Treat Your Hobby Like a Job: How to Develop Clear Writing Goals (Part II)
I didn’t think I was going to start out like this, but I wanted to thank everyone who stops by this page and clicks the link. As I’ve said before, I’ve been writing, forever, but taking the time to share it on a platform like Medium is very new to me. So I appreciate every follower, clap, comment, and share that I receive, especially being so new in this stage of the writing journey.
Back to the subject here. I left off in my previous post on an ambiguous note. Complaining aside from writing, and treating this hobby like a job, I wanted to also write about how I want to accomplish this goal. Recently I was Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, and it’s a lovely and gripping Creative Nonfiction Memoir about grief. I’m not going to talk about the book because this entry isn’t a book review, but I did want to talk about a very small part of the book — where she discusses getting published.
To recap: the book covers the pivotal point where she’s in between careers. She endures that stage that all writers know all too well — the Struggle Years when she’s without a steady job, much less health insurance, and her publication of an article catapults her into fame and the wonderful book she just wrote. Her essay won a national prize, she said goodbye to her desk job, and with it, devoted her time to her writing and her band, as she’d always planned when she’d attended college for a creative degree in the first place.
When I read that paragraph I wanted to hurl my Kindle across the living room.
All About Me and My Issues
I want to clarify: this isn’t about Zauner or her journey to fame, but rather, a bit about my jealousy at the ease that she describes her journey to fame. The writing-related part seems small — her mother’s death gave her the material for the book. What bothered me is the short description of how she came to write the book and be discovered. In my delusions, it almost came across as though Michelle was just writing at a cafe, like every other aspiring writer when they don’t want to clean their house (okay, that’s just me), and then a powerful literary agent just scrolled past her writing at the table and said, “I can’t see everything because the glare on my glasses is too strong, but I love what you wrote. Do you want a book contract?”
To me, that’s how it comes across, but I think it’s because there’s so little we hear about how writers approach the writing publications side of it all. If we could say that pre-writing and the writing itself are the courtship, then publication is the marriage side of writing. Courtship is lovely and romantic. The perfect slice of cake. That great four-minute jazz tune transforms people into another phase of time. However, it’s short-lived comparative to the amount of time a piece of writing is written and how long it takes to be read. I finished Crying in H Mart in about a week, and a thousand percent sure that it took longer than a week to write.
Publications are the marriage side of writing because unlike relationships that can develop based on serendipity, opportunities, or a rush of the right feelings at the right time, a marriage can’t just happen. It involves planning. I used to watch a lot of wedding shows, and weddings include venues, gowns, attire, a bridal party, menus, desserts, entertainment, etc. Weddings don’t just happen because they’re filled with so many moving parts and other people as well. So it would be ridiculous to compare publications to writing because it’s an apple and oranges-comparison.
I say all that to say that there’s much made of the writing process. We have lists of books to read, and how to draw inspiration. We workshop our stories to death. We apply to residencies for feedback on how great our work is or isn’t. But we rarely talk about how to get the writing itself out there. And I think it’s because talking about the search for a publisher usually means doing some work that doesn’t look so romantic. So instead, we rarely bring it up.
Also, what would happen to all of those, I came out the womb a genius description on the backs of books. Look. I know where most of these authors are published because I can look them up on Al Gore’s internet. The question I have is, how did they get those publications?
Yes, the glamor gives the allure of a passionately creative artist, but it also feeds impostor syndrome.
If it’s so easy for them, their writing and ideas, then what’s wrong with me?
That question has kept me up many nights, thinking about my writing. Along with the other stuff that keeps me up.
All About Me and My Unromantic Goals
The Hamlet based on the question of “To Submit or Not to Submit” has been on my mind for eons. Mainly because I’ve waited for the approval of mentors and faculty for the approval to submit. It’s like I was constantly waiting to be knighted (or would it be ladied?) to receive the honor that yes, I was ready to be a published author because I was writing publishable materials.
While I waited for this goal, my conviction and faith in writing began to wane. Since I hadn’t received those words in my youth, I assumed that for that period of my life, I should write. Leave it on my laptop, save it to my computer, and never show anyone, because I wasn’t ready. I foolishly believed that I’d have those words with me because I assumed that laptops are forever.
They aren’t.
Sidebar: My first laptop was stolen by pirates as well as the hard drive, so I lost all of my writing material from my college days. My second laptop stopped working once I was stateside. And the final laptop I was smart enough to save to the cloud so at least I still have my work from my MFA years.
Moral of the story: The Internet is Forever.
