On Knowing When Your Work is ‘Ready’ to Submit for Publication
‘The waiting is the hardest part.’ - Tom Petty
A small confession - I used to be awful at editing (there are probably a few editors I’ve worked with recently who would tell me I’m still terrible at editing but that’s another story).
What I mean here is that I would write a piece, maybe skim over it a few times, and then make the fatal mistake of submitting it somewhere. As a new writer, I had this weird mindset of wanting to write, but a crippling doubt that I could and should write. In a way, submitting things before they were ready and receiving rejections was my own personal confirmation bias - it proved what I doubted about myself to be true.
Aren’t our minds wonderful?
Thankfully, I worked through this and stopped being so flimsy with my writing. I started investing in my professional development through courses and committed myself to stop treating my writing as unimportant. I learned a lot in my first couple of years. Namely, that pretty much everyone is terrible at writing when they first start (accept it, move on and keep writing) and the editing process is just as important as the writing process. It’s also essential when it comes to knowing whether something is ready to submit for publication or not.
There is no surefire way to know when something is entirely ready to submit but I have learned that developing a process towards getting a piece ready for publication has done wonders for both my acceptance rate and my feelings of competence as a writer.
This process looks different for every writer. Here’s what it generally looks like for me:
First & Foremost - Focus on the Writing
It’s great when you have an exciting idea - especially in response to a competition theme or callout - and it can be easy to let this dominate the writing process. First and foremost, forget about being published and focus only on getting your story down on paper.
Put it Away
Once I feel happy I’ve got everything down on paper, and it feels like my story is ‘complete’, I’ll put it away (meaning, I save the document and put in a folder on my desktop titled ‘DON’T LOOK!’). When you first finish writing, you’re too close to the story to edit with a critical eye, so I tend to leave my words alone for 3-5 days before I get to editing.
Edit, Edit, Edit - and then Put it Away Again
After a few days of not looking at the piece, I get it out and start to edit. If it’s a longer story, I like to print it and use a green (not red, it’s too aggressive) pen to mark up some changes. I like this process because then when I return to make the changes on my digital document, I usually pick up a few more edits I missed on the physical copy. Editing shouldn’t be rushed and it’s a multi-faceted process - so I’m happy to repeat this process 3-4 times for a week. Only when I’m genuinely sick of the piece, do I put it away again for a couple of days.
Read Through - and Edit Some more
When I stop feeling sick of the sight of my work, I’ll read through again and pick up on any other edits - it’s this time around that I also tend to get ruthless and will start cutting sentences and entire paragraphs. It usually takes getting to this stage to see more clearly what darlings I need to kill.
Get a Second Opinion
I don’t always share my work with a beta reader. I tend to write micro and flash fiction, and although I might share it with a friend or two, if I feel happy with a story, I base a submission on that. For longer stories, I have a couple of friends who I trust to read an offer proactive feedback - especially if I’m considering submitting the piece for a competition.
Edit Some More
With the feedback from my friends - I’ll go back to my computer and get editing once more!
Put it Away - Again
Then, the piece goes back into my ‘Don’t Look’ folder. For however long it needs to. I try not to write pieces for specific competitions or publications, preferring to write based on my ideas and then keeping an eye on submission call-outs to see where a piece might fit. When I see a call I like the look of and feel a piece would work for, I go back to it and read through things once more. I usually find some more editing, but if I’m happy the piece is a good reflection of my work - I do the scary thing. I submit it.
...
This is my approach to get myself to a point where I feel confident about my work so I can contently submit it and have others read it - and hopefully publish it! This is a process I mainly apply to my fiction work, and it might sound long-winded and like a lot of hard work.
I’ll admit when I first started developing this process; I’d get to the point where I finally felt ‘finished’ and find I was afraid to submit. I’d done my best, but what if my best wasn’t good enough?
The question haunted me.
Again, I had to flip my thinking. It is rarely the case that your best isn’t ‘good enough’ - especially with a craft like writing. There is, in my opinion, no such thing as your ‘best’ writing, just where you’re currently at as a writer. Every rejection and acceptance invites us to reflect on what we’re doing well and where we can improve. It’s an exciting process, not one to be feared, and submitting is a considerable part of that.
Being ‘ready’ to submit your work is two-fold. There is the physical entity, your writing being ready to submit, and there is the emotional acceptance that you’re about to send your work out into the world and risk rejection. Both are worth paying due diligence to in preparation for publication.
But it’s also worth remembering that writing is about more than being published and if you write for your eyes only - that’s okay too. As Anne Lamott shares:
“I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do---the actual act of writing---turns out to be the best part. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.” ― Anne Lamott
