How to be eliminated in the first round

- Chapterize your short story
- Use a lot of exclamation points
- Tell us that "The downfall of the magazines and publishing companies who have previously rejected my work is that they didn't realize that no one can describe the high school experience quite like a seventeen-year-old high school junior can."
- Write a love poem all about love, love and love without showing it to us. Throw in moonlight and cats as well
- Whether writing a poem or a short story, use a checklist as your form
- Give three characters full names in the first paragraph (ex: Don Smith, Hazel James)
- Describe them a la a police blotter (flashed her blue eyes and flipped her chestnut hair, he was five foot ten and a half with rugged good looks)
- submit more than three poems (this is especially maddening when you give me four fantabulous poems and I want them all)
- do good work but tell a mediocre story
- have a great story but don't tell it very well
- cut your story off w/o warning when you near the word limit
- send us song lyrics and call it poetry (unless you are Bruce Springsteen or Sting; in that case, include nude photos for the editorial staff's enjoyment)

Other good ways to make the editors e-mail each other about you:

- submit artwork to a lit journal that doesn't accept it
- submit to a contest that hasn't opened yet (w/ "SUMMER" in the contest title no less!)
- point me to your self-written Wikipedia page