Not excited about submitting

I don't find submitting exciting. It's not compulsory to find routine admin jobs exciting. You've just got to do them.

I have periods of getting bummed out about my subs. I usually like to send my stories out for a long vacation when that happens, park them at Tor.com or something. A year later when they finally get a response, I've usually got a different perspective on my writing. Enough for a better edit, if nothing else.

Sometimes I wish I could just write by spec for a particular market, but any time I try, it just seems so soulless. Like I'm cranking out product instead of having something important to say.

Unfortunately the short story submissions process is so bad, it makes crapshoots seem nice by comparison.

It's never pleasant. Well, not until you get to the point where venues are asking YOU for stories. But to get to that point you have to keep submitting and getting those rejections, and building up your writer's toolkit. There's really no good way around that.

I also often look back at old stories and feel happy they were rejected. That's why I only submit to markets I respect, i.e. the ones that I feel publish high quality stories. There are lots of quality markets out there. If they accept my story, I will trust that it is good. It can be pretty hard to assess whether one's own writing is good enough, so let the publications decide.

That's not to say that a story that gets rejected is bad. Lots of fantastic stories, even the ones that eventually end up in pro publications, get several rejections first. But I don't think there's anything wrong with eventually retiring a story when you feel like your writing has moved beyond that level.

gettingby said:

Do you ever feel like you should get better before you submit things? Looking back, I'm glad a lot of my pieces got rejected. I am so much better now. But I can't help from thinking in another six months or year I will be even better. I have a few things out, but not that many. Part of me feels like I should just get over this submitting fear and send a hundred stories out and see what happens, but I don't really want to set myself up for a hundred more rejections. I've had professors say that I should send out certain stories. Those are the ones out right now, but I almost feel like I need that little push.

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You're always going to look back on the stuff you wrote 6 months ago and think it's awful. It's not awful, you're just a better writer now than you were 6 months ago. You will always feel this way so you just need to submit your work and keep writing.

gettingby said:

Do you ever feel like you should get better before you submit things?

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No.

I think a lot of my work is really crappy, but you know what, any decent short story venue is going to reject tons and tons of stories. If they accept one that I don't think is "good enough," it's not like they're accepting it to make me feel better -- it's because they actually think it fits their magazine and want to buy it. It's not my problem if they want to buy crap have a different opinion on my writing than I do.

Then again, this only really works if you submit to paying markets you've already checked out for quality, so you can take this with a grain of salt.

We're not the best judges of our own work.

The stories I love I've had a difficult time placing, and the stories I felt weren't my best work sometimes sold on their first outing. So send them out, and let God (and/or Editor) sort them out.

gettingby said:

Now, I don't really think about publishing, just writing. Is that weird?

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No, that's not weird. That's great! A lot of people get caught up in the promise of publication--they want to publish, and that's why they write. And if they don't publish, then why bother writing? That's an easy way to demotivate yourself. If you write because you love writing, you're golden.

I want to be published, but the more I get rejected, the less I want to send stuff out.

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It sounds like you were motivated to submit by the promise of publication, and now you've worn that out. That's fine. Honestly, I have the most luck when I try to make it not emotional at all. It's just a process--things get written and edited. When I am done, they get submitted. That's their life cycle. I make lists of appropriate places on Duotrope, I start at the top and I work my way down.

I mean, rejection is still exhausting. Too much rejection is overwhelming. I take lots of breaks and space them out more when I am feeling too worn down.

But you should submit anyway. Do whatever it takes to convince yourself it's no big deal--remind yourself they're not judging you, they don't care, you're not shaming yourself by sending stuff out they don't want, and you're not a bad writer because they said no. The alternative is to never get published, ever, because you sent nothing out. That was, to me, even scarier than rejection letters.

Not weird at all. Look at it this way. If every time you asked someone out, you got slapped in the face, you'd quit asking after a while, right?

Still, having acknowledged your reluctance, you need to move past it. It can help to look at rejection as part of the creative process; in fact, lack of rejection is one of the intrinsic problems with self-publishing, IMO. Rejection's sort of like castor oil for writers: tastes vile, but can have salutary effect in that it makes you go back time and again over a piece of writing you thought was perfect first time out.

Since periods of discouragement are almost unavoidable, it can help to prepare your submissions in advance, so that when a rejection comes in, you just robotically stick the next submission in an envelope with prepared letter and send (or email.)

As a former agent, current writer, I've been on both sides of the rejection dynamic. Wrote a blog post about it, if you're interested.

I felt this way when I was writing short stories. I felt like I've tried them all (or at least the ones I was interested in) and after a while I was sick of writing short stories. So I moved on to writing novels. Like you mentioned your work is getting better. I felt the same way about my own. Out of the 15 short stories I wrote (before I stopped submitting to magazines) 5 of them got published. Before all that I was writing and submitting poetry. My poetry was getting accepted everywhere and by then it didn't matter anymore. I wasn't getting challenged enough, so I moved to short stories. Then when that wasn't challenging enough, I started on novels. So my point is, if you haven't done so already, maybe you're ready to move on and write something different. Switching the subject matter might help. Try writing a different genre maybe. Even in short stories, it would give you different places to submit to. Hope this helps.

I like to work on novels when I get frustrated with submitting. It's like a vacation.

gettingby said:

Why is it so hard to publish short stories? That's not really my question. I get it. This business is hard. While my writing has improved, I am no longer eager to submit work. I used to love submitting and checked the recent responses on duotrope every day. Now, I don't even send everything out that I write. How do I get more excited about submitting?

W1/S1 was great when I started to write short stories. I was excited about the prospects of being published. Now, I don't really think about publishing, just writing. Is that weird? I want to be published, but the more I get rejected, the less I want to send stuff out.

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That's not weird. I have a similar problem where once a single piece is rejected I lack the will to send it elsewhere. I know that's absurd and only hurts me but I have to figure out a way to deal with that.

gettingby said:

I have probably written a hundred stories (really that many), and they have all been rejected.

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How many times was each story rejected? The two (of 8) that I've had accepted were each rejected several times before acceptance (1 was rejected 4 times, the other 10). I use The Submission Grinder, and try to keep my list of submissions at around the 30-33 mark which is how many fit on my screen without scrolling. By doing that, a single rejection doesn't even sting anymore.