The Art of Submissions

This week I turned once again to what may be a dreadfully intimidating part of the writer’s life – submission strategy.

For the writer of novels, the goal of the hunt is to secure an agent, or even better, a direct contract with a publishing company. The work is intense and often bears only disappointing fruit. Rejection letters, or at best invitations to submit something else than what you just sent, are commonplace. All the while you slave among a teetering pile of manuscripts printed on white bond paper with exactly one inch margins and waste dozens of postage stamps on self-addressed envelopes.

For the writer of short prose, the hunt is a little different, the field more narrow, and the prey far scarcer. These days, most literary journals want submissions to be sent in by email or through an online form. The query letter has been rendered useless by many, the synopsis pointless from the beginning – since your story is meant to be short, you often send the work to the editor in its entirety. Turn-around times can be as quick as a couple of business days to as long as seven months. Open submission calls can be turned on and off at the editor’s will based on how much slush they have piling up in their inboxes. And, unfortunately, there are limited pages that can be claimed in all but the exclusively online journals. The competition is truly fierce.

Things only get harder when your genre squeezes your possible targets to a few dozen. For me, I am seeking publication in Science Fiction and Fantasy, a fairly tight-knit community with a long history of unrelentingly high-standards. Never let anyone convince you that SFF isn't a welcoming genre. Most journals state outright in their guidelines that they are always looking for new writers to submit the latest and greatest concepts. But if you want proof that the ranks of SFF demand a certain level of quality, just ask Larry Niven about the first reactions to Ringworld.

So how do we break in? The pressure can be terrifying. How do we produce that next latest and greatest concept that deserves to stand beside the works of Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. LeGuin, and other giants of the genre?

It’s one thing to write a story – it’s another thing entirely to sell it. And conventional knowledge would have us believe that it’s the selling that does more good for a hopeful author than the writing itself. We have to break past the barrier of the slush pile before an editor will even give our work a fighting chance, and to do that, we have to use all our prowess and practical experience to make our submission package THE BOMB (without sending a real bomb of course).

Strangely enough, in an almost illogical way, for short fiction the key to getting past the slush pile is actually “less is more.”

This post is for those of us attempting to scratch fame out of the world five thousand words at a time. And for those of us hunting down a coveted spot in a literary journal, thankfully we have nothing to fear when it comes to the dreaded submission packet.

How can that be? The answer is simple. Most literary journals don’t want your cover letters, your queries, your author biographies and synopses. They just want the work. If the writing stands on its own, you will find someone, somewhere who has a spot for you.

And the journals that do want your cover letter are going to spend no more than a few seconds glancing at it. They receive hundreds of submissions every day. Unless you’re a best-selling author or have been published before in a respectable journal, they won’t really care much about your cover letter. The only use it might have is to give them some reason to not read the story.

In “normal” professional life, the cover letter is an integral way of getting someone to know the important parts about you. They are meant to impress, at times even inflate, and above all they are meant to catch the attention of the person reading them.

In the short story industry, the exact opposite is true. A cover letter is the editor’s chance to make a decision ahead of time. When faced with a slush pile that is already two months (or more!) behind schedule, the number one goal will be to cut out the chaff and save the wheat. That means the sickle must be used unrelentingly for any excuse. They just don’t have the time to read everything.

So do yourself a favor and make sure that your cover letter follows the journal guidelines, if they have any, and above all gives the editor no reason whatsoever to not read your story.

For an inside perspective on editorial slush pile burning and cover letters, read this excellent article from Inkpunks on the subject, complete with a sample letter to use for your own submission strategy.

After you iron out this truly minor detail, the only thing left is to make sure the manuscript is in tip-top shape, that you adhere to all the journal guidelines, and that you hit the “send” button.

And best of luck to you!

And here…we…go!

I’m tired today. Despite a cup of tea and a looped sound-track of rain and thunder, I’m feeling weighed down in my chair. It’s too cold in my office, I’d rather be outside, I’m squinting at my computer, and my back hurts. Probably from my recent efforts to combat bad posture by sitting on a big blue ball.

I’m not sure I like you, big blue ball.

So as a result, today’s post may be disjointed. It may be spontaneous. It may be downright weird. But if you’re going to get to know me as a writer in any kind of way, you’re going to have to learn sooner or later that quite often I am all of those things.

From week to week, usually there is at least one thing that catches my eye and serves as my topic to write on. This week, there are several, but I’m so brain befuddled that I can’t seem to stretch a properly long post out of any of them. As a result, I’ll be discussing them all, scratching out a few paragraphs for each one. Thankfully, they seem to have the overarching theme of perseverance. We may escape with a complete and connected piece after all. Bear with me to the punch-line.

