Different writers take different approaches to their careers. There’s no wrong way to pursue your literary goals—some folks want bestsellers and big advances, some folks want more control over their own writing, some folks want to self-publish and some folks want to publish small, smart books. Some folks want to stick with short stories, some people want to spend decades working on a single, epic novel.
You do you. Personally, the only thing I don’t understand about other writers are people who don’t try to basically publish everything they’ve written that’s any good at all.
Paper the World
Me, I basically plan to publish everything I’ve ever completed, even the stuff that is pretty terrible, even the obvious juvenelia. I’ll put out a self-pub book that’s 5,000 pages long called SOMERS SUCK and it will just be all the awful stories I wrote plus several awful novels, plus all that poetry I wrote when I was in my tortured 20s. The world may never recover.
I’m only slightly kidding. I firmly believe that writing—or any creative endeavor—should ultimately lead to getting your work read or viewed or listened to by as large an audience as possible. I believe that if you wait for your work to be polished and perfect enough you will wait forever, for the simple reason that everything I wrote five years ago seems awful to me today, but that is a moving target. The stuff I’m writing today will seem awful five years from now. So judging your own work is a loser’s game—just get it out there and let the world judge you.
So, I submit most of the short stories I write. I have inflicted some mediocre novels on my agent. All in the hopes that maybe I’m wrong about how mediocre they are—after all, we’re the worst judges of our own work, as you may have noticed.
Oh, sure, there are some things that even I know are too terrible to submit. Slowly, short stories I once liked drop off the submission list as I rack up rejections and slowly realize they weren’t very good to begin with. And novels get retired too—although sometimes resurrected if I happen to see an opportunity. But I more or less intend to publish everything, and I put a lot of constant effort into that goal. I’ll likely never achieve it, but I think it’s useful as a career motivator.
Also, I’d love it if people in the future started wearing T-shirts that read SOMERS SUCK. Actually, that would be cool right now.
Another way to think of this: The more stuff you submit, whether flash fiction or short stories to magazines, or novels to publishers, the greater chance you have of *something* being published. If you never submit anything, you’ll never be published. So what have you go to lose?
(Apparently a “t”–that’s what I lost in my last line: So what have you goT to lose? 🙂 )
HA!