Embrace the Suckitude! On Feeling and Dealing When Submitting Your Writing

"Write, research, submit, and wait."

Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world.

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Hooray! You finished your story, your essay, your complete novel manuscript! Push back from your desk, do a little endzone dance! Of course you feel exuberant. Revel in it! I mean it. Really roll around in the joy of having completed your project!

Chances are you’ve written three, five, eight revisions. You’ve shared the work with smart readers, maybe you hired an outside editor to tighten your manuscript, as I did. Maybe you’ve been working on this project for three or fifteen months for a short story or essay, or three to five years for a full manuscript. (A friend whose book comes out next spring told me she wrote the first essay for her collection when her daughter was three. Her daughter is now nine.) Writing, as we know, requires a brave-heart. It is so damn hard! Sometimes the work is joy-filled, sometimes filled with anguish, often a slog. Coming to the end of your manuscript is an enormous achievement.

So now what? Once your full manuscript is complete, if you are like me, you start the hurry-up and wait to find representation. There is an inner pressure, you rush to get a query letter together, to write a compelling synopsis, to come up with your pithy, one-sentence elevator pitch. Here’s mine: “Must be Nice is a funny, compassionate look at the desires, demands and mayhem of modern women’s lives, told through the stories of six friends in a small California beach town, some flummoxed by philandering partners, teenage children, fertility troubles, bad jobs, and menopause, some embracing brand-new starts, all of them doing their best and often getting it wrong.” Let me say, I had to write about fifty sentences to get to this pitch. Even now, reading it, I worry it’s too vague.

Next, you winnow, seeking the just right agent. This search is not much different than looking for the right lit mag for your work. You ask your friends, read the acknowledgement sections from books you love. Just as you read The Pushcart Prize anthology and The Best American Series looking for lit mag markets, you read Publishers Marketplace to learn who represents whom to find the one agent that will be an amazing fit. The agent that will be intrigued and moved, that will unequivocally recognize that your novel, story collection, memoir, or essay collection absolutely must be in the world, and yes! They even have a short list of editors in mind who will also feel the jolt of your book!  

Write, research, submit, and wait. Research some more. Submit again. Wait and wait and wait. An agent friend of mine recently told me that in July she was delighted to have finally cleared the April queries from in her inbox. They’d been piling up for months. In August she would face her May queries. All this is to say, Writers, bulk up on your fortitude.

Inevitably rejections start rolling in. No one gets a free pass. It doesn’t matter if you've published some of your work, even stories, chapters or essays from this very manuscript, in lit mags. (I placed some stories from Must be Nice in lit mags. One in One Story, another in Zyzzyva.)  In fact, it doesn't matter if you've published in 100 lit mags. Suddenly, all that matters to you is this manuscript, this moment. We may get a bit wobbly, start to question, well… everything! In our pages, we’ve shared our weaknesses, our arrogance, our pain about a struggling child, a mean thing we said to our mother, a bad break up. We have bestowed our cruelties and joys upon our characters, or we revealed them in a memoir. And then, in addition to looking so closely at ourselves and feeling a bit of a vulnerability hangover, now we’re not even certain our writing is any good! Writers rely upon gatekeepers, agents and lit mag journals to let us know we stuck the landing.  A question is, how will you deal with the suckitude of rejection?

Here's what I did. After submitting my book to thirty agents last spring I signed up for an essay writing class. I wanted to reconnect with what I love about writing. First, the freedom to put anything down without thinking about where or even if the writing will land. Next, I wanted to feel the joy of writing in community, which includes sharing my gestational work with friendly and like-minded people who are also sharing first draft writing. I took a 6 Weeks, 6 Essays class from Grub Street, which at the start sounded preposterous, but somehow I wrote five essays. Not perfect, not finished, but words on the page that gave me a buzz of pride. The fact that I was generating new work softened the blow of the rejections I received during the six weeks after I’d sent out my initial batch of queries. Writing new work reminded me that this book is not the culmination of my writing life.

Next, I scheduled extra therapy. First my therapist and I talked about separating my core identity from the book. Maybe you’re a little more solid than I am, but I have famously outsourced my confidence. A rejection of my work has often felt like a rejection of me. With this book, I was ready to unhitch myself. A query rejection does not mean I’m not good enough. It just means that the book isn’t right for the rejector. It might mean that my book, with six strong female characters, getting divorced, joining a drum-circle, going to hair school, freezing their eggs, has too many characters. It might mean that my book, a hybrid between short stories and a novel, is a hard form to sell. But I wrote the book I wanted to write, the book I had to write, and it’s a beautiful, funny, and true book about women’s lives.

Does it sound as if I’m giving myself a pep talk? Maybe I am. I think that’s another thing we should absolutely pull together with our query to-do list. What self-talk pep talk are we going to memorize, put in our back pocket, write out on a post-it note and stick to our bathroom mirror?

Finally, my therapist gave me some really solid advice. Feel and Deal, she said. First you have to let yourself feel--the disappointment, the frustration, the suckitude of the rejection. Whether that is from an agent, a writing contest, or the magazine for which you thought your work was perfect.

Next, you deal. What will that look like for you? For me, as I said, I was going to quit outsourcing my confidence where I can. That means eliminating some gatekeepers. Recently I wrote an essay about why I read and why I write. Rather than submit to a journal and wait to hear from an editor, I published it on my own Substack. Could I have reached a larger audience by submitting to a journal? Sure. But the benefit speaking directly to my subscribers, of connecting with readers, made the potential audience loss well worth it.

From my therapist, “Look, sometimes we get stuck in the trap of feel, feel, feel.” It’s called wallowing! And it’s human nature. I once got a rejection from an agent I really wanted to work with. She said to me, “Rarely do I get all the way to the end of a manuscript and then say no. I usually decide in the first pages. But I read this manuscript, I enjoyed it, and got to a no.” Umm, thanks? It took me a long time to get over that near miss. It even smarts now!

My therapist also said, “It’s equally problematic to push down the disappointment, and yes, the grief. If we only deal, deal, deal, with action items and pragmatism and busy-ness the sorrowful feelings will eventually leak out.”

So, feel and deal. Get used to the suckitude. It comes with the program. Learning how to endure disappointment is part of the J.O.B. I will leave you with this quote from Liz Gilbert’s book Big Magic, “You don’t just get to leap from bright moment to bright moment. How you manage yourself between those bright moments, when things aren’t going so great, is a measure of how devoted you are to your vocation.”

Writers, I celebrate your finished manuscripts, and your works-in-progress. I feel you when you get a sting of rejection, and I’m cheering you on as you keep submitting, keep writing. In fact, I offer you these topics keep you busy as you wait to hear from gatekeepers.

1.      Write about the worst holiday card you ever sent or received.

2.      Write your why for reading and writing.  

3.      Write about a disappointing friend. Maybe that friend was you?

4.      Write about an important person in your life who really saw you and made you feel valued.

Just keep writing.

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