The best piece of advice I got about the life of a writer was from Eric Pankey, a professor who taught at my MFA program at George Mason University. I can still remember sitting in a windowless classroom with fluorescent lighting for his course on the meditative mode, when he turned away from the direct subject of the day and told us we should keep the creative and business parts of the writer’s life separate.
That’s something I still strive for, something we can’t do perfectly but can work toward: mentally and emotionally disconnecting the act of writing from the business of sending out submissions of work. I even try to disconnect them in space and time by not working on applications or submissions in my “writing chair,” by not writing and submitting back-to-back or even on the same day.
This separation can help you experience rejections in a different way, just as a part of doing business. On social media, I see even well-established writers lament when a specific literary magazine has turned down their work. I wish for them that the rejection could seem more like a business sales pitch that didn’t land than a dismissal of them as a writer.
Related to that, take the “business” of writing seriously: Get organized, and keep track of where you’re submitting work. A lot of writers have begun to rely on Submittable to tell them what pieces they’ve sent out, and to which magazines, but with the addition of the CLMP-distributed Submission Manager and the rise in other platforms like Duosuma and Subfolio—as well as the magazines who take submissions over e-mail or through online forms—it’s best to maintain a full list of what you’ve sent out, in whatever way works best for you.
I recommend that because we’ve had a sharp rise at the Cincinnati Review of accepting work but then discovering it had already been accepted elsewhere and the writer hadn’t told us for one reason or another (I wrote about the trend on our site here). One of our former editors, Lisa Low, wrote a great piece about submission tracking systems as well, if that’s not something you’re doing already. It’s good for you and for the magazine editors!
—Lisa Ampleman, managing editor, the Cincinnati Review
Photo credit: Michaela K. Smith