I’ll start with an article from a blog that I’m starting to be quite fond of. Cal Newport spends his writing time exploring good techniques for “how people reach elite levels in knowledge work careers.” For us fellow writers, discovering good working habits is a distinct key to our success. And unfortunately, it requires a lot of thought and practice, because not everyone succeeds the same way.

We also have to be very aware of the ways we fail – not to beat ourselves up, but so that we can rise above our own bad habits. For me, the one thing in life that keeps me from writing most often is not, as one might expect, a lack of time. I am very busy, but there are hours in the day where I could be working on my novel. They are scattered, here and there, and while breaking up your project with interruptions isn’t the ideal working situation, if my goal was just to get the words on the page, I could find the space to do so.

So why don’t I?

More often than not it’s because I don’t feel “the spark” – that passion you get when you first come up with a brand new idea that fades over time. You can’t feel intimately connected with your story throughout the entire writing process. The passion comes and goes, and this seems to be a normal experience for writers. But it’s a terrible excuse to not keep chugging away. It breeds laziness and discouragement. Two of my worst enemies. I fend off these fiends more often than I would like to admit.

However, one good thing about putting a project aside for a moment is that even if you’re not actively working on it, some part of your brain is. The characters, setting, and plot continue to bubble at the edges of your periphery. The subconscious continues to chew on the idea and make connections even when you’re not thinking about it. This is called Unconscious Thought Theory, and you’ve probably noticed it happening at some point in your life. We can probably give unconscious thought the credit for all those brilliant story connections that we make by accident.

If you find yourself getting bogged down in the details of a story, you might try putting it down for a week or two and seeing what your brain cooks up while you’re on the lam. As Cal puts it, you may come up with some “surprising understanding.” Those plot blocks or vague characters you were struggling with before may suddenly seem a lot more sensible.

There’s a fine line between giving yourself the breathing room for deep creativity, and just being lazy. Which is where another very insightful article comes into play.

Today I read this interview with graphic designer, illustrator, and writer Cecilia Ruiz. Cecilia has, through a lot of hard work and perseverance, achieved what I have sometimes dreamed of: a lifestyle of freelance independence. Even just this week, I have been wondering what it might be like to one day work as a self-employed editor of fiction.

Downright terrifying, I’ll warrant.

But also probably immensely rewarding. The idea of waking up every day to edit stories and work with other authors fills me with a deep longing that proves I would enjoy it (understatement). There are so many opportunities that this type of work would open up for me. But one cannot look at self-employment with rose colored glasses; I know enough freelancers and self-made individuals to recognize the stress and sacrifice that comes with the freedom.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of people, including Cecilia, who did not set out with the goal of being self-employed. They worked at what they love until suddenly there was no room for anything else.

Really, is there any other way to reach your dream job? There are very few careers where you can draw an absolute, linear progression. Writing is certainly not one of them. More often than not, career plotting is abstract, messy, and sprinkled with not a little bit of right time, right place. Then you get to throw in the added confusion of networking and self-promotion!

And boy, doesn’t that sound like the very definition of writing.

All in all, no one can tell you exactly how to become the next bestselling author, or the next top-notch editor. What we can say is that it takes guts, creativity, and a proper understanding of who you are and how you work. It takes perseverance. Even in the face of the dark times, we can never stop working for what we want.

Bearing up under such intense pressures, it can be very comforting to remember the words of Ray Bradbury:

“It doesn’t have to be the greatest. It does have to be you.”

Er...

When I find myself struggling with what I want to write about, I turn to writing prompts.

Actually, I don’t – and that’s where the irony of today’s post comes into play. Because I have spent the entire afternoon trying to think of a topic that I’d like to cover and so far I have come up empty handed. Despite the fact that there is plenty of interesting material to use from the literary grapevine this week, none of it has struck the chord that makes me want to sit down and mine my thoughts for a response.

So, I turn to writing prompts. Because I feel that prompts are too often looked down upon by writers, including myself, when they can really be used as valuable tools.

I remember in my early years of school being given writing prompts for creative activities or projects. I used to love them. I was always trying to come up with the most exciting, the most outlandish idea, trying to navigate a complete redirection of what was usually a very boring attempt at rousing my interest. I was actually trying to out-creative all of my schoolmates, though I don’t think I ever succeeded (let’s just say no one ever gave me an award). I hope I at least entertained my teachers. “You find a box of puppies on the side of the road” – INSTANT DRAMA! THE PUPPIES ARE ALIENS!

Or something like that. I was a twisted child.

At some point, as I began to develop my own ideas, I changed my tune and considered writing prompts to be a waste of time. Why spend effort trying to make a generic premise interesting when I could instead be working on a short story with an entirely original concept? Writing prompts were for people who were just starting out, not for those of us who had already been writing for several years.

Well, here I am, a long time distant from my teen-aged self, and I’m starting to appreciate the value of writing prompts again.

