Surviving the Submission Blues

Is Your Writing Out on Submission? Welcome to Hell

So you (or your agent) has sent your work out to ... someone. A magazine, a competition, a publisher, a broadcaster, a film company, an agent you hope for, an author whose quote you desperately want for the cover, a writing course you’d kill for a place on, or even a mentor or editor you've hired yourself.

Welcome to a minor and largely unacknowledged room in Writer’s Hell.

You are now officially in the condition known as Waiting To Hear. But, in fact, it consists of two rooms which (with a relaxed approach to theological accuracy) I think of as Limbo and Purgatory.

A writer I know refuses to talk about ‘submissions’ and ‘rejections’, because we should consider ourselves equals in this transaction: we offer work, and the publisher/agent/broadcasters accept or decline it, he says. He’s quite right, but there’s no denying that it’s hard not to feel abject when you’re in Purgatory. You may have good cause to hope that they’ll want you and your work, but unarguably they don’t need it, whereas you do need them.

After all these months or years as onlie begetter and sole ruler of your work, you have unavoidably stapled your heart to those pages, and perhaps (always unwisely) your mortgage. But there’s nothing, now, you can do to alter the outcome. And if you write poetry or short fiction for magazines, or you are a serial writer of novels, or have made the (usually wise) decision to submit your book widely, you can live in the Limbo-Purgatory circle for a very long time, or even permanently.

Photo by James Lee on Unsplash

Limbo

You may have a short, relatively easy time in Limbo, when you genuinely know you won't hear:

• the stretch before the competition deadline or the closure of the submissions window

• the months before the date they’ve said the competition result will be announced

• the three Frankfurt-sodden weeks when your agent will definitely not be reading it, or she knows that editors won’t be.

• the two London Book Fair or Bologna weeks, when ditto

• over the Christmas-New-Year break, or the much longer equivalent stretch

Surviving in Limbo

• Remember that having your work rejected declined is a whole lot worse if you let that rejection declension (declining?) spell the end of the hope that your voice will be heard. So do things to keep that hope alive:

  • Start something new. I cannot emphasise this enough. If you allow the conviction to grow that your entire writing future rests on this story or book or commission, you will go mad. Besides, it doesn’t: you can write something else. Plus, if you do find yourself talking to an editor or agent, they will certainly want to know what you’ve got in the pipeline. 

  • Don't pin all your hopes on one submission. Send the same work out elsewhere. Generally speaking, ignore those who say they don’t take simultaneous submissions, which give editors and agents more control over your work than they deserve when they haven’t paid for it. Just be prepared for the consequences and consider what you’ll do in the various possible combinations of acceptance and rejection. 

  • Send out some other work, somewhere else, because it dilutes the agony. When the first rejection comes in, you’ll still have a different something out in different places. By the time those have come flumping back into your inbox, you’ll have another batch out somewhere. It keeps the hope going. 

• Do practical things which will be useful if your work is published - but only realistic ones, that you won’t regret if it isn’t:

  • Buy your domain name and bag social media accounts to match.

  • Set up a Substack or blog if you have a topic, ideally relevant to your writing, which you enjoy and can sustain (but not under your own name if it's chronicling rejections).

  • Hunt down a good writers’ circle, forum or other source of writerly friendship and support. It needn’t involve workshopping writing unless you want it to.

  • Start going to readings, events and festivals in your form and genre, so you know what they’re like when it’s your turn.

  • Start following people and making connections on social media. You don’t have to barge in as the life and soul of the party: being the quiet one in the corner is fine.

  • But forgive yourself, and pause all/any these, if they start making you feel more inadequate and hope-less.

• Cut yourself some slack in the writing:

  • Accept that your shitty first draft will be shittier than usual, and make notes as you go about what you’re not stopping to put right at the moment.

  • Switch to research if you’re really distracted and stuck.

  • If you’re even stucker, switch to intensive reading of relevant creative writing.

  • If you really can’t do stuff for your own writing - or you realise it’s only the must-write demon insisting that you should - then concentrate on nourishing and re-fuelling reading.

• This is not the moment to give up smoking, go on a strict diet, start a brutal exercise regime or do anything else hair-shirt-ish. 

• Recognise when self-consciousness is sabotaging you.

  • Don’t be sucked into fiddling instead of real writing or real revising and editing. This is why.

  • Your writing-brain will try to imagine what the editor’s/agent’s/judge’s mind is thinking, then badger the rest of your brain to write what would please those judges. But

    • you can’t read those minds, and

    • that kind of self-consciousness is death to creativity. 

