How do you know when your work is ready to submit?

By Jeaux Bartlett

You’ve written a piece of creative writing: an essay, poem, short story, novel. Is it done and ready to go into the world? How do you know? 

It’s an age-old question. And, like many things in writing, there’s no single, true answer. (Sorry.)

But here’s what I’ve come up with through the years to figure out if any particular piece is ready to submit, whether that’s to a contest, literary agent, small press, or literary journal.

Revise it (to the best of your ability)

The revision process looks different for each writer and, really, each piece of writing. Sometimes a piece of writing needs a lot of reworking to become Something Worth Publishing. Others might appear more fully formed and just need some polish. 

In Fearless Writing: How to Create Boldly and Write with Confidence, author William Kenower writes that a writer really has only two questions they need to ask themselves: 

What do I want to say?

Have I said it?

So, in your revision process (which you do, unfortunately, have to go through), ask yourself if you’ve communicated what you meant to in your writing. Is there more you can say, anything you’re hiding from putting on the page? 

Get feedback

Get feedback on the piece from trusted writer friends, partners, and/or critique groups. Go into the feedback process knowing what you want to get out of it. Are you looking for misplaced commas? Or do you want to know if the overall arc of the piece is working?

If you want author-focused feedback, rather than whatever your readers fancy giving you, you’ve got to know what you’re attempting in your writing and where you need support.

Print it out

While you’re going to submit your piece electronically and it needs to exist in that form (even if you draft longhand), it needs to go back into hardcopy as part of the revision process.

Printing your work and reading through it away from the screen helps you see it in a different light and process it more clearly.

There’s probably some scientific brain-based explanation for this, but I don’t know what it is. Just believe me on this.

Read it aloud

This is the advice I got from my first mentor in my MFA program (at the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University, if you’re curious), Aram Mrjoian, managing editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review and author of Waterline.

Once you’ve printed out your work (and made any changes, entered them into your electronic copy, and printed it out again), stand up, take a breath, and read it aloud.

When you hear your words aloud, you’ll immediately notice where you stumble, where the rhythm is off, the meaning unclear, the dialogue false or stumbling, in a way your brain slides over when you’re reading silently in your head.

If you’re feeling extra brave, consider doing this at an open mic. Having an audience hear you helps you pay extra close attention!

Send it out

This was Aram’s second piece of submission advice. Submit!

If you send a piece out to five or six journals, he told me, and you get no tiered rejections*, it’s not ready for publication. Revise it some more before submitting elsewhere.

If you do get at least a couple of personalized rejections, it means the piece is likely submission-ready. Keep sending it out to find it a home.

* What’s a tiered rejection? This is a fun bit of literary jargon. It turns out there are different ways of being rejected by journals, some better than others. A tiered rejection is when you get a personalized rejection that says something along the lines of, “We really loved this piece, but it wasn’t quite the right fit for this issue. Please send us more of your work in the future.” If it includes some specifics about your piece, even better!

Advice from some winners

Because Aram, William, and I aren’t the only fonts of literary wisdom in the world, I asked the winners of the inaugural Cai Emmons Short Fiction Contest for their advice to a writer thinking about submitting their work. They won a writing contest, after all.

On entering writing contests specifically, Laura Grange, editor-in-chief of Pacific Northwest Gothic, advises writers to “pay very close attention to the contest’s rules, themes, and the descriptions of what the judges are looking for.” If your story doesn’t quite match up, “try another draft, or another story.”

Laura agrees with me and Aram about reading your work aloud. “It’s an easy way to test out dialogue, sentence structure, pacing, and more, and will help you find weak areas that need some work.”

But don’t rush it.

Give your work the time it needs, advises Liz Danek. “I often sent stories out too soon. There was something unfinished about them and a few editors noticed (in a kind way). So now I try to sit on a piece for a bit longer and give it time to breathe.”

Coming back to your work to revisit it later is solid advice. But you’ve got to balance that with actually submitting. 

“I can always find something to cut, but there’s a point I reach that makes me believe in my work and its final version,” Liz says. “Trust yourself and dive in. Thick skin comes with the territory, but a story sitting in a file or drawer does you no favors.

“Stories are never done,” says Scott Colley. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t submit them. “Once you are done with grammar, spelling, and continuity, the author is the only thing holding a story back. Let go and submit your work.”

The other winning authors concur. 

“Don’t self-reject!” says Justine Norton-Kertson, author of Guttersnipe, Utopian Witch, and Climate Action Tarot. “Find a beta reader to help you scope out revisions. But don’t self-reject!

Jill Betterton agrees. “You can’t win if you don’t enter. Submit, submit, submit.”

Another of our contest winners, Erin Radniecki, a book coach, says, “If a writer has taken the time to craft and revise their short story, they should submit it. Period. Give your short story the gift of being read!”

Write your story, say what you need to say. Print it out, re-read it, and revise it. Print it again and read it aloud. Then take a deep breath. And another. And a third. And submit. 

Image by Pixabay

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