Time for a Lit-Mag-Adjacent Brag!
"Sometimes the wins are less easy to quantify."
Welcome to our weekend conversation!
I love our monthly Lit Mag Brags. I love seeing where all of you have had work accepted, learning about new magazines and how you found your way to them. I especially love the way you all support and encourage one another. It’s so refreshing to see such engagement and interest, and it makes every end-of-month conversation a real joy.
But, there is one flaw in our monthly lit mag brag sessions. And that is this: They focus only on the tangible wins.
Don’t get me wrong, these tangible wins are critical. They are what Lit Mag News is all about—demystifying the world of lit mags in order to make those tangible wins more achievable for everyone.
But sometimes the wins are less easy to quantify. Perhaps, some might argue, most times, the wins are less easy to quantify. I once heard a poet say that living with an unfinished poem was like trying to fall asleep while a stranger wanders through your house with a knife.
A bit dramatic, perhaps. But I imagine that finishing that poem must feel nothing short of liberating. Intoxicating. The feeling of sweet relief. Mixed with a bit of pride. Because you did it. It was fun, it was hard, it was torture, but You. Did. It.
I certainly feel this way with my own work. There are endless small hurdles which loom all week, month, year, that don’t go mentioned or discussed. Who would you tell? Often they are far too boring and tedious to even explain. Who but a fellow writer would care, would get it?
Today I finally figured out a place for that scene that I keep moving to my “scraps” folder, and I think if their argument goes just before the story’s climax rather than at the end then the story will work, but I also realized it will be better if I change his job from a teacher to a mechanic, and there’s a mechanic who said he’d answer some questions for me, and I’m so excited because this actually makes sense, and…
If we’re lucky we have people we trust that we can talk to when things get thorny or when we’re stuck. But what about for those small, private accomplishments which cannot be put on a CV, cannot be listed in a bio, may not even go mentioned to another person ever, but which are incredible wins all the same?
This, my friends, is what I want to hear you brag about this weekend.
I want to hear about the big and small ways you recently accomplished something you didn’t think possible. How you finally sat down and put a bunch of themed calls for submissions on your calendar, to get your engine revved once and for all.
How you finally reached out to interview someone, when the very thought has felt intimidating for months.
How you started that personal essay about something so painful it scalds like the sun just to look at it, but you did it, you’ve begun, and now you know that bit by bit you will have the courage to touch that blaze.
How you tackled a poem that was stalking you in your dreams for days, months, years.
Maybe it’s less grand. Maybe you just made time to send out some work, when you didn’t think you would have the time.
I tell this story often in our Lit Mag Chat sessions. But once, when my daughter was a toddler, she fell asleep in the shopping cart while I was getting groceries. Rather than wake her up, I pulled my cart to the side of the aisle and stood against it, scrolling calls for submissions on my phone. I found a themed call that was perfect for a piece I had floating around.
The piece was saved from another submission in Submittable, so I was able to download it to my device. I then copied my cover letter, pasted it into a new submission, and submitted my story to this themed call. I did it while standing up, forearms perched on the handle of my shopping cart, my kid dozed off on a pile of spaghetti boxes and paper towels.
I didn’t get an acceptance from that magazine. It would never have made it into a Lit Mag Brag. But was it a kind of win just the same? To submit work when I was sure I absolutely positively had no time to do it? To find ways to be inventive with managing life’s various demands? To tackle all of this on my handy little cell phone? Yep. It was a win to me then, and always will be.
What about you?
Maybe recently you submitted to a literary magazine for the very first time! Please tell us, if this is you. I’m sure a whole lot of people here will be excited for you.
Maybe it was a process thing. Perhaps you forced yourself to stay at your desk and work that one extra hour, when you didn’t think you had an extra hour in you. But turns out, you did.
Perhaps you made a big change in your writing practice. You stopped going online, turned off internet, turned your soul more fully and completely to face the work at hand.
Maybe you shared your work with a difficult family member. Maybe you declared to disapproving people that you are a writer and that is that. Maybe you said No to something, and put your writing first, for the very first time in your life.
You signed up for a writing group; you finally left a writing group that wasn’t helping you. You finished that scene whose revision has been dogging you; you escalated the conflict finally in that relationship that always felt too tame; you made an outline where outlines always troubled you.
You finally wrote something you consider worthy of the most competitive markets. You read your work out loud when reading your work terrifies you. You started something new. You abandoned a project that was going nowhere. You finished something huge.
Maybe, you just wrote something. That is all. And yet, that is everything. Worthy of all the brags to be mustered.
We won’t do this every month. But once in a while, I think, it’s certainly worth acknowledging and celebrating.
Don’t be shy. Come on out and step right up.
We’ll have time at the end of the month to share those publication wins. This weekend, I want to hear about the other kind of wins, the intangible ones. Nothing concrete to measure, other than touching the sky.
Go ahead.
This week I did a major revision (hatchet job) on a short story I wrote back in the 1990s. It had been getting regularly rejected, and I fiddled with the ending a few times and continued to send it out. Then I got a rejection that declined the story by saying that, while well-written, it was an excerpt from a longer work, and didn't stand on its own. Well! The story was a standalone; there is no longer work. So I read back through the story and came to the conclusion that the conflicts and themes that had been so apparent to me must be getting lost on a reader. So, I threw out everything except the central conflict and made sure it was evident from beginning to end. I'm happy with how the revision turned out, although not quite ready to send it out again.
I love this idea! I’ve been working on an essay collection since 2013. Last weekend, I shared a few essay drafts with my parents after hemming & hawing all summer about whether I would. They are supportive of my writing but still it felt touchy—yet I knew I would regret not showing them more than showing them. It was a little challenging taking in their reactions to various elements, but ultimately I’m really glad we talked through it .