Summary

Ink & Tears is a publication seeking actionable writing advice articles that are personal, data-driven, and engaging, with a focus on helping writers improve their craft through tangible tips and community interaction.

Abstract

Ink & Tears aims to cultivate a community of writers who share their growth experiences and provide readers with practical, actionable writing advice. The publication emphasizes the importance of personal anecdotes combined with data-driven insights, and it encourages active participation within its community. With a commitment to rapid feedback, Ink & Tears values unique perspectives and discourages overdone advice, favoring articles that offer fresh takes on writing challenges. The submission guidelines are strict, advocating for well-crafted headlines, grammatical precision, and a ban on AI-generated content, while maintaining a flexible stance on grammatical debates like the Oxford comma. The guidelines also cover formatting preferences, such as horizontal images and proper source citation, and they discourage self-promotion and gimmicky formatting choices.

Opinions

The publication values quality over quantity, preferring articles that offer new insights rather than rehashing common advice.
Personal experiences are crucial, but they should be presented in a way that provides the reader with actionable tips.
Grammatical perfection is less important than engaging, attention-grabbing content, as long as basic spelling and grammar are correct.
AI-generated writing is not accepted, as it lacks the personal touch and originality that Ink & Tears seeks.
The use of humor and passion in writing is encouraged to make articles about writing more enjoyable and emotionally resonant.
The editorial team is open to evolving the submission guidelines as the publication grows and changes.
Articles should be formatted with a title, subtitle, and horizontal image, and should avoid drop caps, enormous photos, and random emphasis through bold or italic text.
Self-promotion should be minimal, with a limit of two links per article to maintain focus on the content rather than the author's personal brand.
The publication is looking for articles that are data-driven, instructional, and offer unique lessons or methods in writing.

Write For Us: Ink & Tears Submission Guidelines

Fluff-free, actionable writing-about-writing advice

Ink & Tears banner was designed by the illustrious, and surprisingly joyful curmudgeon, Gareth Willey.

Writing is a craft; part glitter, part witchcraft. Being a writer takes time, effort, learning, elbow grease, and a little zhuzh. Ink & Tears is about helping you improve that written voodoo that you do.

This publication’s modus operandi is helping other writers grow by fostering a learning community. We want your first-hand personal writing experiences on what you’ve learned and how you’ve learned it. Written in a way that offers the reader tangible, actionable tips they too can apply.

While your personal experiences are crucial to the story, your focus should be on helping our readers (with advice, tips, and encouragement). By highlighting the school-of-hard-knocks writing lessons we’ve learned with personal experiences and data-driven, no-fluff advice we improve our writing craft.

We’re committed to fast turnaround time, because waiting blows.

Ideally, we want all potential Ink & Tears writers to follow the publication and be active in our community by reading others’ work and engaging with it. Writing is a never-ending learning process, we all have things to learn from each other.

Editorial Submission Guidelines

Below are the current Tyler-Durden-esque rules of our writing-about-writing Fight Club. These will be updated over time as we grow and I change my schizophrenic mind more than Brad Pitt did:

Headlines should be punchy and indicative of what is in the article. Ethereal guesswork is fine for poetry, but our readers want to know what they’ll read.
All articles must be helpful and illustrative for the readers, we’re here to learn.
Meta articles (articles about Medium) are allowed but they need to be unique, data-driven, and ultra-helpful to the reader (not just personal-journey stories). So, no ‘common knowledge’ meta articles.
For the love of everything holy, like bacon — use Grammarly. You’re giving writing advice so you should have decent spelling and grammar. While we’re not grammar nazis and won’t rake you over the coals for a dangling modifier, your post shouldn’t be rife with basic spelling and grammar errors that light up Grammarly like a Christmas tree.
Absolutely no AI writing. AI is derivative, at best. It’s words are soulless and dull. ‘But AI only gave me the article idea, outline, some paragraphs and phrasing, and most of the grammar!’. Umm, no. We can prompt ChatGPT too; we want your personal experiences.
Oxford comma? We couldn’t care less about this ludicrously divisive debate. I’ll take a punctuationally-questionable kickass article that grabs your attention by the balls over grammatical perfection any day of the week. Push the grammatical boundaries if it makes it ‘funner’ (funner definition: “more gooder than fun”).
No reiterations of common advice. If the article exists 127 times already on Medium, yours needs to have a frickin’ kick-arse spin.
No drop caps. We just don’t like them; they’re too high-falutin’.
Use a title (in title capitalization), subtitle, and horizontal image at the top of your article.
Use images that add a little ‘je ne sais quoi’ to your article. Properly source them by linking to the photographer on the royalty-free site (Unsplash, Pexels, Canva, etc.) you found them on.
We like our images like we like our hanky panky — doing the horizontal mambo. Horizontal images just look better visually.
Cite your sources. We don’t expect anyone to reinvent the wheel with every article, so throw a link citation to whichever wheel inventors’ work you built on.
No random bold, italic, or capitalization; no FULL CAPS (WHY ARE YOU YELLING?!); no enormous photos that take up an entire computer monitor full of space.
No articles that are entirely single-sentences. Our attention spans might be gnat-sized, but not single-sentence-sized. Use paragraphs pretty please!
No spammy self-promotion, please. Have a banner or related article you want to include at the end? Awesome. But no more than 2 links. We don’t need to see your full bio, links to your 17 social platforms + kofi, and requests for standing ovations.
Humor isn’t required, but it’s wildly encouraged. Writing is more fun than a strip club on wing night, so writing about writing should be fun! If not ‘fun’, it should be passionate. Blood, sweat, and tears — or giggles, but evoke an emotional reaction.

We’d Shank a Mofo To Get Articles Like These:

If we’d whittle our prison soap into a shank for something, it means we love it. Here’s the type of things we’d love to see:

Data Deep Dive: 3 Elements I Discovered in My 13 Top-Performing Articles
What I Learned from the Crankiest Curmudgeonly Editor I Ever Worked With
The Peculiar Outline Method I Used to Get Published in XYZ
Learn From My Fuckups in Self-Publishing a Book
A Dog-Eared Thesaurus: How to Spice Up Your Literary Vocab
Evergreen Writing: The Art & Science of Timelessness

We’d Gently Decline Articles Like These:

Not every article is a fit for every publication. Your article might be amazeballs, but doesn’t quite fit our ragtag publication’s goals. Here are some examples of what we would politely decline:

Cure Writer’s Block by Going for a Walk! (I don’t care if it rhymes, or that it works…it’s older-than-dirt advice)
7 Ways to Succeed on Medium (Let me guess, the first three are: great headlines, engage with other writers, and publish often?)
Why I Became a Writer (We’re excited for you and your journey! But it isn’t instructional for our readers)

When submitting drafts or article pitches, do so with the reader in mind. What will they take away from your article that they can act on?

At the bottom of every story we will add the pub banner to help get the word out:

If you don’t want it included for a specific reason, please add a note to your draft stating such.

If you want bonus brownie points that win you absolutely nothing, give this article the clap and highlight something so that I know that you actually read the above shenanigans.

How To Write for Ink & Tears

Email me with your Medium handle (@yourname), and a link to a draft I can check out — or, pitch me a story idea you’ve got rattling around in your brain bucket.

[email protected]

Or, you can join my Discord group and poke me with a stick.

Let’s get weird, raw, and real about writing. Laugh, or cry — but leave it all on the page.