Call for Submissions: The Personals

We're looking for super unique and interesting first-person stories that focus on one moment, one day, one week, one season.

Hello, subscribers! We are pretty excited about this one. It’s something we’ve been talking about for a minute and we’re happy to finally be revealing it. If you’re a fan of Narratively, you know that we are all about the BIG story. We like an epic narrative that unfolds in several acts and consists of vivid, cinematic scenes. But part of what we like, too, is a unique perspective. We want to be surprised and delighted — we want to not see it coming. And sometimes that looks like one delicious slice of pie rather than the whole thing…

Enter The Personals. These first-person pieces still meet two of the main criteria for Narratively stories: They’re about something super unique and interesting, and they’re rooted in detailed and colorful scenes. BUT they instead focus on one moment, one day, one week, one summer, etc. (And consequently, they’re much shorter.) We want your best pieces about a surprising moment, a split-second, life-changing decision, an upside-down view of something that we, as a society, are used to looking at head-on. Send us your story about that time you decided at the last second to leave the altar and make a go of it with your unforbidden love instead, the stranger who gave you advice that changed the trajectory of your life forever, that time you confronted your bully 25 years later only to learn about the hardship they were going through at the time.

What The Personals Is: You can tell us a story on a subject we’ve heard about before, but give us a unique way in.

What The Personals Isn’t: We love a good internal-based story like everyone else, a writer working out their opinion or recent revelation on the page, but that is not what we’re looking for here. We want active, exciting first-person stories that revolve around dramatic scenes and moments.

Update: Now that we’ve published a few of these, you can check some out below:

A Freak Accident Brought Me Closer to My Domineering Dad (1,695)

The Man Who Betrayed Me Was Also the Man Who Loved Me (1,820)

Unburying My Mother’s Secret (2,185)

And…a few stories we’ve done in the past that are good examples of what we’re looking for:

I Was Taught to Hate My Lesbian Neighbors. They Took Me In Anyway. (1,500 words)

I’m Not an Asian Stereotype, But I Play One on TV (1,400 words)

Why I Apologized to My Rapist (1,500 words)

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Details:

Pitches? Drafts? We are accepting submissions only for these right now.

Word Count: Ideal length for full drafts is between 1,000 and 1,500 words.

Deadline: We’re considering stories on a rolling basis at this time.

Rate: $300

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