You said once in another thread that once there was a magazine that you'd submitted stories to without success, but then you took some time to read stories by first-time contributers that the magazine had published, found out what the elements were that the magazine was looking for, wrote a story, and got it published.
I had to be talking about Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.
First, guidelines are a must, but alone they mean little or nothing. To stand any real chance of being published, you have to read issues of teh magazine. Guidelines are always too general. They're more useful in telling you what not to do than what to do.
Anyway, it's pretty simple stuff, but for me it all came as a revelation, and made me understand how to write stories that a given editor will want far more often than not.
What I did was study the structure of the stories, the professions of the protagonists, the amount of dialogue, the length of the average story (Guidelines often mean squat where length is concerned.), every element I could separate, I studied.
But the important part was this: There's an old rule in fiction that editors want "Something just like everything else, only different." At first read, this often seems to make no sense, but I found it was the most important rule in the world. It came as a revelation when, in studying those stories, I finally understood what it meant and how to do it.
I found nearly all those stories gave the editor the same things in length, in basic style, in all the essentials that that editor thought made for a good story. But nearly every story also gave the editor something new, something different.
I then read every story the magazine had published for a couple of years, listing all the settings, all the professions, all the similarities I could find.
I then wrote a story that had the length and same pace and the same story elements this editor seemed to like, but I gave her a protagonist with a profession none had yet had, placed it in a setting she hadn't seen, and used a plot that was new. It sold.
But there was more to it. I also realized editors always want things they aren't getting, and that I could almost always figure out what this is by reading several issues of a magazine and dissecting the stories. I didn't even have to do it carefully, once I learned how. I could just read a bunch of stories, see what the editor wanted, and also, by implication, see what she wanted but wasn't getting.
If you can write at all well, and if you give an editor something she wants that no one else is offering, you're ten steps ahead of everyone else submitting stories.
That last step was then figuring out what I could give the editor that was written the way she liked, at the length she liked, but that was also something different, something no one else but me could give her.
That was easy. I gave her myself. In that first story, the protagonist isn't named, but he's me. He's a modern day writer of western novels, and the story start with him/me at a book signing. This really happened. Someone came in who doesn't like his novel becuase he thinks they don't follow "The code of the west." This really happened. That person says his name is William Bonney A.K.A Billy the Kid. This, too, really happened.
The story then turns to fiction wherein the modern day Billy the kid kidnaps my wife and forces me into a gunfight, wherein I cheat, again breaking The Code of the West. The story was called "The Real West."
I then wrote another story where I'm not the protagonist, but the plot is loosely based on something that really happened to me in New Mexico many years ago. It's a mystery, adventure, ghost story, and it was unique.
I then wrote a story set in my hometown, a unique place called Millville, birthplace to Wilbur Wright, a tiny farm town with a population of 100. All three stories sold.
Interestingly, I wasn't selling a very high percentage of my short stories at the time, but a couple of years earlier I had sold two stories to Sports Afield, one backpage and one feature. They paid me $800 and $1,000 respectively, a LOT of money for any short story at the time, but especially high for stories that were only a couple of thousand words long.
When I read those stories again, I realized I had inadvertently used the same rules I didn't know consciously until the Ellery Queen deal.
I've since sold a lot of short stories, and by and large, the process is always the same.
1. I read several issues to get a feel for style and pace and average length. This tells me what the editor wants for sameness.
2. From what I read, I determine what isn't there that the editor would like to see.
3. I find something that I know will be different because I'm the only one who could possibly give the editor a story with this protagonist, this setting, and this plot.
Guidelines are very good things, but no substitute in any way for reading the magazine itself. Look for what's in the stories, the average length, the pace, the type of story the editor likes and the way he or she likes it. Then look for what's not in the stories that you think the editor would like to see. Lastly, look at yourself to see what you can give the editor in the way he or she likes, but that only you can give him or her.