When Are You Ready?

A piece of advice I've read several times in writing books and writing magazines is to wait before sending out one's work. I've read interviews with editors who complain that young writers in MFA programs don't ask them questions about craft or characters or style or plot, but instead ask about submission guidelines. These editors feel like the young writers they encounter really need to focus on honing their abilities before worrying about getting published.

This makes sense. Before feeling like I'm ready to put my work out into the world, I should really take a long time to work at it and get good. Absolutely. And yet, it's tough because so much hinges on getting published. If I had no other concerns, I think I'd be happy enough to spend the next few years simply honing my craft, working on applying all the lessons I learned in grad school, developing my skills more, and then sending out some amazing, polished work when I would be at a point of really being ready. But I do have other concerns, such as making a living. Right now I'm scraping by with two jobs. I'm busy all the time. I have stacks of freshman essays and developmental writing to grade. This leaves me little time to work on my own writing. But if I'm good enough to publish and can build up those credits, then I can land a better teaching job, where instead of teaching four classes at a part-time pay scale, I can teach maybe three at a time with a full time salary and benefits and the expectation that continuing to work on my own writing is part of the gig. So simply out of necessity, I feel like I have to send out my work in the hopes that some of it might be good enough already. Once I move up the career ladder, I can spend more time on my writing, but I have to spend the time on my writing first before I can move up the career ladder. It's a tough bind to be in.

So related to this point, I've been thinking about contests and submissions and so forth. I came across a fellowship the other day that is incredibly attractive and would be a life changing opportunity to land, the Stegner Fellowship through Stanford University. Numerous major writers were fellows there, so the prestige alone would be enough to make a CV more competitive. And the fellowship itself pays a stipend of $26,000 a year for two years with no teaching requirement or any coursework beyond a regular writing workshop and attending visiting writer events and such. The goal of the fellowship is really to provide a writer time to write and hone his or her craft. How perfect would it be to be selected for such a fellowship? But of course it's incredibly competitive. According to their website, they get about 1,400 applicants each year for the ten slots (five in fiction, five in poetry); that means fewer than one percent of the applicants land a fellowship. So my first thought is that there's no way I'm at the level where I'd stand a chance since I'm barely even published, and the $60 application fee is hefty enough that I don't want to simply throw that kind of money away on a dream. And yet . . .

I can't help thinking that maybe I could stand a chance at something like that. Who's to say that I wouldn't be one of the chosen few? I won a fiction contest before that was on a small scale but still against some strong fellow MFA student writers. I've received some handwritten notes complementing my fiction from some prestigious journals, including one that I rank in the absolute top tier. And my work is getting better all the time. If I take my two best, most polished pieces, my absolute highest quality work, and I do everything I can to make them as good as they can be, well, would I necessarily be in the rejected 1,390 applicants? Probably, but maybe not. There's always that chance that I would be one of the ten.

I think about one of my professors who won a prestigious contest for a story collection. How did he know he was at the level where he stood a chance of winning? He had published fairly widely by that point, but he was still a struggling writer, sending out his work and (I'm sure) still collecting rejections. Did he know that his stories were finally at the level where he would win? I'm sure he didn't. But he thought maybe he was there. Maybe that batch of stories would be selected that year. And he won.

So is it better to follow the advice to simply stop sending out work until I've improved even more and gotten that much better? Or should I aim high and try for dream fellowships and submit to dream journals? Each time I go over an old story, I see new ways to improve it, which means I'm getting better constantly, and the fiction I send out now is superior to what I sent out a few years ago, so probably if I wait longer, my work will be that much better next year or the year after. But maybe it's good enough now. But I won't know until I submit it and see what happens.

Will I risk $60 of the money I work two jobs to earn? Should I wait on something like that fellowship and apply next year when I've got one more year of experience under my belt and maybe a few more publication credits? I don't know. I haven't made my mind up about that one. My rational brain tells me not to waste the money. But if I always lived according to my rational brain's suggestions, I wouldn't be pursuing writing at all.