Publishing and Persistence

The McSweeney's horror issue, lit mag rejections, and pushing that writing bolder up the hill

I hope you all don’t mind me sharing a little news slash bragging, which is that I’ve got a short story appearing in McSweeney’s first ever horror issue edited by the great Brian Evenson. It’s a truly stellar line-up: Stephen Graham Jones, Mariana Enríquez, Jeffrey Ford, Senaa Ahmad, and a bunch more. You can pre-order it or subscribe if it interests you!

I’m quite honored to be in this issue, both because I love horror (and Evenson’s work) and because McSweeney’s was the first literary magazine I ever fell in love with. I’ve written about that before, but I first read an issue when I was in undergrad and have wanted to be published by them ever since. Twenty years later, it happened.

So that brings me to a little newsletter topic: persistence.

As I said in my last post—Lit Mags and Money (or the Lack of It)—at the end of the semester I talk to my students about the practical side of publishing. Lit mag submissions, agent queries, editor submissions. I tell my students that persistence is the most important quality a writer can develop. Being a genius is great, of course, but when it comes to the business side writers are faced with a ceaseless torrent of rejections. Rejections from magazines, from agents, from editors, from grants and awards and residencies and tenure track jobs. It truly never ends. It can easily grind you down and make you quit. Writing great work is a first step, but you have to persist to succeed.

Anyone who is out of an MFA program more than a couple years can probably think of classmates who were among the most talented who have simply stopped writing. They went down other career paths or life got in the way. I’m not saying that’s right or wrong. Maybe those ex-writers are a lot happier doing other things! But you can only publish if you persist. Every writer I know has abandoned manuscripts in their drawer or disk drive. We all have stories or poems or essays we could never place. The ones who end up publishing are the ones who keep at it.

That’s true in the long arc of the career but also true in the particulars, like placing a story in a lit mag. One anecdote I tell my students is that when I was in an undergrad creative writing class we read an issue of Best American Short Stories, which is an anthology rounding up excellent stories published by various literary magazines in the prior year. In the author notes, one of the contributors mentioned their story had been rejected thirty times by different lit mags before it was accepted by one. That’s persistence.

It’s also a good example of how rejection doesn’t necessarily mean anything about the quality of your work. This story had been rejected all over the place, yet it got accepted at a top magazine and reprinted in a major anthology.

At this point in my career, I’ve been lucky to publish at most of the magazines I’ve aspired to. (Watch out, New Yorker. I’m coming.) But that doesn’t mean it came easily or quickly. As I said, it took me two decades to get into McSweeney’s. Actually my first ever acceptance was a McSweeney’s Internet Tendency humor piece. But it took me two decades to place a short story despite being published on the website many times.

Perhaps another anecdote in the persistence pile: the story McSweeney’s is publishing was previously a “we loved this but not quiiite right” rejection at two big SFF magazines before it was actually accepted by an editor at a third. But that editor quit (before I signed a contract) and the editor that took over said they were shutting down submissions for a while. Easy to get discouraged by things like that.

So if you’re a writer starting out or struggling, the best advice I can give you is to keep at it. Push push push, persist persist persist. (At least if it’s what you want to do. If not, well, there’s plenty of other less stressful things to do in our one precious life!)

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Since my last post was about literary magazines and SFF magazines—and how the lit and genre worlds still don’t speak to each other that much—as a final note here I have to give props to McSweeney’s for being a magazine that has long worked to break down the barriers between so-called “literary fiction” and so-called “genre fiction.”

The upcoming horror issue is of course evidence of that. But McSweeney’s got in the game early. When I said I fell in love with McSweeney’s magazine twenty years ago, a big reason for that was the 2002 issue edited by Michael Chabon:

The issue, which was republished as a paperback by Vintage, mingled commercial bestsellers, literary fiction darlings, and genre writers together in a way that you simply didn’t see back in 2002. A TOC that had Michael Crichton, Kelly Link, Dan Chaon, Elmore Leonard, Karen Joy Fowler, Rick Moody and more side by side was just… unheard of back in the early 2000s. Hell, it’s basically unheard of now.

This issue was formative for young writers like me who had grown up reading both genre fiction and literary fiction back to back and then been told by teachers and critics that they were separate things and never the twain shall meet. It was definitely a big influence on the series of flash anthologies I co-edited like Tiny Nightmares, which also sought to mix emerging, established, genre, and literary authors all together.

Twenty years later, and you regularly see speculative novels competing for Pulitzers and National Book Awards, big SFF writers profiled in the New Yorker, and writers of all types feeling free to swim in whatever genre waters entice them. And I think that 2002 issue helped pave the way…

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If you like this newsletter, consider subscribing or checking out my recent science fiction novel The Body Scout that The New York Times called “Timeless and original…a wild ride, sad and funny, surreal and intelligent.”

Other works I’ve written or co-edited include Upright Beasts (my story collection), Tiny Nightmares (an anthology of horror fiction), and Tiny Crimes (an anthology of crime fiction).