Newspaper Letters as Writing Craft: Notes on Publication by Christopher Jay Jones
When I began writing in 2019, I read books and websites to learn how to get published. Some avenues to publication are easier than others. Genre publishers, for instance, have a voracious appetite for content (remain calm, genre authors—I said some avenues are easier, not easy). I write literary fiction and humorous essays. The competition for those forms is very stiff. I figured it would take years to get my work into print. I joined a local writers’ group and began working hard.
While I enjoyed the work, I craved immediate gratification. I wanted Ink. So I did what many citizens and also crackpots do: I started sending letters to my local newspaper. I had quick and repeated success. As good as that felt, I knew that this was a small paper with just a few subscribers, and that rising to the top of their slush pile was not going to win me a Pulitzer. Most letters don’t make you think, “Now there’s a writer!” Very few letter-writers are scratching a creative itch. For most, promoting their idea or agenda comes first and their letter is just how they plop it out there. Still, when you have zero publishing credits to your name, seeing a few letters in print is very encouraging.
After about a year of working locally, I went from writing letters to one local paper, then to the statewide paper, and I was eventually published in papers in all 50 states and most of the US territories. I set out simply to get published, but along the way I received a practical education in studying different markets, studying individual publications and their editors, being creative and resourceful, following guidelines, and doing what works as opposed to what you think should work. You can get all of that from how-to books, but I absorbed those lessons in a much more meaningful way by actually engaging with many papers, getting a pile of silent rejections (they don’t tell you they’re not going to run your letter—they just don’t run it), and eventually building up a pile of clippings. I got the Ink, and so much more.
You can do all of this by writing for contests and literary journals and magazines, but newspaper letters are a nice, short form (flash fiction alert: many papers have a 200-word limit), the feedback is quicker, and given the number of papers in the country the need for content is vast. You can turn all of local print media into your own writer’s sandbox in which you can practice many elements of writing craft, with a low bar between you and publication.
If you would like to try writing letters to newspapers, or you want to see how I did it and the resulting published letters, read my blog posts about my journey.
Christopher Jay Jones is a retired computer programmer who lives and writes in Anniston, Alabama. He has been published in two Alabama Writers' Cooperative collections as well as the Bridge Bulletin magazine, and has a story coming out soon in The Birmingham Arts Journal. He also blogs a bit to indulge his tendency to overthink things, in an attempt to keep his short stories under 10,000 words. Look for "Christopher Jay Jones" and "Column Inches by Chris" and "Bridge, Out Ahead" on Substack.