What it means when your story is in Submittable a long time

This is a subject that a lot of blogs on writing have covered. Does it mean anything if your story is in Submittable for a long time before it gets rejected? Specifically, does that mean that the editors thought it over a long time before sending the rejection? If you're waiting on a notice and it's been in there a while, do you have a better chance of acceptance, because the editors are spending time mulling it over?

Generally, I'm going to agree with the community consensus on this and say that you shouldn't make too much out of the length of time something is in the system before you get a notice. But I will differ and suggest that it might tell you something, but only in specific circumstances.

The basics

Submittable is the system by which about 85% or so of literary journals accept submissions. (That's a totally subjective figure based on my own experience. Many of the very high-end journals, however, use their own systems rather than Submittable.) I assume you know this, or you wouldn't be reading my blog, but you never know. Maybe you just like to check in from time to time to see if I've posted any new photos of myself that show the progress of my baldness.

When you submit a story, Submittable gives you a status of "received." Some time later--could be five minutes, could be a year--you'll see the status change from "received" to "in progress." "In progress" means that somebody has done something administrative with your story. Clifford Garstang's excellent blog tells us that merely opening a story does not change its status. Kelly Davio, however, guest blogging for Submittable, so I take it as authoritative, tells us that the only time a story can be opened without it changing status is if the reader closes the browser without first voting, assigning, or going back to the main screen. I've tested this by submitting to a journal where I myself am an editor and messing around with my submission in various ways. I'm actually going to lean with Clifford on this. I think you have to actually make an administrative action to a story. Which means you can't really tell from the disposition status whether anyone has looked at it or not. It all depends on the magazine's own preferred process for going through submissions.


Types of literary journal staff structures

Structure One: Well heeled journal with lots of intern slaves. This type of magazine probably assigns your story very early on, because they have a specific person to assign it to. How long it takes for someone to read it and vote on it from there is anyone's guess, and you won't know when it happens. So unfortunately, with the heavy hitters, you won't have any idea based on time what's going on. Most likely, it'll be a while. The good news is that a lot of the stronger journals will give you an "encouraging rejection" if they liked what you wrote and just didn't have room for it.

Structure Two: Ordered, but small. This is a magazine where everyone knows the drill and the machine is well oiled, but there aren't a ton of student interns to command. Often, there is one editor for fiction, one for poetry, one for non-fiction, and that editor does everything in that genre. Here it's a total crap shoot. It's up to how that editor likes to do things. She might open it up, read a page, then put it aside if it looks like it's something she'll need to give time to later. I do this sometimes as an editor. Some nights, I am just going through the slush looking for bad stories I can get rid of easily. If I find something decent, I leave it for later. Or the editor might never touch the story until she's ready to read it for real. In this case, you're likely to go from "received," straight past "in progress" and on to accepted/rejected in a very short amount of time. There's no committee to talk to. It's just one person, and she reads and makes a decision. In other words, there's not much you can tell from this.

Here's the exception, and the one time when being in the system a while might mean your odds are improving: Let's say it sits there for a while in "received," and then one day it goes to "in progress," but then it waits again for a while. To me, that might mean the editor finally got the story and then had to think about it. So if you submit to a magazine like this, and you're in "received mode" for a long time and THEN you go to "in progress" and sit for a long time, it MIGHT mean something.

Structure Three: Controlled anarchy. There are several editors for each genre, and nobody is really telling anyone what to do. All the editors are free to go in and read what they can, when they can. This is the model on the journal I work with, and I suspect it might be common for journals where the inbox is too big for one person but the staff is still all volunteer.

This is the structure where I think your story sitting in "in progress" mode for a long time is most likely to mean something. This is especially true if it took a long time to go from "received" to "in progress."

We like to have two editors vote no before we reject a story. This isn't always possible, but it's how we like to operate. Very often, once a story gets one vote, someone else jumps on it so we can close the loop. If we don't like the story, it often will go from "in progress" to rejection in days.

