Welcome to the beginning of something.
PILCROW is Substack’s first serialized novel competition. Each quarter, we will present excerpts from the unpublished novels of three rigorously selected finalists, and invite our subscribers to vote on one to be fully serialized in these pages. Quarterly winners will receive $1,000 and both finalists $500. As we grow, we expect this to increase.
See our Submission Guidelines here
More than the prize money, we hope that our project will expose our writers to the discriminating eyes of Substack readers, as well as the increasing number of agents and editors joining Substack every day, and indeed we want to lend our writers a Substack following of their own, independent of PILCROW itself. Substack is a crucible and a proving ground: many writers with celebrated reputations have foundered here, and many with little or no previous mainstream support have thrived. We’re inspired by The New Yorker’s recent admission that, yes, Substack is now part of the conversation.
To which we answer: “Of course, and welcome to the democratic fray.”
Serialization has a long but strangely unheralded tradition. Most people know that Dickens’ novels were serialized, read aloud on street corners to rapt and illiterate chimney sweeps1. Many are unaware that such titanic entries in the annals of our literature were also originally serialized: Middlemarch; Madame Bovary; The Brothers Karamazov; Anna Karenina. Even Ulysses. As recently as the late 20th century, publishers were not immune to the charms and utility of the form in promoting the work of Capote, Mailer, Hunter Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.
The regrettable collapse in social ubiquity of the literate magazines represents a sea change, but amidst much digital wailing and gnashing of teeth, it also presents an opportunity for us all to get both much weirder and much more serious, to make it rich and strange. We hope you’ll join us here at PILCROW. And spread the word.
Excelsior,
Tom Watters
Editor in Chief
All fiction published in PILCROW will of course include an audio option, for the chimney sweep that lives in all of us.