This weekend I submitted four stories to over twenty different journals. The stories were ready to go out. They had either been rejected and needed to be resubmitted or had been finished recently and had to be sent out. I watched my Submittable list accumulate. I entered my submissions on Duotrope. And for a minute I felt proud. For a minute I felt like I used to feel when I would go back-to-school shopping and would line all of my items up on my bed when I got home: shorts, t-shirts, folders, and crayons.

It felt like possibility. It felt like hope.

And then I spent the rest of the weekend obsessing over my submissions. It’s like going back to school, too, in that the reality sets in quickly: you’re no more popular than you were the year before, 6 a.m. doesn’t feel any later, you still miss the bus almost once a week, and Jimmy Whittle still makes a list of the girls who got boobs over the summer.

I checked Submittable as frequently as I checked Facebook. I refreshed the recent responses on Duotrope.  I thought about where I submitted my work and what the editors would think. I imagined how the piece would fit in with the journal’s aesthetic. I wondered whether or not my work was too experimental or too trite or too coy. I worried that my work was too wrong for the journals I submitted to, too wrong for any journal, really, too wrong to be read by anyone at all.

It was all I could think about all weekend, even when my boyfriend took me to the fair, even when my mother called to tell me that she was sick, even when I was lying in bed and supposed to be asleep. “I want it so badly,” I texted to a friend a few days ago. “Doesn’t that count for something?”

And then I read a blog post written by the lovely Melissa Sipin, in which she quotes Junot Diaz:

“The whole culture is telling you to hurry, while the art tells you to take your time. Always listen to the art.” 

Oh, I thought when I read that. The art. My writing. And I felt whatever had been tightening inside of me all weekend start to relax. Because in all of that time that I had been revising cover letters and reading submission guidelines and refreshing Submittable, I hadn’t once thought about my writing. I hadn’t revised the strange little bit of magical realism I wrote last week. I hadn’t worked on the story that was due on Thursday. I hadn’t touched my thesis that had been returned to me with comments last week. All I could think about was being published.

Last semester, my professor showed us the notebook she used after her MFA program to keep track of her submissions. It was a tattered little thing, each page yellowed and covered with notes for each of her stories: dates of when she sent them out, the journals she sent them to, and how long it took for them to be rejected. She paged through the notebook and read some numbers out loud to us. “This story was rejected thirteen times before it was accepted. This one . . . twenty-two times.” I could see from where I was sitting the different ink colors she had used to keep track of her rejections and how the dates extended into years down the page. “This one,” she said, counting, “this story was rejected fifty-one times. But then it got me a Stegner.” We all sat and stared at this history, this rap sheet of her writing life. When she closed it, she sat up straight and was emphatic: “You have to send your work out. You just have to. When you get a rejection, send it out again. Eventually,” she said, “you’ll barely feel it.”

It’s not really a question, is it? Sending our work out is necessary. It’s something that, when the work is ready, we need to do. But this aspect of our lives as writers is often in direct conflict with the writing itself. Submitting our work is all about cover letters and word counts and first serial rights and self-promotion. It’s all about getting your work into the right hands and getting your name out there. And, while we may hate to admit it, we should: it’s also a lot about us as writers, about our egos, about our pride, about our need for validation in this life of creative insecurity and self-doubt.

But all of this has little to do with the art.

So I’m thinking a balance needs to be struck. Time needs to be given to the secretarial aspects of submitting our work, sure, but not too much time. Maybe one day a week. Maybe one day a month if that’s all that you can manage. But that one day is when you will bemoan your rejections. It is when you will eat cookies for breakfast and feel sorry for yourself, and it will also be when you sign into Submittable or Duotrope or NewPages and send your work back out into the world.

For the rest of the week, if you are going to obsess over anything, obsess over the ending of that story whose meaning isn’t making itself clear to you yet. Obsess over the relationship between the two sisters in that strange little piece of magical realism. Obsess over the title of your collection. Obsess over how exactly to describe the distinct buzzing of cicadas in the summertime. Obsess over the thing you can control; obsess over the art.

The rest is out of our hands.