Mistakes You're Making That Screw Your Writing Career: Ways You Can Undo Them and Get Published
Here’s what I have to say about some moves I see folks making that may cause setbacks on their writing paths. But, luckily, it doesn’t mean the end…take a look at the following tips to help get you back on track and moving forward.
Not Submitting to Competitive Journals
The way to success is to aim high. Here’s a photo example of what my Submittable account looks like at any given time. You’ll start to see results when you broaden the scope of your submissions.
I always tell my mentees to submit to a good mix: top tier, middle tier, and smaller journals and presses. Listen, I could scroll through a whole slew of rejections I had to muddle through before that New Yorker acceptance came in, people.
Plus, the more you submit the stronger your submitting chops are becoming. Your name is sticking to the walls of the minds of readers. You’re doing the necessary work.
Publishing with Unsupportive Presses
So often I see poets putting together and publishing chapbooks with unsupportive presses—meaning they do very little to help guide you through the process or don’t have the resources or funding.
Publishing individual poems in excellent journals is even better—oftentimes you’ll get even more attention and networking possibilities. Don’t be afraid to ask some of your peers or favorite writers where they have published and what their experiences have been.
Failure to Network and Keep Up Social Media
Social media and networking in general is so important to succeed in the publishing world. In reality, it’s pretty much imperative for any business these days—from a new café to any solo entrepreneur.
I always suggest keeping active platforms on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook if you find your community active on any of those. Once you start up these platforms, try to keep up with a posting schedule that fits your lifestyle—whether it be 2-3 posts per week or month—as long as it’s consistent.
One last note I’ll leave under this category is don’t forget to interact with other folks’ content! Remember, you’re building a community around you and the only way to support that community is to build each other up in a communal way. So don’t forget those likes, comments, saves, shares.
Being Entitled, Whiney, Arrogant, or Mean
Maybe in the 1970’s or 80’s people went around being rude to each other in order to gain upwards mobility. Today that is not the way you navigate the literary scene! The writing world seeks compassion and kindness towards others—focus on treating those around you well and the same will come to you.
Publishing Too Much, Too Quickly
This is a quick career-ender. I see this happening all too often with younger writers—they gain a sizable amount of traction very quickly and then burn out or get quickly forgotten. Instead, focus your efforts on something more longterm. A steady and consistent rate is better than a quick zap and fizzle. Take your time. You have it.
Not taking risks
That being said…do take risks! This links back to aiming high. Worst case scenario whatever you applied to or pitched doesn’t work out. That’s ok, move on. Move on to the next one. One of my mentors, a highly successful poet today, once told me that they applied for the Guggenheim Fellowship 11 times before receiving it! 11 times! Each time they submitted, that was a risk worth taking. Be persistent.
Not Giving Back
Linking back towards building community: you’re cultivating it and it will take care of you once you do so. So not only does that mean building those up around you, it also means taking part in workshops, conferences, etc. Be active and participate. You’ll find it has a reciprocating effect.
Those are my tips for success! Best of luck!
How do you write about everything from joy in response to death to a first blowjob? Find out in January’s workshop! 😈
How do we question and harness retribution and anger in our poems? How do we pull light and heat from rage? Mostly, how can we get away with being our best mean person on the page while honoring our own ethics, integrity, humor, and readers? In this workshop, be prepared to curse, apologize for sins you’re secretly glad you committed, and reveal edgy confessions.
Throughout this eight-week generative course, we’ll explore various poets (more on that below) who manage to get away with risky confessions, potentially volatile statements, and controversial revelations. What keeps us as distant readers engaged? When are we turned off?
Is there a way we can ethically invoke shock, discomfort, AND compassion toward ourselves, our subjects, and our readers?
A good part of the class will then be devoted to creating our own virtuous “mean-person” on the page through a series of optional, guided writing prompts. You’ll also explore free-verse and lesser-known poetic forms and themes, including the golden shovel, cento, ottava rima, and abecedarians.
