Five Minutes is a nonfiction only online literary journal with an unusual premise. They only publish 100-word pieces that explore five minutes of the author’s life. These are very much “micro memoirs” (and in the past they ran a micro memoir marathon). The five-minute limit is not particularly literal, what they say about it is this: “Five minutes is not an exact measurement, but a stand-in for the concept of “short moment of time” (which made for a more cumbersome title). However long the moment is, readers should be able to identify a crux, or a shifting in the piece.”
You can read past pieces here, to get a feel for what they publish, and what they mean by a short moment in time, and a shift. It’s easy to see what they are describing, displayed in most of the pieces they have published. They publish 4-5 pieces a week. Because what they publish is so specific, please read a few first to make sure your piece fits, and follow their guidelines carefully.
Pieces must be exactly 100 words long and their titles must be no more than 15 characters (including spaces).
They don’t publish a lot of things including :”poetry or fiction; retellings of dreams; retellings of things you imagined; retellings of things you saw without any reference to you/your response (we want you in the piece!); erotic memoir; pieces containing graphic violence; pieces from the perspective of abusers; poetry or fiction, though we are interested in poetic prose and memoir masquerading as fiction; pieces which overtly promote a theological or political ideology; pieces in which you tell us someone else’s memory as told to you; pieces that contain hate speech; slurs.’
They also say, “We are receiving many (beautiful) submissions about the last time a writer saw a beloved person, about putting a pet to sleep, about relatives with dementia, and about the quiet moments in the morning before the day starts. Due to the high number of submissions on these themes, these pieces are less likely to receive acceptances. We challenge you to take risks with your voice, your structure, your chronology … anything that might set your piece apart.”
They ask that each piece is formatted as one block of text without any paragraph breaks.
They ask for one submission at a time, and the work they consider cannot have been previously published. Once they have published your work, you can re-publish your work after 90 days has passed, on your own site, or elsewhere as long as you include a note that it first appeared in Five Minutes. They also ask that you inform them of the publications.
The only other rights they ask for is the right to read your piece aloud at a Five-Minutes-related event.
They try to respond to submissions within three months. To learn more, please go here.
Emily Harstone is the author of many popular books, including The Authors Publish Guide to Manuscript Submissions, Submit, Publish, Repeat, and The 2026 Guide to Manuscript Publishers. She regularly teaches three acclaimed courses on writing and publishing at The Writer’s Workshop at Authors Publish. You can follow her on Facebook here.
