Submitting your writing, explained in Princess Bride GIFs

It’s easy to become disheartened when submitting your writing. We’ve all been there. Even after all the heavy lifting of writing a story or novel, revising it, getting feedback, even working with an editor, you send it out into the world with high hopes. Sadly, there is no guarantee of success, exception maybe perseverance, but even then you know not every story will find a home.

Take heart! Even great stories can take a while to find traction. Take The Princess Bride, now cherished as a classic film. Upon its theatrical release in 1987, it barely made a ripple, and was considered a flop. (For the inside story on what it was like to work on the movie, I highly recommend Cary Elwes’ book, As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales From the Making of The Princess Bride.) But thanks to home video and word of mouth, eventually the movie found its audience, and then some, becoming a cult classic.

I happen to think that in submitting your writing, as in many aspects of life, The Princess Bride has much to teach us.

Have confidence in your writing

You did it! You Wrote The Thing. You revised it, you took it apart, you rewrote it, you polished it. It’s ready. You may be feeling, deep in your gut, that you have created something special. And you have.

You bring that enthusiasm when you put it out into the world, not unlike the joy with which Grandpa wants to share a book he dearly loves with his sick grandson.

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You may also be telling yourself, in the rush of just-having-finished-something, that it is a guaranteed bestseller. All the agent or editor needs to do is look at it and they’ll agree. A guaranteed hit. Guaranteed. Guaranteed, you tell yourself! Hm, “guaranteed” —

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Sadly, there are no guaranteed bestsellers in publishing. There’s only a story finding its audience, and that takes hard work, good advice, and luck.

Send it out

You find your preferred market for your writing, or the right editor, or a likely agent, and you send it out. Go on, there, manuscript! Have a good time out on submission! Or, as Miracle Max put it:

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Rejections are normal

You’ll send out your work. You may not hear back right away. In fact, you probably won’t. Publishing is slow, until it’s suddenly not. Meanwhile, you’re all like:

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You may get a no-response-means-no rejection. You may get a form rejection. Or a personalized one. You may get a request to revise and resubmit. You might even get a rejection that invites you to send something else. Those are all part of the process. It’s normal! You may worry about R.O.U.S.es (Rejections Of Unusual Severity), but I don’t believe they exist.

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Send it out again

So it gets rejected. Fine! You dust off that story and send it out again. And again. And again. Surely, you think, there’s a magic number of submissions at which point it will have to be accepted, right? Some wise words from the Man In Black:

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New projects

Meanwhile, you’re moving on with more writing, because writers write. It’s normal. It’s good! You may feel you don’t have the energy to keep sending out that story or novel that doesn’t quite land. After all, you may say to yourself: “I’ve got 1K words to write today, my darlings to kill, edits to make. In short:

Don’t give up

At a certain point (it could be any point after hitting “send”) you will become convinced that there’s no use sending this piece of writing out. It’s gotten rejected once, twice, thrice, ten times, 17 times, [x] number of times.

You may feel you are trapped in a pit. Of despair, if you will.

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Like the grandson home sick, you may protest that it’s not fair! After all, you did all the right things.

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But of course, like being mostly dead, you may be second-guessing yourself. Your manuscript isn’t a failure because it’s been rejected; you just haven’t found the right home for it yet. So don’t be too convinced all is lost.

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Maybe your writing is just “mostly rejected.” You can keep going.

We’re in it together

Writing is often a solitary activity, but it depends on feedback from others, editorial input, and plenty of other person-to-person cooperation. Don’t forget to help others out! They may be struggling with something you can help them with, even if they’re pursuing different goals. Give them some words of support, at the very least.

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Happily ever after

I wish I could say a writer’s success in publishing, with enough hard work, was guaranteed. (But we already covered that: it’s not.) That just makes the moments where you do find that story a home, or that novel does get published, all the sweeter. Like true love, it doesn’t happen every day.

So keep writing, keep revising, keep submitting your writing. Somewhere out there, readers are waiting for exactly the kind of story you are working on — “Why can’t there be a story about [x]?” they cry out.

Your response:

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