So if your story waits a while to get opened, then gets opened, then sits around a long time (say a month), I'd say that with this type of journal, there's maybe a 60-70% chance that it means people were divided on the story. There are other things that might be going on--sometimes, anarchy means that people just aren't paying attention, and a story that needs to be finished up just gets ignored. But I think the odds are that if your story didn't get assigned soon after coming in, and when it finally does get opened it sits for a while, it probably means something. But only for structure three. It could mean that for structure two, also, but it's harder to tell. With just one person, they could have any kind of system.

How do you know what type of magazine you've submitted to? Well, you don't, unless you know someone who works there. But you might be able to form guesses if you submit to the same place several times and start to notice trends.

I really think all journals ought to do a good job of differentiating between rejections. If a story made an editor or editors think before tossing it, they ought to send a different kind of rejection. It ought to be clear that the "encouraging" rejection actually means "we read your story and liked it more than we like most stories we get." That's the easiest way to tell what a journal thought. Well, that, and actually getting accepted.

In any event, for you, the beleaguered author trying to get some acceptances and make sense of it all, I think it's best to heed the majority advice: a rejection doesn't mean a whole lot, and it's best not to try reading tea leaves. Enough journals will actually tell you if you merited a closer look that you should pay a lot more attention to those than you do to time spent in limbo.

Heretic recommends: Tahoma Review's "fiction with feedback"

I spent $7 a few weeks ago to submit a story to the Tahoma Review. Normally, it doesn't cost that, but for the $7, they promise to give you some feedback. I got my feedback this week, and it was well worth the money. It wasn't exhaustive, but I wouldn't expect it for that price. Rather, they gave a two paragraph response as to why they didn't accept it.

Sure, I've been pretty negative on getting feedback, but I found this useful enough for what it was. Turns out, the reason they rejected it had a lot to do with the same flaw I saw in the story. It was a flaw I'd tried to iron out in later versions, but they didn't feel I'd quite attended to the issues. That doesn't mean, of course, that they're right. But right and wrong isn't really what you're after with something like this. You want to know the impressions someone had. It's like when I do a "Would I Have Published This Story" bit. I'm not saying I'm right or wrong, I'm saying this is how I think I'd have voted on a story and why. It's not criticism, it's just pulling back the curtain on what the gut reaction of a reader was.

I'd say that $7 was pretty good money, then. I've gotten less for a lot more money other places. The takeaway for me was that I might not have a story there right now. I'll probably pull that one and let it sit. Sometimes, at a later date, I get an idea for how to rework something, and then the original story becomes something new and better. I'm hoping that happens here.

Why I care if people read what I write

I posted last week about how to deal with it emotionally when a writer seems to get more than they deserve. Frequent commenter Badibanga--who is a friend of mine in real life--asked why I care. His comment:

...why do you want to fit in so badly? Great fiction is a coterie of usual suspects who will be unknown and unremembered 30, 20 years from now. That is the rational gamble here. The "great" writers often were not appreciated by contemporaries. So do you want to be of the moment? If so, then behave accordingly. Do you want to do what suits you, then do that, accept the consequences, and do not whine about it. Rare, rare is the person who is appreciated both by contemporaries and subsequent generations. I guarantee, however, that many of the truly great did not give a shit about fitting in or being some sort of also ran to a bunch of celebrated hacks.

We discussed this in person last week, after the ablutions demanded by sacred tradition were first performed, but because I thought it was an interesting conversation, I'll share my view here.

Badibanga has a point. And lately I've been thinking a lot about that Borges story...the one I referred to in that post, where a man writes his masterpiece entirely in his head a split-second before he is gunned down by a firing squad. I think anyone who's going to write seriously will have to internalize that story at some point, because the odds are long for nearly every writer that anyone will ever seriously give a shit what you write. So yes, on some level, you have to write to please yourself.

