Let’s suppose you were an aspiring journalist who just
completed an interview with a hip new band making the rounds in Brooklyn. You
wrote an article and it looks terrific. It’s got everything you could hope for:
fabulous quotes, larger than life personalities, compelling back stories and
lots of local color. All that is left to do is send it out. So you get a fresh
manila envelope, put on the correct postage and send out your article about
this groundbreaking new rock band to…the Economist.
The Economist? Why
not Spin or Rolling Stone? Or even the music section of the local newspaper? The
answer is simple: you’ve always wanted to publish a piece in the Economist. It’s a prestigious journal,
after all. Their articles are read by presidents and prime ministers all across
the world. Sure, they don’t typically publish stories about rock bands. But you
just know they’ll want to make an exception for this piece. It’s just that
good.
A bit farfetched? Definitely. It’s hard to imagine an
aspiring journalist thinking this way. But let’s admit it, as fiction writers
we think this way all the time. Which
creative writer hasn’t sent at least one story to the New Yorker or Ploughshares
and thought to themselves, “They just have
to take this story: it’s the best thing I’ve ever written?”
It’s almost embarrassing to think about all the times I've sent
out blind submissions. I would get trapped in a cycle of frustration and
failure, sending out work in sheer desperation, rarely stopping to consider why I was submitting to a particular
journal.
Ironically, it was a particularly detailed rejection letter
that changed my way of thinking. I had entered a chapbook contest run by a
reputable West Coast publisher. Although I didn’t win, I had finished high
enough in the competition that I got a critique of the first four poems in my
manuscript.
To say that the editor and I didn’t see eye-to-eye would be
an understatement. He and I appeared to have the exact opposite tastes in
poetry. I was a long-winded narrative poet with beatnik roots and he had a
taste for imagistic poems with concise minimalistic language. His suggestions
for revision involved cutting out what I perceived to be the very essence of my
work. Reading his feedback was a revelation because I realized for the first
time that I never should have submitted to this contest in the first place. It
was like sending my hip music article to the Economist.
It’s easy to understand why fiction writers and poets fall
into the habit of making blind submissions. There are so many literary journals
out there (both in print and on the internet) that the task of studying their
content seems daunting. It seems especially overwhelming when you consider that
the best writers are also avid readers. It’s hard enough to find the time to
read your Chekov and your Alice Munro without trying to squeeze in the latest
works featured in Glimmer Train or
the Paris Review.
And, let’s face it, fiction writers have another challenge:
we’re not the most pragmatic lot. Most of us don’t write our stories because we
want to get published in specific journals. We write because we have to.
Writing is a passion, an obsession, a vexing condition that can only be temporarily
alleviated by more writing. The idea of looking through journals to find where
our work fits seems too cold and calculating, the very antithesis of our
creative fires. What’s more, there’s the terror that there won’t be any place that’s right our stories, that
we will slave away for a lifetime of manuscripts that will never get out of our
flash drives.
Although that terror is real, it’s a fear we have to fight
through in order to actually get our work off the computer and out into the
world. In fact, it’s only by encountering the work that is currently being
publishing that we can begin to understand what kind of writers we are, what
kind of writers we aspire to be and where our stories fit in the larger scheme
of things.
A change of expectations may be in order. Perhaps that
upstart journal on the internet is a better fit for your experimental piece
than the Kenyon Review. Maybe you don’t
have quite the dry sense of humor that McSweeney’s
values. This does not mean you will never write for the award-winning journal
of your dreams. It does mean you need to be honest about your own writing at
each stage of your career. You must be clear-eyed about where each piece truly
fits.
In the end, all that matters is that you find your work a
home. A home is not necessarily a penthouse on Park Avenue, a villa in Tuscany
or graffiti-decorated apartment building in Williamsburg. A home may not even
be a split-level ranch house on a cul-de-sac in the suburbs. For pieces of
fiction, like the people who write them, a home is a shelter turned into a
sanctuary, a place of respite from the literary wilderness.
Home is where you belong.
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