Is There Any Point?: Wisdom from a Year of Submitting Short Stories

Ask most readers these days what they prefer to read, and they'll likely give you one of two answers: either long form non-fiction (i.e. biographies, memoirs, etc.) or novels. Note that the aforementioned binary doesn't include short fiction.

Since the rise of TV as a form of mass entertainment back in the 1960s, the market and appetite for short stories has shrunk by the decade. Average readers these days almost never read them outside a classroom, and when they do, most have the same reaction: "It just felt like it ended too soon," or worse, "I didn't get it."

It's not there faults, of course; once you've grown accustomed to the emmersive reading experience of novels or book series, transitioning to reading shorts is a real shock to the cerebrum. As such, most readers advise writers not to bother with short stories anymore; the wide readership the form once enjoy simply isn't there anymore and likely never will be again. And, without readers, there's no monetary incentive for writers, since there's no way to make a living writing shorts. (Thanks, Capitalism. I hate it.)

Yet writers, being the artistically-inclined fools we are, still continue to produce them and get them out into the world. Why though? Is there any point to it?

Biased as my viewpoint might be as a writer myself, I think there is.

I set myself the task of submitting short stories 100 times this year. Why? Part of it was to emulate my hero, Ray Bradbury, who got his start writing (and mastering) the short story. The other was just to prove to myself that could I write short stories that worked, the best litmus test for which is if someone was also willing to buy them.

So, between revising my novel, I wrote stories to send out to different venues. I started tracking them using the Submission Grinder, and I paid closer attention to my feed on Twitter for notices of open calls. On New Year's Day, I sent out my first submission, the first of (in the end), 132 submissions.

And it didn't take long for the rejection letters to follow suit.

I didn't allow the rejections to stop me though. Whereas in my earliest submitting days as an ambitious college kid, I'd have taken the rejection to heart and spiraled into a depressive episode, I took a completely different approach. Instead of despairing each time a rejection dropped in my inbox, I sent out two more submissions, doing my best to make sure the recently rejected story also went back out to another venue.

This approach, this dogged refusal to see a rejection as anything except a temporary setback, did three things for me: it got me some results, granted me some insight, and case-hardened me against the artist's greatest enemy, fear of failure and rejection.

Out of the 132 submissions, I managed to snag 3 acceptances, two semi-pro sales and one pro sale. That breaks down to about 3 submissions a week over the year, and with that ratio of acceptances to submissions, it flattens out to about a 2.3% success rate. 

Now, in other ventures, like if you're a baseball player and you only hit the ball about 3 out of every 132 pitches, how the hell are you still under contract? But in art, in writing, that's fairly respectable, especially if you're focusing on only one thing, you're honing in only on paid gigs and not FTL (for the love) calls, and you're not doing it full-time.

It wasn't much, but it was far more than I gotten in the past when I stopped trying after the first no or two. That dogged determination got me those acceptances, and that they led to both payment and publication—the results speak for themselves.

Now, naturally, I had to bounce back from a lot of failure. 3 for 129, again, isn't great in any world except art, but getting all those rejections taught me something else: rejection isn't personal.

I started taking writing serious when I was 18. That means I've focused on excelling at this thing for 11 years, and I only started getting results when I was 25 with a few nonfiction sales. After doing something for that long, you learn a thing or two.

In those early days, when I used to take rejection personally, I thought it was because the editors hated my writing. And, chances are, they did. Not because they hated me (they didn'tknow me well enough to hate me properly), but because I hadn't learned my craft yet. I didn't know how to get into and out of scenes smoothly. I didn't know how to used dialogue effectively. I didn't know how to describe concisely or how to use interior monologue efficiently. And I'm still learning to get better at these things now.

By now, after all this time, I've gained a grasp, yet I still get rejected a ton. Why? Because sometimes, even when a story works, it's just not a right fit for a magazine's ambiance. Or, sometimes it is, but they ran a similar piece in the last issue, or the one before that, and don't want to run another. 

Sometimes, however, your piece is a perfect fit; it makes past first readers, fiction editors, to the EIC (that's Editor-in-Chief), themselves, and it comes down to your piece and and an equally good alternative that the EIC likes more. With the limited space and resources most magazines have these days, care to take a guess which one they'll go with with a hard deadline looming?

None of these things are in your control as a writer. The only things that you have full control over are producing good work, honing your craft, and keeping watch for opportunities. That's it. There's nothing personal in any of this, so there's little point taking rejection that way.

Ah, I lied. There's one more thing you can control: how you respond to setbacks.

If you are someone like me, inclined to take "nos" to heart, sending out stories and collecting those rejections is a form of inoculation. 

That habit I built of sending out two new submissions for every rejection I got was my rejection vaccine. Rather than letting it get me down, letting it negatively impact my mental health, I just said "Fuck it," and kept trying. 

That more than anything, I realize, will help in the long-run. 

My goal is to try and get my novel-in-progress traditionally published. To do that, to navigate that system, I need an agent. To get an agent, I'll need to send out queries. Ask any writer whose been there—in the query trenches, as we call them—how disheartening that process of submission and rejection can be, and you may trigger their authorial PTSD.

After a year of sending out submissions to magazines—small and large—however, I'm ready. I'm not scared of query trenches. I know what rejection feels like now, and I can face it just fine because I have the perfect coping mechanism through habitual practice.

Every time a rejection comes my way, I'll send out two more.

So, beyond the normal marketing advice of getting your name out there, building your audience, and honing your craft, sending out short stories for publication has another special fuction that I think is worth the heartache at its beginning. It teaches you that rejection is only temporary. As long as you're still breathing, still writing, still creating, you still have a chance. You just have to persist.

Keep trying and you'll get your results.