Stories about puzzles wanted | $200 per piece

COMPANY/PUBLICATION: SOLVER STORIES / THE NEW YORK TIMES

Submissions to our Solver Stories feature for the latter half of 2021 are now open. We're looking for fresh voices and well-told stories about how puzzle-solving or games have had an impact on your life, or how they might have changed a relationship.

‘SOLVER STORIES’ SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Have a story that needs to be told about puzzles and how they connected you to someone else? Wordplay wants to hear from you.

Wordplay is interested in exploring how puzzles connect us to each other, how they fit into our daily lives and what we can learn about ourselves from solving them.

Solver Stories welcomes submissions of personal essays about an issue the writer has faced in life, and how solving puzzles (of any kind) has helped them resolve that issue. Another topic of interest is how solving puzzles has affected a relationship in the writer’s life.

The most important thing is that the writing be emotionally honest and for the story to be freshly and compellingly told. An example of the kind of essay we are looking for is Jessica Wolf’s Solver Story, “The Language of Letting Go.”

Please read the guidelines below and submit your essays to solverstories@nytimes.com.

Wordplay will pay $200 for each essay that is published. Solver Stories will be published every month, and payment will be issued when the story runs.

Preferred length: 800 to 1,300 words. Please attach your essay as a Word-compatible document AND paste the text into the body of the email.

Send ONE email with all elements of your submission. Please do not send multiple emails with various pieces and versions.

No pseudonyms (including the author), composite characters or invented situations may be used.

Essays must be previously unpublished. Previously published work is considered to be that which has appeared in print or online, including on blogs.

We will attempt to respond to every submission within four weeks, though response times may vary with the volume of submissions.

If you are new to writing and publishing, please read the following for guidance on what we look for in a good essay:

1. Decide what story you want to tell. An essay doesn’t have to pack everything into it. In fact, the sparer the writing, the easier it is for readers to follow and enjoy. That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be details in it, but a single plotline is best for this sort of feature. Which leads me to …

2. Organization. I need to know what story you are trying to tell. If there are too many “storylets” in an essay, readers will give up and lose interest. And that means you have to …

3. Hook me in the first paragraph. Writers have an appallingly short amount of time to grab and hold a reader’s interest, especially online. Many beginning writers tell a story chronologically, and make the reader wait until the end to let them know why they are reading the piece. Make your first contact with the reader intriguing enough so that they want to continue.

4. Include dialogue, if possible. Dialogue helps hold the readers’ interest and pulls them in, because it makes them feel like they are part of the conversation.

CONTACT INFORMATION:

Questions / submissions: solverstories@nytimes.com

Website: https://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/solver-stories