During the time when I was waiting on approval to be “Ready,” I lost valuable time and writing material. I’ve come more into my own voice at my Big Age, so perhaps what I would’ve published in my twenties wouldn’t have been any good. However, I still should’ve been publishing, because I would’ve gained the experience of publishing then, and perhaps, I would’ve had more copies of my writing because it would’ve been circulating the internet, embarrassing me.
Sometime after grad school, I realized that waiting until outside approval to be ready is a social construct. I waited on the approval of faculty and peers because I valued their opinion. Perhaps they were too busy, or too honest, in that they didn’t feel that I was ready to publish. My problem wasn’t them; it was waiting on the approval of others for permission to send my work out. I lost valuable time (and writing material) because I wasn’t confident enough in my own ability, and I lacked so much that I looked for others’ approval instead of tapping into my intuition and sending my work out there.
What I didn’t get is that searching for outside validation is a moving target because you may never get it. I also used this lack of validation to completely put me off sending in my writing, because it didn’t match others’ opinions. Deeper than that, it allowed me to stay in the fantasy that when my writing is discovered I’ll be applauded for being a genius out of the womb too.
Seeking that outside validation kept me safe. It meant I could delve deeper into my fantasies of all the cool little literary magazines that would publish me *if* I sent out my work. But that’s like avoiding asking your crush on a date, then talking on and on about how if you did ask them out, they’d fall in love with you.
It’s a nice fantasy, but does it get you any closer to what you want?
All About Me and My Abstract Goals
As discussed before, I’m an ISTJ, so abstraction and high concepts give me migraines. In order to achieve my goal of publication, I’d need to send out my work for publication, to begin with. Every modern writer has been rejected from an opportunity: whether that be a literary magazine, an agent, or a publishing house. That includes Michelle Zauner, even if she never reveals it to the public. ZZ Packer had a famous story that in her first classes, she showed the 40 rejections she received before she published Drinking Coffee Elsewhere in The New Yorker.
As writers, we can forget our goal and lose ourselves in the abstraction of what could be, as opposed to what it is. That means dealing with the administrative tasks associated with writing, instead of just the big ideas. That’s why last year, I finally decided to stop listening to the nagging voice that I wasn’t ready for publication and I created a little spreadsheet detailing out places to send stories in, their deadlines, all the blah blah blah that ITSJs are known to be competent at.
I thought about the goals laid out before me. Yes, I’ll face rejection, but I have a catalog of work that no one has seen yet, and I want to be published in front of the world. But not sending the work out to magazines meant no one was going to see it at all. I kept track. I had a goal. I sent out works to about 75 journals in 2021. I received 14 rejections before I received my first acceptance. I received about 20 rejections before I published my first full-length short story. Both of my stories were nominated for the “Best of the Net” award. And yes, the nomination is small, but it means a lot that the editors nominated my stories because they didn’t have to.
Now that I’ve gotten some data about story publications, I want to move on to other writing avenues that I haven’t yet explored yet. I’m still sending out literary magazine submissions and diligently collecting my rejections. So far, no publications, but I’m hopeful one will come through in the next year. At least this process doesn’t feel so scary. And while it was very exciting when I received that acceptance letter the first time, that excitement didn’t last very long — only about thirty seconds, and then it was back to life as normal.
At least now, I don’t feel the desire to look for outside validation for publication. And now that I think about it, that desire for outside validation didn’t even will me enough to publish my short stories. In grad school, one of my professors evaluated me, and said that I was already turning in publishable short stories — and I still didn’t submit my work to journals. So that validation that I was searching for was very hollow really because it didn't produce the type of motivation that I thought it would.
I didn’t plan on talking about it on this Medium, but I have a book of interlinked short stories that I wrote in school; I really want to find an agent for this collection. I’ve already paid the money for editing and writing a good query, but I’ve found that I can’t quite move on with getting into an agent’s inbox. I’ve laid the groundwork but I’m struggling with the execution. I sense it’s because I’m struggling with my self-image (a future post), and now, I need to think larger to achieve other writing-related goals.
I’m a copywriter. I’m a personal blogger. I’m a short story writer. I’m a short story author. And I can’t wait to share all of this with you, despite how terrified I am that I sound like a rambling idiot on Beonyce’s internet.
The problem I’m newly having is trying to maintain a positive outlook as I go on with these steps of my writing career. I can make all the spreadsheets I want, but I sometimes feel choked up and once the initial motivation disappears, it’s so easy to just upload my goals to the Cloud and never see them again.
I’ve laid the groundwork to be a writer, but I’m struggling with the outside image.
Perhaps this phase of LinkedIn will be about that struggle.