I have yet to sit down and play with a prompt, but I imagine that I will be doing so very shortly. The novel that I started at the turn of the new year has not progressed past the first several pages. That’s ok, I keep telling myself. I’m taking my time. But if I want to keep the energy up, I will sooner or later want to write something. And as I have no other projects that I am currently interested in, the easiest solution is to grab a fresh page, grab a writing prompt that I find interesting, and just go wild.

What does this accomplish? To be honest, it probably won’t produce particularly good literature, unless I really surprise myself and tap into some unknown well of brilliance that was just waiting to be released. But I might come up with a neat turn of phrase that I can use somewhere else; I may discover a new character that I want to explore; at the very least I will be using writing to entertain myself, which would be excellent, positive reinforcement. If the idea of working on the novel intimidates me, the best way to move past that is to just write for fun.

And what better way to take the pressure off than to let your imagination be free with someone else’s concept?

If you find yourself wading through the weeds of writing, give yourself a break and try a little frivolity. You can find prompts easily online – here are a few to start with!

Learning to Let Go

If you have ever defined yourself by something you do or by the people you know, you will understand the crippling, shriveling notion of emptiness when you start to lose touch with what you thought was your very self condensed into one representative part.

I have before discussed my struggles with acknowledging myself as a writer. It’s something that I have used as a personal qualifier for about half of my life. When people ask me what I am, or what I do, I will eventually get around to the fact that I write, if it isn't the first thing I talk about. It is a part of who I am, and it can no easier be removed from my personality than you can change the color of my eyes.

And yet.

There have been times, very dark times, when I doubted whether or not I was a writer anymore. Everyone grows out of hobbies, childhood dreams that fade away as time and experience teach us there are better things to be spending our energies on. Growing up I wanted to be a veterinarian. Then I wanted to be a zoologist. Then a herpetologist. I wanted to raise falcons and have twelve large dogs, living out in the country somewhere with a menagerie of beautiful animals as my constant companions. But I set those dreams aside as I grew older. I became attracted to other hobbies, other life goals. And I was never disappointed by my choice to move on from these ideas. It was just a part of growing up.

So when I consider, perhaps, that maybe after all I’m not the writer I think I am, I am surprised by the immediate, gut-wrenching, heart-shattering sorrow that comes with such a thought. It’s not just the growing pains of moving on from something that interested me for a little while. It’s the fear that maybe a part of myself is not who I thought I was.

The writing process has a way of making us analyze ourselves very thoroughly. We consider our self-worth. We consider our talent. We consider our relationships with other people and with the world around us. We consider what we will leave behind when we’re dead and gone – a few pages of scribbled notes that will get recycled by our children? Or a story that will burn through the minds of generations to come?

And sometimes, these considerations are painful, they are raw, and they are revealing. We see pieces of ourselves we do not want to see. And sometimes that makes us doubt our identity.

Getting to the point, though, I think that anyone who suffers from bouts of terror like these has, in reality, nothing to fear.

I was expressing these very struggles to my fabulously talented and prolific sister, who has written three novels in the past two years, just the other day. I was, as usual, bemoaning my lack of drive. Crying about how my urge to write was motivated more by guilt than by the happiness that writing should bring me.

I mean, writers are supposed to enjoy writing. That’s how all writers are.

Right?

In response, my wise sister sent me an article about quitting. When something no longer makes you happy, but instead fills you with dread at the thought of doing it, it’s time to hang it up. Maybe forever.

But the more I thought about putting down my pen, the calmer I became. Because I realized that, as much of a struggle as writing can be for me, the idea of quitting was so upsetting that I am certain I will never allow myself to do so.

And thus, my fears that I’m not actually a writer are cured – because no one who is born to do something will find themselves just letting it go because the going gets tough. We can’t stop. It’s not in our nature. We may gripe and groan and feel the pain of the process, we may even stall out completely for months on end. But that doesn't make us any less of what we are.

J. R. R. Tolkien, who I guarantee will still be a well-known name for generations to come, said “Usually I compose only with great difficulty and endless rewriting.” I have heard that he was a notorious critic of his own work. And this fact is comforting to me, in the face of the constant propaganda that truly talented writers don’t ever struggle; don’t ever have doubts; don’t ever spend hours wondering about their place in the world.

If there’s anything that I can offer to you, I hope it is the courage to keep going, and the assurance that you are not losing yourself. The very agony you feel is proof enough of what you are. If we weren't writers to the core, we would have put aside our pens as idle, childish hobbies years ago. Most people in their lifetimes attempt to write a book. Most of them quit early on in the process. And the rest of us endure. Instead, we continue to wrestle and pour ourselves out onto the page. Maybe one page at a time, maybe a hundred pages at a time. It doesn't matter either way. Writers are not judged by how quickly they write, but by the stories they tell. Tell yours, and leave the fear behind.