Guidelines & More
Looking for our Fall Contest? Click through to our Fall Contest 2024 page, or scroll below to head straight to submissions.
Send us your 100-word piece about five minutes in your life and we’ll consider it for publication. Guidelines:
• Piece should be 100 words, formatted as one paragraph. Not 99. Not 101. Title, which is not part of 100 words, should be 15 characters maximum, including spaces.
• There should be one identifiable moment (approx. five minutes) that’s the crux of the piece.
• We don’t publish:
—retellings of dreams
—retellings of things you imagined
—retellings of things you saw without any reference to you/your response (we want you in the piece!)
—erotic memoir
—pieces containing graphic violence
—pieces from the perspective of abusers
—poetry or fiction, though we are interested in poetic prose and memoir masquerading as fiction
—pieces which overtly promote a theological or political ideology
—pieces in which you tell us someone else’s memory as told to you
—pieces that contain hate speech
—slurs.
• Each piece should be formatted without line breaks;
one block of text, not multiple, short paragraphs.
• We are receiving many (beautiful) submissions about the last time a writer saw a beloved person, about putting a pet to sleep, and about the quiet moments in the morning before the day starts. Due to the high number of submissions on these themes, these pieces are less likely to receive acceptances. We challenge you to take risks with your voice, your structure, your chronology … anything that might set your piece apart.
• We only publish memoir, and want the writer present. Very occasionally (almost never!) we feel the writer come through in a moment witnessed and described, and accept it, but in general our readers don’t consider pieces without the writer’s presence to be memoir.
• Please submit one piece at a time. Please wait until you hear back to submit another. If we accept your piece, we ask that you wait until it runs to submit again. If we reject your piece, you may submit another piece the following month.
• We are committed to inclusivity and strongly encourage submissions from marginalized voices.
• Five Minutes’ editors and readers do not vote on pieces by writers they know.
• Simultaneous submissions welcomed.
• We do not publish previously published pieces, including those shared on your blog.
• Generally, we adhere to Chicago Manual of Style and The Diversity Style Guide. We do not worry about these issues when considering submissions, only in copyediting.
• We try to send out decisions within two months; if we haven’t responded to your submission in nine weeks, feel free to contact us.
• Those who track submissions via Duotrope, find us there.
• We reserve the right to publish your piece first. We are happy to have your piece published again elsewhere if 1) you wait 30 days (this includes running the piece in full on your own sites and social media); 2) it runs with a note that it first appeared in Five Minutes; and 3) you let us know. We also reserve the right to read your Five Minutes piece aloud at a Five-Minutes related event.
• Five Minutes doesn’t pay for publication.
• We publish four days a week. When we accept your piece, we will give you a general idea of when your piece will run.
We can’t wait to read your Five Minutes! Submit at Submittable!
