What is a Writing Sample?
The writing sample is our opportunity to get to know what you write about and how you write it. Please submit 10-15 pages of your best and most characteristic work. If you mostly write poetry, submit poems. If you mostly write stories or plays, submit those. You can also combine genres if that’s your thing.
Quality, not quantity. Please don’t try to squeeze more writing into a 10-15 page count than can fit. It’s much better to submit one 12-page short story or a 12-page chapter from a novel than to cram two 8-page samples that you’re not excited about into a 15-page document. Your writing sample could be eight poems that you really love; it could be a 6-page short story and six poems. Whatever pages you feel best represent who you are as a writer are the ones that should go into your sample.
Format:
- Use 1-inch margins, 12 point font. Use one font for the whole document, please, and choose something readable like Times New Roman.
- Prose should be double spaced; poems should be single spaced.
- Put page breaks between your poems and, if you are submitting multiple stories or essays, between each story.
