In one of the last days before the regular job really kicked into gear, I sat manic and crazed in front of my computer revising a short story and posting a fellowship application and slamming a 300-word essay together in 45 minutes flat.
Maybe it was an hour, and maybe this wasn’t my very best work, but it was definitely a wide-eyed, wild-eyed attack on writing and submitting.
These last-minute attempts at literary scholarship don’t always produce prize-winning material (…wait, do they ever?), but they do produce. In that strange and stubborn moment, when I can do anything but sit one more day on a story, I find a tiny bit of hope and possibility and a fire rekindled, which for me was relief after a very quiet summer.
Sure, I anticipate the usual No’s, No thank you’s, and “Really…No” to hit my inbox in the next several months. Still, I don’t regret hitting SEND. After all, as Sherman Alexie says in this podcast with Jess Walter, submitting, acceptances, and rejections are all part of the “entire process of becoming a writer.”
Mantras help me push that process, phrases like “Why not?” and “Fearless writing” and (more recently) “Do the foot work.”
What that means is that one day in doing the foot work to get your portfolio together for the submission to that literary journal so far out of your league it’s laughable, you will sift through all those old stories and rejections (because who are we kidding, you save every one), and you will discover that half of the stories you sent out, which bounced back time and again, eventually did find a home.
It took countless tries, but they made it to publication, all because you sat crazed at the computer that one Monday afternoon and hit SUBMIT again and again.
What are you waiting for?
