I want to talk for a bit about the strange
ritual of submitting work to literary journals. There is so much about it that
remains utterly arbitrary. I ask myself: why do I enter my work into these literary
beauty pageants that feature work from writers who are more educated, talented,
and inspired than me? Why, too, is the work that ends up being accepted so often
the stuff that I feel is not the best or most exciting and is certainly not the
work that I expected to be popular or trendy. I sometimes feel like the writer
in one of Akutagawa’s stories who is asked to write an eulogy for a person that
he was barely acquainted with, and he slaps together a trite, mawkish, flippant,
and affected piece, only to find that it gets a sincere and powerful emotional
response when it is read at the funeral. On the other hand, a short story that
he has just published is torn to shreds and cruelly mocked by a prominent
literary critic, leaving him to wonder how a piece of writing that he put
together with no real effort or dedication has succeeded so well with its
audience while a work that he poured his heart and soul into did not.
Every writer who submits work must decide when a piece is ready to be
reviewed by editors and be able to fly on its own. I suspect that this moment
comes for most of us when we feel that everything “works” in a piece of
writing, the language, the story, the pacing, and the ending. But I know there
are works I have written and carefully edited that I immediately wanted to
improve upon as soon as they were published.
A word here, a comma there, a bit of added color. I am constantly making
little changes even after a piece has been published, perhaps because I’m
secretly hoping for the opportunity to one day publish a “canonical” version,
perhaps in a book. One of my children is a filmmaker, and he says that he
always sees small details in his films that he would like to change, “mistakes”
that probably nobody else ever even notices, once his work is in the public
eye. But where does the perfecting of a piece end? I think of the painter
Apelles in John Lyly’s Elizabethan drama, Campaspe, who, when asked by
Alexander the Great when his portrait of Campaspe will be finished, answers, “I’ll
never finish: for always in absolute beauty there is something above art.”*
I think that anyone who does a lot of submitting has probably made
mistakes in carrying out the submission process, which is almost always done
these days by email or through a submission manager. Some mistakes are the types
of things that would have been easier to catch in the days of paper submissions
(something that I was briefly familiar with at the beginning of my writing and
submitting endeavors, before submission managers became the thing). But maybe
submission managers and email are really not to blame for my mistakes. I’ve
sent cover letters with the wrong story name, and I have even sent the same
story or poem or essay—I can’t remember which—to the same journal twice, and
I’ve done a host of other things which probably cause editors to question not
only my professionalism but also my sanity. On every occasion it’s been accidental,
but it still speaks volumes about my ability to carry out simple tasks. And I
know that editors are busy people trying to do their best while being snowed
under by endless submissions from people like me. Submissions are always a
gamble, but I’ve probably not helped my odds on more than one occasion by—again, accidently—not following a journal's guidelines to the letter. I
continue to submit, and maybe make an occasional mistake in the process of
doing so, but it’s a necessary step in getting my work out into the sprawling
literary world.