Here’s a preview of the many facets of ethical bitchiness:
Complicity—nobody gets off the hook
See the fearless humanity in the other entity
Humor
Essential Information
Metaphor as a vehicle for transformation
More to be discussed in course…
Each week will focus on a central theme of our ethical bitchiness. For example, one week we may focus on sex, the next week, trauma, then family, race, etc. We’ll be discussing a multitude of poets, such as Laura-Anne Bosselaar, Wanda Coleman, Ocean Vuong, Kim Addonizio, and Tommye Blount.
Let’s take a look at several ways Meg Kearney shocks her reader in “First Blow Job”:
Suddenly I knew how it was to be my uncle’s Labrador retriever,
young pup paddling furiously back across the pond with the prize
duck in her mouth, doing the best she could to keep her nose in the air
Right off the bat we have humor: Kearney compares herself to a dog, and metaphor as a vehicle for transformation: it’s clear (especially as we continue reading) that the speaker is using the act of a swimming dog to mean something else in the speaker’s life. Ending the stanza with “doing the best she could to keep her nose in the air” is our first cue that this comparison is leading us somewhere deeper.
so she could breathe. She was learning not to bite, to hold the duck
just firmly enough, to command its slick length without leaving marks.
She was about to discover that if she reached the shore, delivered this
We see complicity—nobody gets off the hook with lines like She was learning not to bite.
duck just the way she’d been trained, then Master would pet her
head and make those cooing sounds, maybe later he’d let her ride
in the cab of the truck. She would rest her chin on his thigh all the way
home, and if she’d been good enough, she might get to wear
The rhinestone-studded collar, he might give her a cookie, he might
not shove her off the bed when he was tired and it was time to sleep.
In the last line, we see the fearless humanity in the other entity as the speaker humanizes the subject. We get the first humanizing description of the subject: “he was tired”. The speaker gives weight with the placement—the one offering from the inside perspective of the subject appears in the last line, leaving the reader to chew on that the longest.
For more discussion points like this, sign up for the workshop, through Larksong Writers Place, to try your hand at excavating your own shocking self or ethical bitchiness on the page. We’ll interrogate other poets as well as each other’s work. See you there!
Poetry and Publicity—What’s So Important?
I am going to tell you about the importance of self-promotion. As poets, why must we blow our own horns and sing our own praises?
One of the craziest outcomes of sharing your own accomplishments, is not only propelling your own poet path, but also encouraging folks around you to strive for more. In turn, that also amplifies the poetry community even more—more recognition of the poetry world allows it to grow bigger and better.
Make it a practice to share your accomplishments—blast it out on social media, shout it from your window, or shoot it out to all your group-texts—even if it’s small! No success should go unnoticed. This is how poets have to do it—building ourselves up and in turn, reaching out a hand and bringing others to the top with us.
There was a time I found myself getting pissy because I'd see people always getting asked to do readings, conferences, etc., and I was feeling left out until I realized that I had to speak up on my own behalf, even if it felt terrible and awkward and shameful. I now know that those emotions is just the ego trying to keep me safe.
Once I began pitching myself—posting, etc—I stopped being invisible, and maybe that too was equally scary. But I began getting asked to do things. And though we cannot always 100% influence one's career trajectory, refusing to remain silent is a surefire way to give our best shot at being seen and heard - if that is what you want.
Some people just want to put writing in a spiral notebook in a drawer and there is nothing wrong with that. But if your goal is to connect with distant readers, then start with family, friends, and keep going from there.
But, Maria, I don’t yet have the published work to laud!
Before we praise first we submit, submit, submit. A great place to start excavating the various sites to submit is Entropy Mag, which puts out a list of where-to-submit places and updates every three months. Take a peek—there are still tons of journals, presses, awards, fellowships, and residencies to apply to before the end of December.
Ok, but what if I get rejected?
One of the most surprising things to ever happen to me early on in my writing career was when a highly-published poet I knew showed me their Submittable account—the pages and pages and pages of grey little declined boxes scrolled by with the occasional blip of a green accepted.
If you want to publish, the key is consistency.
Rejection is fuel—it pushes you to move on to the next opportunity. Harness the anger and catapult yourself to the next opportunity before the anger fizzles too long into resentment. It’s like cooking caramel, you must catch the heat at precisely the right time—just enough heat brings sweetness...too long on the burner and it turns bitter. Of course, the bitterness can help you too if it pushes you to get stuff done.
