Just Wait, or, How a Little Patience Can Get You Published

By Cam Terwilliger

Throughout my years as a reader of lit magazine slush piles, it has never been the high volume of genuinely bad submissions that has bothered me. If you get a genuinely bad short story, you read it, reject it, then move on to the next with a clean conscience. By the end of the night, you don’t even remember it. No. It’s the “close but not quite” stories that get under my skin. Every time I sit down to read the slush pile I know that I’ll find one eventually. It will be a story with some real imagination swimming through its pages, but I’ll be able to tell—about half way through—that it just isn’t working. Maybe it has a strong opening but the prose gets thin later on. Maybe it takes 30 pages when 15 would have done. Maybe it grows enamored with it’s own cleverness, ending with contrived “transcendence” instead of resolution. Whatever the case, when I find these stories, I sigh my sad sigh, then think: if only you could have put this through a few more drafts! You might have really had something! Everything’s in there. But it needs more time. More time to coalesce. More time to harden into the jewel-like thing that great stories are.

I feel like I come across this kind of story more often than I have a right to expect. Though it’s true that most submissions don’t register with me, I do seem to find “a close but not quite” story every time I read. This might just reflect my own deep-seated need to believe in the revision process, since Lord knows that’s the only way I can write anything worth looking twice at. Still, I don’t think so. I think there are a lot of passionate imaginative people out there doing a lot of great work. You’d be surprised, if you asked me, how many stories from the slush pile I can remember.

But I also think there’s a lot of people not doing quite enough work.

As you know, revision is a long, drawn-out process. Yes, in those final drafts we want nothing more than to just—at last—be done with the stupid thing. Still, I think many writers undercut themselves by stopping a little too early. The impulse to send your story off for consideration at literary magazines is so strong, particularly among early stage writers like myself. You just want some recognition for your hard work! Is there anything so wrong with that? Well, not technically. But we have to be careful. If we submit too quickly, our efforts to gain recognition might actually be selling us short in the long run.

With my own work, the distance between a story that is done and a story that is “close but not quite” is often discovered by waiting. Learning to put a story away, waiting to submit it until later, has been a big lesson in recent years.  Even when I’m absolutely certain that a piece is done, I still wait now. It works unexpected magic. I’ll come back to a piece, simply expecting to tidy up its commas, and then I’ll discover the thing I’ve been subconsciously overlooking. I’ll discover the problem that must be righted.

If waiting between drafts is a powerful tool, I’d say that waiting a really long time between drafts is even better. In the past I used to be scared that if I spent a long time away from my story I would lose touch with its impulse, risking the story’s demise. However, losing touch with your story is the best thing you can do. Putting stories away for six months, or more, has allowed me to gain purchase on problems that I would never figure out if I stayed inside the muddle of constant revision. Basically, after waiting, my tolerance for things that are almost working goes down—way down. As I read, it’s as though I’ve come across my story in the slush pile. Almost always, I find it wanting. Except, in this scenario, I can do something about it. 

So please. Before you send off that story you know is your Best American contender, just wait a while longer. You’ve already invested so much time and energy in it. Why not follow through? Why not give just a little bit more? The magazines won’t go anywhere. They’ll be there next reading period. In the end, it could be the difference between acceptance and only writing something that’s “close but not quite.”

Cam Terwilliger has read submissions for Ploughshares, The Atlantic Monthly, Redivider, and The Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Fiction Fellowship Prize. He now works as an associate fiction editor for West Branch. A Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow, his own stories appear or are forthcoming in Narrative, The Literary Review, Post Road and others.