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By: Badri Sunderarajan
Tags: Creativity, Writing, Snipette, Writing Prompts

Hello, potential writer of Snipette! We are Badri and Manasa, co-editors and writers here. We hope to see you joining as a writer, too!

To Become A Writer For Snipette

Email us at snipettemag@gmail.com. Include a link to your Medium profile and the draft or story that you’d like to submit, as well as pitch in 100-ish words. We’ll get back to you in 7–8 days.

We aren’t very particular about the format of pieces we accept — it can be a story, info-piece, news report, DIY, review, poem, recipe, or anything else you think of.

There are some articles that are more likely to be accepted than others, but don’t worry about that right now. If you’ve browsed our articles, you’ll already have an idea of what we publish — and you can get a clearer idea by reading about the “Snipette Style” below.

If you’re article doesn’t fit, we’ll let you know why, and try to help you rework it. We only ask that you follow a few simple guidelines regarding language and submission.

Some Guidelines

We’d like our pieces to be easy to understand, so avoid highly technical language and complex words. Explain, as far as possible, rather than state.

That said, we do like creative and inventive description. Use simple words, but not simplistic styles. Avoid listicles. We don’t like subheadings either (but if you include them, we’ll help you edit them out while still preserving the flow).

We prefer drafts to published articles, both so we can schedule it for an optimal time and so we can edit and polish it.

We ask that you give us permission to modify the article before publishing. We will:

Check for basic grammar and spelling

Add, replace or modify the header image

Add our signature and a “Have something to say?” or a similar note at the end

Change the title, but only if it sounds too clickbait-y or doesn’t fit our publication’s theme

You can review the changes, and we won’t publish without your approval.

If the style of the article doesn’t fit, we might need to go into more extensive edits. We’ll ask you before doing that, and you can decide if you want to go ahead or not.

We generally create our own illustrations for the header and body of the article. We ask that you allow us to do the same for yours. You can give us a description of the image you’d like, or even a photo for us to copy from. We will do our best to provide you with an image.

You can pull your article out of Snipette at any time, but we request that:

You leave it in for at least 6 months

You inform us before removing the article

You link back to Snipette even after the article is removed, saying “Originally published in Snipette”

Apart from the above, there’s no need to stick to article conventions. Use anecdotes to explain science or technical details as key parts of plotlines — they’re what make articles fun.

Regarding the Partner Programme

Medium lets people earn money by marking some of their articles as “members-only” and putting them behind a paywall — and you’re welcome to do so too! Sometimes, if an article gets “featured” by the Medium editors, it’ll be put behind a paywall anyway.

At Snipette, we want our articles to be accessible to as many people as possible. So when we share them via email and social media, we’ll use Friend Links — special links that allow people to bypass the paywall (it won’t affect your earnings). You can use Friend Links too; see here for more details.

…and one more request

At Snipette — as you’ll see at the end of almost every post — we encourage questions, comments, corrections and clarifications. We value interaction with our readers, and ask that you do the same. Don’t stop at writing your article: come back to look at the comments, and try to respond to them whenever possible.

For the un-confident

We have a little more to help you write here.

You can also join our Writers’ Programme, where we’ll guide you through writing the perfect Snipette piece.

The Snipette Style

And now for the bit you’ve been anticipating. What kind of articles do we want? What are we looking for? It’s actually hard to say.

We try to showcase a diverse selection of topics, formats and writing styles, so almost anything goes. A story told in images? Great! A detailed tutorial of Python programming? Sure!

However, there were some things that just felt more “us”—and we didn’t exactly know why. So we tried to think back. We tried to ask why. We tried to see what they had in common. This is what we got.

At Snipette, we are looking for something with Understandability, Perspective, and Fun. And that’s really it!

Below is a rough guide to the kinds of things we’d like to see from you as a writer. While they don’t all have to be a part of every piece you write, they are what we’re mainly looking for as editors.

Understandability

There are many articles online. Some cover complex issues, and others don’t. Some are easy to read; others are not.

Usually, the easy articles cover simple topics, and the hard ones cover the complicated.

And that’s the problem.

When a complicated article speaks of something complicated, it’s hard to read, especially with all the complicated terms. That’s why, at Snipette, we try to keep the descriptions simple. Don’t speak as a professor to a student, but as a friend to another friend. (That’s what good professors do, too).

Explain things in a way you would understand yourself. Why call it “electromagnetic waves of assorted wavelengths outside the visible range”, when you can say “invisible colours shooting through the air”? In Snipette articles, even atoms can “feel fidgety”.

Is your article feeling too dry? Add some emotion and description.

Don’t just state that the albatross migrates. Say how it feels, winging its way across the ocean, over the air currents; following a path that it knows by heart, a path that has always been. Linger in the scene for a while; let your readers sit breathe.

You don’t have to be an expert to write about a topic. If you’ve just learnt about something, it often works better, because you’ll know what helped you understand it, and help others understand it the same way.

Perspective

So you write from your opinions and your world view. That’s to be expected. You’re only human, after all. But do you have to be?

At Snipette, we value perspective. We want you to think outside the box. We want you to write from the point of view of someone else. Maybe even something else.

Step into someone else’s shoes. Try their clothes on. Become them while you write.

Or make an assumption that most people don’t. Things that make perfect sense in their own way, but unexpectedly so. Things that make people wonder how they never got there themselves.

Snipette pieces don’t always have to stick to one topic. Take two completely unrelated subjects, put them together, and see what emerges. You’ll begin to find parallels and similarities where you’ve never noticed them before!

That isn’t to say we don’t love a good old-fashioned argumentative piece — especially a well-written one. But don’t be afraid to toss convention out of the window and try something different.

Fun

Snipette pieces don’t have to always be serious — in fact, they are often fun! Don’t hesitate to add a touch of humour here and there.

Most articles go straight from Point A to Point B, like a canal transporting water. But they don’t have to. They can twist and turn in unexpected ways, meandering like a jungle stream. Throw a spanner in the works. Highlight obvious exceptions. Contradict yourself to make a point.

Are you writing about two different things, which will join up later? Do you need to switch scenes between the two topics? Puns make good pivots for changing the subject mid-article.

Of course, just because something’s fun doesn’t mean it has to be funny. If it doesn’t come naturally to you, you don’t have to force humour through. You can just be engaging.

If something interests you, then you’re in luck, because that interest will automatically come through in the article.

Similes and metaphors help, especially ones that seem unusual, like the stream one we used above. They let people experience something new through something they’re already familiar with. Just don’t stretch a metaphor so far that it snaps. (See what we did there?)

The end of an article is often a hard bit. You can, of course, just summarise what you just said. Close your case. QED.

But are those articles memorable? Will you remember them later? At Snipette, we try to finish articles with a flourish. Add a pun, contradict your whole argument, or think of a comment that’s almost related, but not quite. Put it there.

Keep people thinking.