  • Recognise when the doubt-demons are sabotaging you. That self-consciousness evolves horribly easily into an Inner Critic.

    • A simple-minded, primitive Critic says your writing is rubbish and you’re a fool who’s too big for their boots, and everyone at the publishers’ or competition’s office is laughing at you. But you’re not, and they’re not. The rubbish may be true just now, but your Inner Critic is by definition a liar, so don’t believe him/her; the rest are not true.

    • The more evolved Inner Critic learns to don disguises, however, so keep an eye out for those devilish eyes glinting through the mask of a very sensible and reasonable protector.

  • Recognise any procrastination for what it is, but explore why you’re procrastinating. It might be the agony of Waiting To Hear, but it might not be - and the causes do make a difference to what you can do to overcome or side-step it.

• Nourish and refuel:

  • Basics:

    • Get out of the house in daylight, every day, at least walking; listen to music or an audio book if you’d otherwise start ruminating miserably.

    • eat well but also sensibly, even if you don’t feel like it.

    • read/listen/watch easy comforting stuff by all means, but the satisfying, refuelling kind, not the junk-food of the Dark Playground.

    • go on Artist’s Dates.

    • play with some easy creativity: bake cakes, take photographs, write poems (while poets could try writing stories); essentially, anything which there’s nothing riding on.

  • Enjoy the fact that you are no longer grabbing every minute to hammer away at a manuscript:

    • Find jobs which are straightforward, achievable and satisfying, in however mild a way.

    • Sort out the garage, garden or attic if you’re the kind of person who once they’ve knuckled down will get real satisfaction from a good job well done.

    • Catch up with friends you trust not to ask (too often) about how the submissions are going.

  • Accept that Waiting To Hear is rather like having a-bit-of-a-headache for three months, and so any or all of these things may not feel quite as satisfying as you’d hoped

• Remember we all go through Limbo, we just don’t always talk about it: we get fed up with being asked how it’s going; non-writers in particular may innocently say things which are at best tactless; and we’d rather not risk having to reveal that the book didn’t find a home.

• Find companions in misery. This is when your closed, private circle of trusted fellow-writers, your secret Facebook group, or your old muckers from your Masters or other course come into their own.

  • They understand both the agony and the context, and they’ve been there themselves, or will be soon. The first thing I do, when I’ve sent something off, is to collapse into the private fora where all my dearest and oldest writing friends hang out, pour myself a very large virtual drink, and catch up with who else is suffering.

  • They are also the friends who will say very lovingly, when I’m being hysterically furious or crushed about something else, that it’s my Waiting-to-Hear condition which is making everything seem impossible.

• Recognise when you really are not OK, shift into self-care mode, exploit anything you know of yoga, meditation and mindfulness, and if that doesn't work, get professional help.

Purgatory

And then there's the true Purgatory that starts at one minute past 9am (your time-zone may vary) on the day you can start hoping (however unrealistically) to hear.

Particularly excruciating side-chapels of Purgatory include

• the one for those competitions which have a longlist and a shortlist, and

• the one where the editor says she loves it, and wants to take it to acquisitions in six weeks’ time.

• the one where the editor says he loves it but isn’t sure which issue it will fit in

HOW DO YOU SURVIVE PURGATORY?

• Try not to spend your life trying to read the entrails of how long it takes to hear, or what the first few say when they do respond, or what you read elsewhere about the state of the market, or what another writer says about their success or failure.

  • The only thing you can tell from not having heard yet is that you haven’t heard yet - and the only answer to ‘how long will it take?’ is however long it takes. Every agent and editor has a different reading system, and you have no way of knowing what it is.

  • If a website gives a deadline or a likely response time it’s perfectly fair, a little while after that time, to email and politely ask if they have an answer yet. ‘I’m trying to plan my writing for the autumn’ is a face-saving way of saying ‘I’m going insane here so ready the bloody thing or else!’

  • Even if the website says nothing, you can ask, but you may not get an answer.

• Being slow to get answers is incredibly common - and ever more so.

  • The advent of the computer and home printer exponentially increased the number of manuscripts in circulation, and increased it again once we stopped printing things;

  • Editors at magazines have to do more and more work with less and less help; at the literary end they have to spend swathes of time on grant applications, and almost certainly have a day job too;

  • A book, to be acquired, has to promise with increasing certainty to sell in much larger numbers, and that certainty has to be based on all sorts of figures and judgements garnered from different peaple.

  • At anything other than the smallest publishers, the decision to acquire at has to go through many hands and committees, and since there’s always someone off sick or away, the response to you will arrive at the speed of the slowest in-box. 

