The Writing Blog: Self-Selecting Submissions
There’s no straightforward path to becoming a successful writer. (Or if there is, I wouldn’t know about it, since I’m not one. Not yet.) But there are a number of ways to make money at writing, and the more you put out there the closer to becoming “successful” you get.
(Side note: success is what you make of it. My personal definition of success is “the ability to live comfortably off money earned from writing while also writing whatever I like”, which is… asking quite a lot of the universe, unfortunately.)
Anyway.
So a while ago I got the chance to have lunch with a well-known author and their family. I’d been spending a lot of time fretting over the idea of being “published”: what did it mean, what counted, was I “good enough” and what the hell was “good enough”, anyway? The author and their family were absolutely delightful, listening to all my beginner questions, and the author’s partner gave me a piece of advice that shifted my perspective:
I’m not the one who gets to make that choice.
I’d been self-selecting for a while without realizing it. I had some stories that I really liked but I didn’t think were “good enough”, so I wasn’t sending them out. I had a good acceptance rate and a number of published pieces—and they were good places to be published!—but I wasn’t submitting to the places I’d always dreamed of being a part of. These were places where the author and their family were on a first-name basis with the editors, and I got a bit of a reality check.
If you decide a piece isn’t good enough, the answer is always no. If you do your due diligence, write the best story you can, and send it in, the worst they can do is say no anyways.
I’ve since taken a top-down approach, sending out my stories only to places that pay pro rates, going through a list of my dream publications. There’s still some self-selection (obviously I’m not going to send a contemporary murder mystery to Asimov’s) but for the most part I send it wherever I think the story would be a good fit.
My acceptance rate plummeted for a bit, and most of what I got consisted of form rejections—but there were some personalized rejections, asking me to resubmit. Then that mindset got me into the University of Edinburgh, and I found myself with a lot of time to focus on my craft. Suddenly I was getting more personalized rejections, and then—during quarantine, when I’ve had nothing to do but write—I started getting acceptances.
(I do have some cool news, but I can’t talk about it yet, so more on that later.)
Which all sounds very privileged, and it absolutely is. I’ve had the time and resources to uproot everything and focus on my writing. But uprooting everything to focus on one’s writing isn’t the lesson I want to take away from this. The points are these:
“Good enough” is a moving target and it’s not something we really get to choose for ourselves.
“Good enough” is a target. Not an attribute. It’s something to work towards, not prove to be true.
There’s nothing you should be doing, only what you want to do. It’s up to you to get there. This is possibly the opposite of comforting for a lot of people, but I’ve never done well with set tracks.
I’m never going to be a good enough writer for myself, but that’s fine. Everyone’s their own worst critic. The more I write, the better I get. I can set my target where I want to land, not where other people tell me to place it. And I’ll adjust my trajectory to get there.