Fear and the Art of Submitting Short Fiction
Back when I taught short story writing, people would often ask the trick for getting past the inevitable flow or rejections. My answer was always simple: it comes down to volume. When you have a single short story that you’re sending out, every rejection feels like you’ve been thwarted. When you’re sending out a dozen stories, with more projects in the hopper, a rejection usually means oh, thank the gods, that’s where X goes next. The sting of rejection really boils down to fear—and often the social fear of something secret and hidden about yourself being revealed and found wanting—and that fear magnifies in relation to the perceived importance. If you’ve spent your life hungry to be a writer, immersed in a cultural narrative that says successful writers are either geniuses or hacks, then that first work holds a lot of weight and expectations. It’s the point where you prove you’ve got what it takes to be the kind of