If You Want to Write...

The latest in our weekly blog series. Also, apologies for the trouble everyone's been having with the logos. We're working on it, but Gmail can be frustrating. Lovely, but frustrating.

The Go for It Principle

Basically, if you want to write and become published, you won't be qualified. You don't have a decade of trying under your belt. You have neither MFA nor a master's instruction, probably. You should dig yourself into a hole and stay there, quivering from fear of your ineptitude.

Yeah, right.

The thing is, you can feel (and in some ways, we all are) inept, inexperienced and unpublishable. Yet, and this is important to realize, the last thing is out of your control. Unless you self-publish your book or your magazine, the decision to publish something you have written is out of your control.

So, how do you make it happen? The Go For It principle. It's a complex theory that can be boiled down to: Go For It.

Whether "it" is a tiny e-zine or a huge, newsstand magazine, go for it. The worst that can happen is that you get a tiny little rejection letter (I've gotten one smaller than my hand) that says Thanks but no Thanks. The best that can happen is that you're accepted. Publication is out of your control, but submission is not. I've broken into some high-profile magazines while still a teenager. How? I went for it.

Go.