To cut to the chase, you should not submit fiction, poetry, non-fiction, or anything else you might submit in the fond hope of getting published because you will lose the will to live.
Your hair will begin to fall out. You will start to appear slovenly, your attire composed of tattered and unclean clothes you stopped laundering from sheer forgetfulness. You’ll become a drunkard, an addict, a hopeless vendor of your own body at discount prices, providing a two-for-one Tuesday for your better customers.
In other words, you will fall apart, going to hell in a hand-basket with the speed of digital magic.
Why You Should Never Submit Material for Publication
The reasons for this are simple. The first is one every writer is familiar with: the chances of having your submission accepted are less than those of winning a major lottery. So the sense you quickly acquire is of pointlessness, the same sense you get when seeing the play Waiting for Godot performed, or when reading the play’s text. You feel the way Bill Murray’s character Phil did in Groundhog Day. You’re in a meaningless loop you never get out of because you never get published.
Another reason for not submitting material is the business of formatting. Do any two publishers have similar submission requirements? Some want them in specific fonts with specific sizes. Some want your name and other information on every page, some want that information on the first page only, and some don’t want it at all—just some identifying info in a cover letter. It seems as if every time you submit a piece of work, you have to reformat it for the specific publisher even though by this time you know you are wasting your time.
Another very well-known reason for not submitting material is the time delay. It’s an understandable one—magazines that accept submissions receive hundreds, even thousands of them and usually have an editorial staff that is the envy of corporations that love cutting costs by cutting employees. You send a piece out. You finally get a response from some over-worked bugger declining the piece only after you’ve raised children, sent them off to university, and have completely forgotten ever sending or even writing the piece declined.
Yet another reason is the request that you refrain from multiple submissions, though this does not come from all publishers, only some. This one makes you scratch your head because given the time delay mentioned above, it leaves you in the position of being able to submit a specific work only twice, maybe three times in a lifetime—if that.
There are many other reasons as well, such as that disorienting feeling of being caught up in a ritual whose meaning was lost long ago, or trying to puzzle out just what the editorial likes and dislikes might be for a particular publication. Exactly what voice are they looking for? It’s usually all but impossible to divine that.
Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of submitting material is the awareness that there are usually very good reasons for the publishers requesting the things they request of submissions.
However, speaking for myself, the number one reason for not submitting material is this: While I am busy submitting material that has a slim shot at best of being accepted, I am not writing.
I don’t know who I am when I’m submitting material but I do know he is not a writer. If he were, he would be writing. This is why I don’t submit as often as I use to and, when I do, it is half-heartedly. Yes, I know I should give it more effort and certainly more thought, but I find it fatiguing and incredibly frustrating because I want to be writing.
There is no escaping the pitfalls of trying to be published. I have no pixie dust to resolve it—if I did, I would not be writing this. I would be getting published.
In the end, this little bit of writing is a lot like the effort to be published: it doesn’t go anywhere. It enunciates a frustration but it does not resolve it.
But I feel better having written it.