A Word from Your Editor

(a.k.a. the designated Heartless Bastard in Charge)

Since we started this thing, my inbox has been flooded with rambling life stories, short biopics and what I can only assume are rough-drafts for Oscar acceptance speeches.

Let me make this clear.

Although it’s tempting to mention all the nice people you have met along the way, we don’t want your whole life story. We certainly don’t need to follow you from birth to death, Charles Dickens style. 

We want to know two things and two things only:

1. Where you are right now; this can be at the beginning or the ending of your story.
2. What was the one thing, the moment, the choice, or the random twist of fate that sent you down the path to where you are today.

People Stories is a collection of big decisions disguised as small choices. 

Of course, it helps if the place you are now is an interesting place, an exciting or even bizarre place. Otherwise, why would anyone (other than your mother) care how you got there? Of course, almost any place can be interesting if you look at it in the right way. Your job as a writer is to choose the angle from which we glimpse your life. Make it interesting, make it unusual, make us care.

Before you write, read the advice section and the tips for writers. Go to a search engine and type in “writer’s resources” if you need help with grammar, spelling and style. There are myriad easy tricks that will help refine your prose. If your piece still has grammar or spelling errors, I reserve the right to fix your sentence structure, to add or subtract commas as needed, to join together firmly your split infinitives. But I promise not to mess with the basic structure of your story. You can trust me on that.

If you get anything from this Word From Your Editor, get this: I don’t want to read any more series of events, lists of helpful and influential people, or biographical sketches appropriate for book jackets and magazine profiles. 

I just want that moment that changed everything. 

The world is waiting to hear about it.

And I am, too.

Tom Walters