I’m going to squash some considerable curiosity & insecurity about my pursuit of writing or publication or recognition, & I’m going to do it publicly.
I want answers, perspective & a red flare shot into the murky, twilight of my interior. A sample of the questions I want answers to include:
What is objectively true about my writing?
- What objective truths about our writing (frequency of articles, the use of the first person, etc.) matter & do not?
- Does a matter of fact (e.g., a tendency to mention a golden retriever in every story, poem, my essay) suggest or indicate that there is an intrinsic value, or some repeating pattern to my work that affects it at all?
Is my writing good?
- Is my writing arranged or organized in such a way that maximizes its potential “goodness” or desirability?
- Why do I frequently receive encouraging, personal, positive proclamations of the goodness of my submissions (a very rare thing) from editors on 63-75% of my submissions to ‘top-tier’ publications, but never get published?
Is there a certain way to sell your writing that is easier/optimal when compared to other ways?
- If I know other published authors, or, put differently, attend the same schools, win the same awards, & meet the same people as other published authors how much does that affect my odds of being published?
- Is there an observable hierarchy or likelihood that someone who submits in March with a .pdf will do better than someone who submits in Sept. with a .docx?
What increases one’s odds of being published?
- Does the typeface, format, style, or identity of the author affect their odds?
- Do metaphors about the x or y appear more frequently in publishable work? Like, do poems that include figurative language abt. the nighttime do better than poems that include figurative language abt. the daytime?
- Does writing this article, or articles of this sort, or promoting this type of dissent—a type of dissent that I think is both ambient & natural contrapposto in any pursuit that depends on the invention / commodification of human enterprise—increase my odds of getting published?
Do publishers (both art house & mass-market) consistently improve, recognize, & challenge their idea of “literature” as it exists & is invented or sold in markets?
- If not, why not?
- If one compares a statistically significant sample of rejected submissions & a statistically significant sample of accepted submissions, should the qualities of a [non]/publishable literature become obvious, evident, or at least determinable?
- If either published or rejected work shares no specific trends, patterns, or qualities with similarly published or rejected work, then can it be assumed that publishers do not have a rigorous, consistent, or logical guidelines for accepting or rejecting a particular submission?*
How can this be objectively measured or investigated?
Objective
I am compiling everything I’ve written in the ten years since my graduation. I’m an analytical person, so it makes sense that taking an objective, measured, metrical assessment of the 1000+ pages/hundreds of thousands of words that I’ve written in the last decade will help me solve something.
Hopefully, it will help me write more freely, more clearly, and more truthfully—even if that lowers my chances of being published. My friends & peers are pretty well aware of my thoughts on the literary marketplace.
I’ll expand on them elsewhere, but, suffice it to say that my writing can not be comfortably sold or pitched because of its form, style, & incomplete nature.
Admissions / Context
I have enjoyed, luckily, tremendous successes—and failure—as a writer:
I am an alumnus & fellow of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which, technically, is both a premier literary program, but also the most selective academic institution in the world.
My writing has won prestigious awards (though not for quite a while, &, therefore in journals that barely exist or do not exist); this suggests that writing is good, in theory.
- I won the Stegner Literary Prize as an undergrad, which at the time, was a big deal—mostly because everyone at the ceremony got a glass of champagne & I was 19 yo.
- My thesis manuscript (Weekending) earned me Alberta Metcalf Kelly Fellowship.
I’ve been published a lot, edited a lot, & written for several publications myself.
- I’ve been a paid writer/critic for The Star Tribune, The Richmond Times-Dispatch, The Millions, & a bunch of other places.
- I have never published a book-length work, despite having book-length-work-worthy writing to publish.
I’m finding rejection less upsetting / disturbing than I used to. I have a well-established & semi-toxic streak of a sort of suspicion & entitlement regarding rejection, but I feel much less intensely after introspection, work, & proper framing.
I write because I like to write, just like I game or hike because I like to game or hike. It’d be nice, for example, to be a famous gamer or hiker, but not being either has not negatively affected my enjoyment of those activities—if anything, it’s probably enhanced it, given that I do not have a field of distortion that comes in the form of praise, critique, celebrity, etc.
Dang, look how much I wrote, despite specifically restraining myself. Apologies. Without further ado:
Still, it’s a curious thing to be published and unpublishable simultaneously; more curious that this spectral qualifiers (published author/writer/poet) depend on the momentary preference (a shifting, opaque, disintegrated hallucinations that lack both an objective correlative & any meaningful consideration of a system that does not depend on taste, privilege, hegemony & entropy to establish or certify the worthiness of literary art) of publishers who mostly are lovely people, or, like all of us, are trying to be—people who care deeply about an industry that is changing, or “dying”, which is not how I choose to describe a shift from potential to kinetic mode.
A live a database of everything I’ve ever written. The first language / written piece comes from weekending, for which I won the x in 2012. The last was probably written on 05/02/2024.