When You Write Something That Pleases You

Snoopy has it right. It is exciting to write something that you know in your heart is well done. When that happens, you are inspired enough to start searching for a market for this wonderful piece of writing. You are pumped up and want to find a place where you can submit your work.

You submit and submit and submit the piece but receive either a rejection or no response. You begin to wilt like yesterday's bouquet. Doubt creeps in. Frustration sets up housekeeping in your mind. You even get angry at times and then you feel major disappointment. All those emotions swirl and twirl until you're dizzy with it all.

Once you get through all that, step back and try to be objective. Read your piece with an objective eye--which is not all that easy to do. Try to figure out why no editor snapped up this well-done story. There can be many reasons besides an editor not liking your work.

It's possible the publication had run a similar piece in the past few months. So, no matter how good your story is, they aren't going to repeat a topic so soon. Perhaps you tried a market that wasn't actually a good fit for the kind of story you wrote. Maybe the story itself is good but your mechanics of writing were not so hot.

The point here is that even good writing can get rejected. If you still feel positive about your story, keep submitting it. But first, do some re-editing and/or revising. It's been long enough since you wrote the story for you to be able to see it from a different perspective.

If you think the story is a good one and it still excites you, don't give up on getting it published. It's not all that often that we get an acceptance on the first submission. When you read a story in a magazine or online that you really like, do you ever wonder how many times the author had to submit before that particular work was actually published? No, we most likely don't think of that but I am certain that many of those good stories have taken awhile to find a home.

Bottom line for me is that it's a great feeling to write something you know in your heart is good. I entered a personal essay and a poem in a contest recently and neither one placed. It disappointed me but I still feel very satisfied with what I wrote and I'll start submitting to editors now. Somebody, somewhere is going to agree with me someday.