Agents & Editors Recommend

Never underestimate the power of professionalism. Be sure to do your homework and learn a bit about the press or journal you’re querying, which is easy to do online. Read all guidelines and submit accordingly, following directions for what information to include in a simple query, the length of a sample chapter or group of poems, or the correct people to whom you should address your e-mails: Please do not send e-mails to numerous persons, for example, unless the guidelines indicate that you should do so.

My best advice to writers can be distilled into one word, in the imperative: Risk. Take bold, huge, scary risks in your work—at all levels: form, content, the sentence. Get addicted to that writerly adrenaline. Leap. Trust that your readers are as intelligent and soulful as you are (and quite possibly more so). Write up to them, never down. Then be ruthless with what you’ve generated; be willing to throw away a lot of failed experiments and submit only what continues to give you chills—or, to use Theodor Adorno’s term, that “shudder” of aesthetic recognition.

There’s an old episode of Marc Maron’s podcast, WTF, wherein Maron is interviewing actor Bob Odenkirk and, at a certain point, they start talking about what it means to be a person versus an artist. Odenkirk says something like: “I don’t care how much fame or acclaim you get. I don’t care if you're Picasso. At the end of the day, you still have to be a person, someone who might create masterpieces but who doesn’t simply rest in that self-absorbed mastery.

One thing that writers should keep in mind is the truth that sometimes publication really does boil down to timing.