• Lean on your agent but remember

  • They are the nearest thing you have in the industry to a best friend, but they are not your best friend, your counsellor or your publicist.

  • Your agent is your interface with the industry, explaining how things work, when you might hear, and what the next stage is.

    • Don’t feel ashamed of asking apparently silly or ignorant questions: there are fundamental ways in which we are not part of the industry, and all new writers, and many established ones, simply can’t have learnt all this stuff. Agents know this in principle but don’t always remember it

    • Don’t be shy about asking for what would help you: for example, would you rather hear the result of each submission as it comes in, or wait until they’re almost all in and some conclusions can be drawn?

  • Treat them as a fellow-professional: don’t expect them to babysit your every feeling, or answer daily furious or miserable or just fussing emails whose only real purpose is to temporarily assuage your suffering.

• Try not to feel that you’ll be letting others down if the work doesn’t sell: your agent, your writing tutor or your family. It’s human, but that way madness (or at least an unhealthy emotional dependence) lies.

  • Agents are gamblers, and they don’t always win. That’s not your fault, any more than it’s your fault if someone looks at your racehorse, reads up its form, and chooses to put money on it which they then lose.

  • Tutors are the same: we are thrilled when our students succeed, we are very sad when they don’t, and as part of our reflective practice we worry about we could have done better - but at heart we know that it’s just how it goes.

  • And family? Make sure they know something about the realities of how it actually works, manage their expectations along with your own, and don’t be afraid to ask for what you need, whether it’s that they stop asking, or they join you in a cathartic day of garden-butchery. To which end:

• Understand more about the context of acceptance and rejection. as a way of managing your expectations and those of others.

  • Remember, always, that it’s not personal, it’s just that person.

  • This classic post by a publisher is very funny, but also very informative. The good news is that, provided your manuscript is better than this - ‘Author can write passable paragraphs, and has a sufficiently functional plot that readers would notice if you shuffled the chapters into a different order. However, the story and the manner of its telling are alike hackneyed, dull, and pointless’ - then it’s already better than 75% of the slushpile.

  • Find out more about the acquisitions process. Many an aspiring writer, having slogged and studied and bagged a good agent, is startled and depressed to discover that it’s only the beginning. But the acquisitions process is also worth thinking about when you’re looking for an agent, since they earn their living by understanding how editors think. This post, over at Nicola Morgan's always-excellent Help! I Need a Publisher, sets it all out very clearly, and this one is good on how magazine editors operate.

• Get practical about your idea that if this works, you might be able to write for a living:

  • What is this Hell telling you about how much you care, or don’t, about the business (and it is a business) of finding readers?

  • If having work out there makes you realise that you want to do a Masters, or start a magazine for others’ writing, or build a writing hut, or turn to self-publishing, then go for it.

  • But, I can’t emphasise enough: don’t commit to anything, financial or otherwise, which you will regret having committed to if this work is rejected declined.

  • And don’t let your legitimate hopes blind you to the less-good possible outcomes, because there are all sorts of factors governing your work’s fate which are nothing to do with its qualities, and everything to do with things you can’t know about.

When [you do receive a rejection] someone declines to buy your work

• Allow yourself to be miserable:

  • It hurts to have someone say ‘I didn’t like it enough’

  • You’ve had your hope taken away, however temporarily, and that is a bereavement.

  • It’s tempting to bat away the grief before you’re ready - saying they’re idiots, you sent it to the wrong place, the market is terrible, there’s no point … but all of these actually prolong it.

  • The only way round grief is through it, though chocolate helps. Alcohol helps too, but may make tomorrow worse because it’s a depressant.

  • Be prepared for a temporary flare-up of self-consciousness, Inner-Criticism, self-sabotage and procrastination. 

  • When you really are ready - and not before - see what you can learn from this response, if anything. Sometimes there’s honestly nothing to be learnt except that that person, that day, didn’t think it fitted what they were currently involved with.

• Don’t be ashamed to recognise that this is not what you want to do with your life.

  • I know more than one person who worked and slogged and got a novel out there and ... in the process of submissions, realised that, actually, the time-and-emotion-suck wasn’t worth it, and didn’t serve their happiness, and they stopped.

  • I know other writers who walked away from the whole shebang after a published novel, or two or four, or even a TV adaptation. Being an author just didn’t make them happy.

  • That’s a perfectly honourable decision, which you shouldn’t allow pride, or other people having nailed their colours to your mast, to stop you making. 

But, if you do decide to start, or carry on, submitting:

Bon Courage!

An earlier version of this piece first appeared on This Itch of Writing on Typepad.