That being said, what primarily motivates me to write is a sense that some disconcerting truth about existence has lodged itself in my brain, and nobody that I know of has ever mentioned it before. Am I wrong about it, or is this really a truth nobody has ever mentioned? I pick at it and pull at this notion and keep trying to give words to the thought it until I'm done. But the only way to know at that point if I've really arrived at some hitherto unspoken truth is for others to read on it and comment. So I need readers.

As much as folks romanticize the writer who was only discovered after death, that's actually not all that common an occurrence. And I have to believe it will become even rarer as time goes by, and the world is ever more and more caught up in the moment, caught up in today, and forgetting whatever happened five minutes ago.

As Badibanga says, it's likely that even if I became a well known writer today, I'd be forgotten soon after. It's far, far more likely, though, that if I am unknown when I die, I'll remain that way. It's very hard for me to imagine a future where a child or a widow goes through my thumb drives after I'm gone and manages to find a publisher--if such a thing even still exists--who will take them on.

Even many of the authors cited as examples of people who were discovered after death had at least some recognition in life. Phillip K. Dick was a well known Sci-Fi writer, he just hadn't crossed over into mainstream appeal until some of his books became movies. Edgar Allen Poe achieved mild success in life, albeit not the financial kind. Long before critics hated Moby Dick, they liked Melville's Omoo and Typee. Even Emily Dickinson had a few poems published before she died. In order for future generations to find gold floating in the detritus of the past, you have to at least get your work into that detritus. And the more of it you get there, the more likely it is to be found.

So yes, I do want to be read, which means I crave publications and awards and notoriety. That leaves me with a tough choice ahead of me. The more seriously I pursue writing, the more it becomes clear that what I want will probably elude me. The latest round of stories I have sent out were the best shots I had. I put everything into them, and they're coming back rejected. So I either have to keep plugging away with a growing sense of hopelessness or give up.

Gradually, I am arriving at a position that is something of a paradox. If I write only to be published, then I won't write anything worth writing. But having written that true verse in the darkness, I have to then become another person who cares very much about getting them published. I have to not care what people think when I write, and then care very much what people think when I'm done writing.

I used to not understand why writers so frequently suffered from a variety of psychological maladies, but the longer I'm at playing out this paradox, the more sense it makes to me.

Mini-Gallimaufry: MFA for popular work and an MFA advisor who realizes the current model isn't getting it done

This will be one of my shortest posts ever:

1) After my post yesterday, I was looking to see if any writing programs do, in fact, focus on popular fiction, and I found at least one that does: at University of Southern Maine, the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing has a popular fiction track.

2) A thoughtful article in the New Yorker today from an MFA advisor is the latest to question whether the heavy focus on craft is the right approach. I know it was a problem for me. I was around a lot of smart people who liked to read, but we didn't talk as much about what stories were worth telling as we did about how to tell them.

What being in writing workshops with Nnedi Okorafor taught me about the goal of writing programs

You may not, at this exact moment in history, grasp the significance of the title of this post. But it's likely you soon will. Her fantasy novel is about to be made into an HBO series, and it's backed by none other than George R.R. Martin himself, leading to inevitable claims that her series is the next Game of Thrones. Nnedi's done alright by herself.

That's fine with me. I only remember two people's names from my program in graduate school, and she's one of them. (I was talking recently with a woman who described her graduate writing program as an incestuous group where everyone hung out together, slept with each other, and gossiped about one another. Mine was nothing like that. We were friendly, but there were never any social events other than readings. Or maybe there were, and I just wasn't invited?)

What I remember most about Nnedi is that nobody knew what to do with her novel when it came up in workshops. Graduate workshops are generally geared toward literary fiction.

Defining what literary fiction is isn't easy. It is sometimes defined in opposition to other types of literature, which are tarred with the term "genre fiction." "Genre fiction" may or may not be seen as pejorative. I would say literary fiction is fiction which aspires to be regarded as serious, which hopes to say something significant about the human condition, about society, about the universe. It is literature the author hopes will be assigned as reading in universities one day.

