing. We don’t publish academic essays and prefer a conversational, collegial tone. Poetic and lyrical styles work too. Sometimes we receive essays that simply don’t fit the Blog’s mission or voice.

Clarity. As editors, we review submissions with the mindset of an attentive reader. We need to be able to follow the essay overall as well as on the sentence and paragraph level. If we aren’t sure what the writer is trying to say, if the language is unnecessarily complex or confusing, if the topic seems to stray in too many directions, or if the essay reads rough, like a first or early draft—we say no.

Coherence. Ultimately the essay needs to connect the dots. We want to understand how your personal experience links with writing CNF and what we can learn from you. The why of the essay, the reader takeaway, should be clear, but doesn’t need to be overly explicit or tied up in a bow. We appreciate subtlety, nuance, metaphor, and imagery as ways to show meaning.

We sometimes hear that blogs are dead, not read, a declining trend, that they’ve been replaced by social media and Substack. We also hear that blogs are alive and well, popular and widely read. As far as the Brevity Blog goes, we believe the latter. The Blog has stayed relevant over time in response to your submissions, your writing. The over 80,000 subscribers read and engage with their comments, because they’re interested in the same important questions you’re asking and answering.

So again, thank you, for reading and contributing to the Blog over these past 17 years and please, if you haven’t yet, join the conversation.

Best,

The Brevity Blog Editors

Find submission guidelines for the Brevity Blog here.