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 writer you want to be, and those first rejections sting harder because you’ve mustered up your courage to defy society’s messaging that creating art is not for you in order to get the submission out there, and now you’re forced to wonder if everybody was right.

So, your first story or novel feels important, while your fiftieth (if you’re lucky) feels like another day at the office. Even if you still get that flutter of fear that someone will turn and say how dare you call yourself a writer, there’s a backlog of work and effort you can point to and say, I dare because of all that.

The fear never goes away. Writing often feels like a career where you can’t make mistakes, and where letting poor work out into the world is a shortcut to tanking your entire career.

To which I say: Fuck that. 

Writing careers are crazy resilient—folks get torn down for plagiarism scandals or creating fictional stories that are fraudulently sold as autobiography, and they still rebuild their writing careers and go on to success. Bad books get released all the time, and people still rehab and rebuild. They do it because they keep writing, keep submitting, and keep searching for writing work. 

Fuck fear. Do the work. Write more stories.

Does the fear ever leave you entirely? I’m not sure. I do know that I’m writing this post as a pep-talk to myself, finishing up a handful of new short story projects and deciding what’s next for them. And I can feel the familiar fear again, my subconscious throwing what-if designed to protect me from the sting of rejection: what if this story bombs? What if the editors all say no? What if I’ve lost the knack that got me through five novellas, fifty-odd short stories, three collections, and countless years of blogging, writing courses, teaching, and starting a small press? What if you publish it yourself, and nobody ever buys a copy?

(The answers to those questions: then write a different story; then send them a different story, dumbass; then keep writing until the knack comes back; then the blurb and cover are still leads that will pull people towards older work, and it will go in a collection eventually and make money there. Notice how volume lies at the heart of all those answers?)

My best guess is the fear is still there, waiting to come out. Inducing hesitation when the process that’s always worked best for me is damning the torpedos, sending things out, and getting on with the next story. Being willing to fuck up, because there’s always another story coming and that might be the place where I finally get it right. 

Because, at the heart of it all, I know the answer to fear is volume. Making each individual story much less important in the overall narrative of my career. Writing enough that people forget the awful stuff and focus on the stories that really worked.