Back when I first decided to actively start sending my work out into the world—instead of making 2 submissions per year—Kim Liao’s viral article, “Why You Should Aim for 100 Rejections a Year” came to me at just the right time. Although I’d not been as much of a perfectionist back then, my goals were still oriented towards getting published. I made lists of my dream magazines and thought about the kind of pieces I would write for them. I didn’t think receiving rejections would be something I would delight in. But Liao’s recommendation–-that we should take a lot of chances on our writing—was difficult to ignore. It, unexpectedly, seemed to be the very thing I (and evidently, by the fact of the article’s virality, many other writers) needed to hear.
And so for the last several years, my only writing goal had been to collect one hundred rejections. I prepared a new spreadsheet at the beginning of every year, tracking submissions, deadlines, and responses. I never managed to make 100 submissions, but I did end up getting both acceptances and rejections, considerably more than before I’d had this goal to guide me.
But now, despite the ways in which this goal has benefited me, I’m no longer chasing 100 rejections every year. Here’s why:
I was spreading myself thin
The problem with a writing goal attached to numbers is that slowly, everything starts being about numbers. Receiving 100 rejections requires that you make 100 submissions. This means expanding the list of publications, contests, anthologies, etc. that you submit to. A basic submitting etiquette is that we become familiar with the magazines we’re sending our work to so that our work matches the publication. This becomes very difficult when our list of places to submit to keeps expanding so that we can make more submissions. I could either spend all my time reading, or I could select publications that I really liked and cared about, and focus on submitting to those—even if it meant fewer submissions and a higher likelihood of rejection.
I prioritised deadlines and other people’s tastes
Taking a publication’s tastes into consideration means matching it to a piece of writing which we like and are proud of—and not by writing solely for the publication’s tastes.
Sometimes, that approach can help, especially when beginner writers are still exploring what kind of a writer they are, or when we’re trying something new. But with a decade of writing behind me, what I needed was to finally, finally work on the stories and essays I’d always wanted to write but hadn’t found (or made) the time for because I was too focused on writing something that would be accepted by this publication or that contest.
In other words, I was writing (or editing my older manuscripts) to get acceptances, rather than writing to write. The goal was driving me in a different, anxiety-filled direction, instead of helping me overcome the anxiety of publication or starting work that mattered to me!
Are you a writer if you don’t publish your stuff?
I’d always wanted to be a prolific writer. In the beginning years, I equated “prolificness” with “number of publications”. My one dream was to have a “Bibliography” page on my blog that would take several minutes to scroll through, something I’d done myself on a lot of writers’ websites.
It was only when I looked back recently, at my blog archives, my portfolio, all the dozens of manuscripts I’d printed to edit, that I realised that actually, I have been prolific. Sometime after my beginner years, I’d realised that what bothered me the most was that I left a majority of the stuff I wrote incomplete. I thought I couldn’t do plot or didn’t understand essays. What I wanted to do the most was to finish the things I started writing.
Several years later, this is still my goal. I want complete pieces so that I can say I have created a whole thing. Whether or not it gets published doesn’t even occur to me at times. All I want is the wholeness of a story or an essay, not incomplete drafts that feed my inner Demon of Perfectionism.
When you’re a writer, chasing publication seems a given, obvious goal–are you even a writer if you don’t publish your stuff? A decade on, with each year varying wildly in terms of work completed and pieces published and still with no goals to write a book, I can say that the answer to that question is yes. A writer is a person who writes, after all. Publication is something that comes after, and only if we want it to. It’s not a prerequisite. One can be a prolific writer without having published what one has written.
My writing needed qualitative, not quantitative, changes
Attaching numbers to my writing has also been unhelpful because my writing needs qualitative, not quantitative changes. The problems that my practice showed would not be solved merely by submitting stuff I’d already written. What I needed was to practice with direction. I needed to change my inputs–-by reading physical books, interacting with the real world–-and to write about things I’d never written before, rather than staying in my comfort zone. I needed to take my craft beyond writing descriptions, something that had turned from a skill into an indulgence. I needed to reinvigorate my vocabulary by not using the limited set of words I’d been (over)using these past few years. I needed to trust myself more to produce different, better, non-repetitive stuff.
And chasing a high number of rejections wasn’t going to help me with that. I didn’t need the confidence to show my writing to others, which I’d been doing for years, but the discipline to take care of my craft, nourish it so that it could nourish me, rather than frustrate me because I was too driven by a goal that was not actually mine.
Bio: Ratika Deshpande is a writer from India. Her work has appeared in Authors Publish, Reactor Magazine, the Brevity Blog, and other platforms.
