Wild Heart Writers is a platform for uplifting and amplifying the voices of writers who have taken the journey to their wild hearts through one of our workshops.

We accept submissions of poetry, prose, creative non-fiction/memoir. We seek forward-thinking and thought-provoking posts that search the soul and risk revealing the heart. Words that come from the wild parts, vulnerable and raw and ready to soar.

Wild Heart Writers are not afraid to move beyond their comfort zones, to push into the difficult spaces, to tell the hard truths. To examine the shadows and burn in the light.

Are you a Wild Heart Writer? If the answer is yes, please join us — your stories are revolutionary and necessary — and we want to share them with the world.

HOW TO SUBMIT:

First, follow the Wild Heart Writers publication on Medium.

If you want to get paid for your work, be sure to join the Medium Partner Program. Learn how to do that here.

Make sure you have been added as a Wild Heart Writer*.
If you have not yet been added as a writer for Wild Heart Writers, please send an email with the following:

— Which Wild Heart Writers course you have participated in.
— A link to your Medium profile.
— A link to the draft of the post that you want to submit (Get this link by clicking on the three buttons next to your face and selecting Share. This will give you a link that you can share while the piece is still in draft form. Just copy that link and send away.)

Once you have sent the email, you will be added as a writer and then you can follow these instructions for adding your draft to WHW.

Upload your post as a new story in draft form.
Please do not publish your piece before submitting it. Be sure to keep your post in draft form if you want it to be considered for publication.

Please use all 5 available tags when submitting.
These tags are what Medium Curators use when selecting work for curation, so please always use all 5 possible tags. Examples are Poetry, Relationships, Sexuality, Life Lessons, Self-Improvement, etc.)

Submission Timetable:

All submissions will be read in the order in which they are received. Please allow up to two weeks.

Reading through quality work takes time. If you have not heard from us within two weeks, feel free to drop us a line to check on the status. If your piece is not accepted or needs adjustments we will add a private note to the post to let you know.

Proofread: Please proofread all pieces before submitting them to us. This includes running your piece through either word spelling and grammar check, or preferably a site like Grammarly.

Edits: If your piece requires minor edits for typos or grammatical mistakes we may choose to make these edits ourselves. If the piece needs reworking/rewriting, we will add a private note to the piece with instructions for editing and resubmitting.

Style Guidelines:

Write a post: If you are new to Medium and have not written a post before you can use this helpful guide to get started. But do not hit publish if you want the piece submitted. See the instructions on submitting above.

Write a post

Title and Subtitle: Use a title and subtitle for all pieces. These should be enticing and reflective of what the reader will find in the piece.

Image: Always use a high quality and high resolution, horizontal image as the main image for your piece. This should appear just below your subtitle and above the rest of your piece. All images MUST be properly credited. If you are the creator of the image you can simply caption the image by saying “Image by author”. The easiest option if you do not have a copyright and royalty-free image already selected is to use Medium’s portal to Unsplash.

You can make use of this by clicking on the + button beside the new line you created where you want the image to appear, then click on the magnifying glass search icon and type in the kind of image you want to search for. If you use this, the image will automatically be captioned with the proper credit. If you use an image from another site like Shutterstock or another, you will need to copy and paste the credit into the caption yourself. Here is a handy guide on adding images to your post:

Using images

Formatting: Big bulky blocks of text are hard to read. Especially on mobile devices. Break up your text with line breaks and subheaders. Make use of white space so the eye easily flows down the page. Here is a handy guide on how to format your post:

Using the story editor

Submission Guidelines was originally published in Wild Heart Writers on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.