Pitch yourself
As a poet you can hardly be passive. Almost all “successful” (a term we’ll use here as someone who is comfortable with themselves and their work and also is somewhat published) have had to land opportunities themselves.
Poets, compared to fiction and non-fiction writers alike, are less likely to use agents. Why? According to Kevin Larimer in Poets & Writers, it may be due to a myriad of reasons. One of them being that literary agents usually get bigger pay-offs from longer works of fiction than they do from books of poetry.
However, it looks as though currently there are “now more early-to-midcareer poets with literary agents than ever before.” This may have to do with the increasing relevance of poetry, as people turn more and more to poems to speak to hardships like the Black Lives Matter movement and the Covid-19 pandemic. Even small victories like having a poet perform at the Superbowl is a big win for the poetry world. (Check out Amanda Gorman)
As a poet, there are other ways beyond an agent, such as hiring a publicist, putting effort into social media, etc. so that we aren’t just reliant on winning contests. Winning contests is not the only way to publish or get noticed!
The point here is that as poets, we have to keep pushing ourselves. The only way is the way forward.
To read more about poets and literary agents, see this article here.
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How are you celebrating National Translation Month?
In honor of National Translation Month, I thought I’d share a little bit of my past experience with translating work. You can find some of my past translation work in Drunken Boat, where I have several poems by Dimitra Kotoula published.
I chose to translate Kotoula not only because she is among a unique generation of poets, but also because of her delicate maneuvering of tonal balance. As a translator, I act as the person in the liminal space between Dimitra’s poems and my English versions. I’ve grown to know and love her poetry, even though she challenges her readers and her work is so different from mine. I understand more of the nuances, and my Greek has improved.
I want to talk a little bit about the process and some of the difficulties I faced as a translator. Firstly, my biggest challenge was remaining true to both meaning and music without compromising the poems' political sensibility.
It has been a challenge to try and render Kotoula's poems in the most accurate light, as they have been written during the current Greek financial struggle, which although is not always at the forefront of the poems, is always lurking at the periphery. There were moments when I struggled to stay as true to the poems' meanings as possible while preserving their musicality.
In order to keep the mood and influence intact, I had to keep the sociopolitical tragedy in the back of my mind while translating the poems. In addition, many of Kotoula's poems are about the act of writing poetry itself, though most moments she prefers not to be explicit about this. Instead, she relies on an intelligent reader's inference, which was difficult to portray as a translator.
While adapting Kotoula's work into English, she and I have exchanged extensive notes back and forth—elucidating images, explaining verbs, and finally negotiating certain mythical allusions or Greek colloquialisms that could have otherwise been lost en route to the English language.
As a Greek-American woman, I had to bring my knowledge of Greece's current turbulent state of affairs, my own clouded memory of living and speaking in that country, and finally, all of the perplexing emotions that accompany being uprooted from one home that I never quite fit into, then transplanted into another one.
In a very real sense, throughout this journey, as a translator, I was going home and getting lost at the same time.
To continue your celebration of National Translation Month, curl up somewhere cozy and check out this selection of poems in translation. I’d also like to point you in the direction of poets who self-translate (an interesting process in and of itself). Some poets to check out are Raquel Salas Rivera, Ana Portnoy Brimmer, and María Luisa Arroyo.
When talking about the process of self-translation, Rivera notes, “Translating my own poetry has been a way of healing my relationship with a bilingual self who struggled intensely to learn standardized dialects of both languages.
For a long time, I was bilingual in contexts where monolingualism was encouraged. My bilingualism was treated by my teachers, professors and peers as something that had to be contained, a dangerous and infectious substance. Each language could spill into the other, leaving unwanted traces and incomprehensible words. By translating these poems, I am acknowledging that US imperialism’s economic impact has led many Puerto Ricans to migrate to the US, where speaking English and surviving are synonymous.” To read more about what they have to say about the process, visit Waxwing.
If you’re interested in reading some self-translated books, you can check out the catalogue at Bilingual Press.
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