Read Literary Magazines

That's good advice for everybody, but it's especially good advice for writers who want to publish work in those magazines--or anywhere else for that matter. It's even good advice for the writer with a chip on her shoulder who commented on this blog that the Pushcart Prize Anthology (and the rankings of magazines that I derive from that Anthology) is "meaningless" because . . . because . . . because her outrage was lost in a fog of incoherence.

And now here's Dan Chaon on what writers can learn from young rock stars. I recommend the whole piece, but in a nutshell: if you want to publish your work in literary magazines, you have to be reading literary magazines.

The writing community is full of lame-o people who want to be published in journals even though they don’t read the magazines that they want to be published in. These people deserve the rejections that they will undoubtedly receive, and no one should feel sorry for them when they cry about how they can’t get anyone to accept their stories.

Exactly. And he goes on to recommend two relatively small, excellent magazines to start with: Hobart and Avery Anthology. There are many more he could have named, but that's a great beginning.