That's the model for graduate writing programs at American universities. The programs teach students to write like the works those students are reading in their literature classes. (Most MFA's have at least some reading component, and my M.A. program was exactly half literature study, half workshops.)

Nnedi wrote YA post-apocalyptic fiction with a Nigerian bent, even then. The class wasn't rude about it. We commented on her work as energetically as we did anything. As I've said before, I don't think the feedback from classmates was useful to me at all. If it wasn't useful to her, I wouldn't be surprised. (I did once give her this feedback: I thought it seemed morally questionable for the children in her world to have super powers as a result of nuclear fallout, because that might make young people think nuclear war was desirable. I guess I can say I once gave advice to a famous writer.) I wouldn't presume to speak for her on how valuable she found the workshops. She stayed for her Ph.D., whereas I left after my M.A., so I'd guess she found some value in it.

Post-apocalyptic fiction, but from an entirely different cultural wellspring than what we're used to

What seems interesting to me looking back on it now is the conversation we had one day about her work. I want to say a comment by the instructor started it. It wasn't a particularly nasty comment, or even dismissive. My advisor was a fairly supportive person. I think she may have asked a question about the book and qualified it by saying she herself did not read a lot of this kind of fiction. Whatever she said, the class ended up in a sidebar about the merits of YA fiction, namely whether there were any. Nnedi and quite a few others defended YA. They declared that Harry Potter--the YA champion of the time--was actually quite complex and sophisticated and had intrinsic worth beyond being a bestseller. (I had no opinion then. I've read Harry Potter now, because now I'm a father, and I agree. It's a great series.)

It wasn't really a vitriolic conversation, but it seems odd to me now that it was a conversation we had at all. In law school, I doubt whether anyone has conversations over whether tort law is real law or just something for ambulance chasers to make a buck off of. I doubt if the status of plastic surgery is looked at askance in medicals schools. That's because these are really professionalizing programs. The end goal is to perform in an industry. To use an example more directly analogous, do drama programs only teach Shakespearean stage performance? Or do they also teach how to act in a movie or on TV?

I'm not sure why teaching to the job market is not a model for writing programs. Or maybe it is. It's just that when literary fiction is the presumed type of writing, the reality is that the vast majority of graduates won't be able to make a living writing. So the academy is teaching students to teach writing workshops as much as teaching them to write. To the extent it is teaching writing, it is teaching how to write stories that will be published in places where most of the readers are other writers who graduated from the same types of programs and publish in the same types of journals.

A few lucky literary fiction writers do succeed commercially, of course. They are the ones who won major awards so that their books were assigned in universities, or who got onto Oprah's book club and became one of the few "good for you" books Americans can be shamed into reading every year. But they are very much the exception that proves the rule.

I've been out of grad school for 15 years, of course, and the game may have changed. But I wonder why these schools don't offer mystery, fantasy, YA, romance, or any of the other genres that actually DO sell as part of the curriculum.

Part of it assuredly has to do with universities justifiably feeling that their mission is to promote human knowledge. But I'd bet there's at least some fear behind the choices. What if graduate programs cannot produce commercial success in fiction reliably? Right now, they're not really expected to. They're simply expected to produce occasional bright lights who can get published by the kinds of journals the school itself probably runs. They're expected to produce writers who win awards proctored by other MFA grads. You can teach people how to write for a system. But teaching people to write to be read widely is tough. Agents and publishers, whose whole lives revolve around trying to bet right on it, fail all the time at guessing what the next hot item will be.

That's why writing programs are as much about teaching students to teach writing programs themselves as they are about teaching them to write.

This shouldn't be seen as a personal complaint, by the way. As I told a friend the other day, even if I wanted to write genre fiction just to be read, I wouldn't know how. I don't have one in me. My literary hero in grad school was Herman Melville, a man whose greatest work was ignored in his own lifetime. So this isn't sour grapes that nobody taught me to write a NY Times bestseller. This is just to note that Nnedi's wonderful success was such an unusual dream for a writing program student back then that we almost didn't know what to do with it.

