Question of the week: is Submittable my new best friend, or is it already on its way to becoming a dangerous addiction?

Submittable, for those unfamiliar, is a website that serves as search engine/submission portal/tracking device for writing contests and literary magazines. Actually, all sorts of things are posted on there, including lit-related grants and job openings. It’s incredibly streamlined: make account. Search through calls for work, sorted by deadline. Pick your poison, send out your story, and pray. For a writer hoping that any publication will give them a leg up in the book world, this is very alluring, if not downright necessary.

The thing is, websites like Submittable that make it so easy to send out your work remind me how many people are trying to publish. Thousands upon thousands of us are out there on the internet like the stars across the sky, all posting our shiniest works and burning our brightest. (Or not. I admit I got to the point yesterday where I hit ‘submit’ without my customary twenty “once-overs” of my final draft, because I was so tired of all the anxiety of “is this word truly necessary??” and so on.)

The vast multitude of aspiring authors out there is often used as a cautionary tale in writing how-tos and advice articles. Agents talk about how many hundreds of submissions they receive; writing contests and magazines have turn-around times of 3-6 months due to volume. At first, I interpreted these tales as saying, “you’re one among a countless throng, but if your work is perfect it may rise above the rest.” A lot of the advice on the internet supported this idea, because grammatical and structural perfection is something nameable and teachable (to some degree, at least), whereas other aspects of writing aren’t. That interpretation drove me to work very hard at editing and learning and polishing, but it also made me bitter, because every day I saw articles and stories published that didn’t seem quite as perfect as mine.

Now, I’ve come to realize that we don’t pick out one star among others because it is perfect. It’s so far away — just as a first draft is far from a finished product — that we might not be able to say if it was technically perfect at all. Instead, a lot of winning contests and landing deals is luck. And I don’t mean that in a “it’s completely random, why even edit” sort of way (though I do think one can edit too much). I still think you have to put your best work out there, but now I recognize that so many other factors — what the reader is feeling, what particular unnamed thing they’re looking for, celestial winds — come into play. To use a different metaphor, you can’t just shoot once and hit the bull’s-eye, no matter how carefully you set up and aim. You’re far better off firing shot after shot, day after day, and being open to the fact that you might end up hitting a target you didn’t even see in the first place.

And that’s why I’ve set myself yet another goal for 2021: send out one short story a week, be it to a contest, magazine, or online platform. I’m keeping it as a loose goal, because sometimes I tend to become too deadline- and checklist-oriented and get lost in a stressful spiral. (Hence the danger of Submittable, a website designed to give me more tasks I’d never even heard of to check off!) But still, I think this is an important and under-discussed part of “putting yourself out there”: more often than not, you can’t just try one avenue and find success. You have to try so many things, and maybe a few successes along the sidelines will help your progress overall.

It’s hard. It’s also the sort of thing that a lot of inspirational speakers and concerned on-lookers try to warn us. But, I suppose, some lessons you have to learn on your own. 🙂