Read the site guidelines to make sure your story is compliant.
Do not depend on spell check to edit your story. Read it carefully to check your spelling because spell check will allow misspellings that are words, often with hilarious results, e.g. I put my arms around her waste.
Format your story into paragraphs of about four sentences or where the narrative should logically break. All dialogue should be formatted into separate paragraphs each time someone speaks. A mass of prose with few or no paragraph breaks will be returned to you.
Read your story paying attention to where you pause. There should be a comma there if it is a phrase or a full stop if it is a complete thought.
Read the Writer's Resources about the use of apostrophes if you are not sure. They are not used to form plurals unless to signify possession for a plural. They are used either for contractions or to signify possession. Read the resources for other punctuation marks to know that you are using them correctly.
Do not overuse exclamation marks. They lose their power if used in every other sentence.
Check your verb tense throughout your story to be sure it is consistent. Many submissions have tense shifts from past to present and back again.
Take a look at the proper form for punctuation, formatting, and capital/lower case letters for dialogue in published stories and follow that example in your story.
Do not use text speak/emoticons in your story or short forms like &, or ok, or lbs. Use the entire words.
Express all numbers in your story as words unless they refer to measurements or the time of day. Remember the hyphens for age, e.g. 18-year-old. Numbers may never start a sentence or paragraph, whatever they describe. In these cases they should always be expressed as words.
Your title should not be formatted in all caps and should not include text speak or emoticons. Do not repeat the title in the body of your story. Notes to the reader should be at the end of your story.
Please do not expect that you can spend an hour putting your thoughts in writing and that it will be published.
That could happen, but probably won't
Walk away from your story for a few hours, or as long as a day. When you keep rereading your story, you see what should be there because you know what you have written. Time and distance will give you the perspective to see your mistakes.
Take the time to read the resources available on all aspects of writing in the writers' forum. They will help you polish your work and allow it to be published more quickly.
Read some of the Editors' Picks (EP) and Recommended Reads (RR) stories to get an idea of the standard 'Stories Space' is looking for.
note: copied and edited from a longer post on the LUSH, 'Resources Forum' by, principessa
![glasses8](https://static.storiesspace.com/emoticons/stsp/forum/glasses10.gif)