Keep this in mind if you want to follow her path to greatness.

Congratulations to Nnedi. I'll be getting some of her books and reading them. I like fantasy enough to know every single thing the Lord of the Rings movies did wrong, but it'll be nice to see what someone can do with it drawing from a completely different mythological tradition. 

On people getting what they deserve (or more than, or less than)

Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping? -Hamlet, Act 2, Scene II. 

I was just checking out the sales of my book on Amazon. A few people bought the e-book, which made me happy. Then, I saw sponsored links to other e-books. One was Rebel Cowbear: Paranormal Werebear Romance (Lone Star Cowbears Book 1). There is also a sequel in the Wearbear Cowboy romance series. I was tempted to laugh, but then I saw the book had 58 comments on Amazon. My book has three. 

Earlier this week, I read a couple of installments from this year's Best American Short Stories anthology. The second and third stories in the anthology were from big names who'd been published recently in the New Yorker. I found both stories to be rather lazy efforts undeserving of the attention. They weren't terrible, they just didn't feel like they'd been written with any real urgency. They felt like something a professional writer thought would make a good story, so the writers put into them the stuff they usually put into a story to make it work. And because they are big name writers, they got into the New Yorker and the BASS anthology. 

You won't always feel as a writer that others are getting things they don't deserve and you do. Sometimes, you'll feel that even whatever credit you have gotten is undeserved, and you are a fraud and a hack and a terrible writer. Sometimes, you'll feel both cheated of your due and undeserving of any due at the same time. (Just this morning, I deleted the first page of a rough draft I wrote last night, and asked myself why I ever write anything, because I am obviously terrible.) 

However, when you do start finding yourself as a writer feeling cheated, that others are getting more than they deserve and you are getting far, far less, I find these thoughts help me:

-The Kardashians are all rich without having any apparent abilities between them. This is a much greater injustice than a writer continuing to be published by big journals in spite of having peaked years ago. So if T.C. Boyle phones in some crap sci-fi trash about designer babies, it's low on the list of cosmic injustices when that story gets love. 

-It's almost certainly much worse for minority writers. The market can only support one niche writer at a time. So if you are a Rohingya writer writing about Rohingya issues and the market has already picked who its favorite Rohingya writer is, you're out of luck. Somewhere, there is a Chinese-American female writer who has been waiting for Amy Tan to die for about twenty years. Even when that happens, that new writer will spend a decade being called "the next Amy Tan." 

-Both "Everyone is getting more than me" and "I am terrible" are irrational. I know that being irrational helps write great fiction, but when it starts to unsettle you emotionally, go try some other writerly activity like getting piss-drunk or philandering with half your neighborhood until you feel better. 

-There is a Borges story called "The Secret Miracle." In it, a Jew who has been sentenced by the Nazis to die by firing squad is sad that he will never be able to finish writing his play. As the bullets are about to fire, God stops time. The man is able to complete the play in his head. The moment he completes the play, time resumes, and he is instantly killed. I often think of that story, imagine that each story I write has a private audience of one. If it is ever shared beyond that, this is a bonus. But writing the story is something I have to do. I'm only responsible for writing it. What happens beyond is not my responsibility.

E-book is out

If $17 was too much for a paperback, but you've just been dying to get my book to see if I can actually write anything worth reading (because this blog sure doesn't fit the bill), you can now get the much cheaper $8 e-book version.

I've just committed to buying books at a local book store if I can, but I really don't know another way to get an e-book than Amazon/Kindle. Here's the link for the Kindle version:

https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Wait-Called-Jacob-Weber-ebook/dp/B076H8FKNZ/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1508290153&sr=8-1.

Thanks to the folks who already got the high-priced paperback, and huge thanks to the people who have wanted to talk to me about it. I wrote the book for the same reason I write anything: to say things I think people will find worth reading, and, hopefully, talking about.

Thanks to everyone who ever checks out this blog.