Ratika Deshpande

I got 33 acceptances and published 194 blog posts in 2024, making it the most prolific year of my writing life. I took more chances; I experimented with writing different stuff. I applied to writing jobs and grants, submitted flash fiction, participated in contests, and wrote articles and essays I’m very proud of. Below are some lessons I learned throughout the year and which contributed to these numbers.

Before I proceed, I must acknowledge that we writers don’t work in isolation; what’s going on in our lives impacts our writing. I went through both good and rough periods last year, and both affected how much I was writing and publishing. Nevertheless, when I remove those factors, this is what helped me make 2024 a prolific year:

Narrow down your list of target publications. If you aim to get 100 rejections in a year like I did, it’s tempting to try submitting to a lot of publications, in the hopes of having a higher chance of acceptance. That may be mathematically true (I’m not the best with numbers) but it’s not the best strategy in the writing world. Familiarity with the publication to which you’re submitting matters more, which requires extensive reading. So if you aim for a long list of publications, you’ll need a lot more time.

This broad approach also creates confusion and overwhelms, and encourages perfectionism. When you have a smaller list, you can study those publications in depth. And with deep familiarity comes the confidence that submission requires because you’re no longer shooting arrows in the dark.

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Relatedly, stop trying to find a better method. Writing, at its core, is quite simple: we must read a lot and write a lot and submit a lot. The how can vary, but it’s more efficient to stick to a method that we already use rather than waste hours trying to discover The One Correct Method to help us achieve all our writing goals. While it’s important to keep developing our skills, we need to understand where it stops being learning and starts being procrastination. It’s an easy trap to fall into and one I wish I’d gotten out of earlier; I’d have written and submitted more had I done so.

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Don’t let the research get out of hand. Regardless of the genre you write in, there will be times when you’ll want to learn more about a topic before starting to write that story about consciousness-stealing fungi or an essay on the feeling of awe. But research is a never-ending process; you’ll always feel like you should learn more before you start writing, especially when it’s a topic you’re not very confident about

But the magic of implicit learning means that we learn some things automatically. So when you’ve learned enough to explain at least the basics, start writing. As you do, the information your brain has taken in will surface on its own. Moreover, if you’ve been reading other, unrelated stuff, your brain will offer you novel connections. It’s a process that happens only as we “think on paper”; writing becomes a tool for the brain to create those links. When you write this way, you’ll know that there’s a lot you already know for a particular project, and you’ll be able to see what gaps still need to be filled. Then you can go and research specifically to fill those gaps—a more efficient method than researching forever and never getting started.

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One trick that helped me get started, especially in the face of overwhelming perfectionism, was to set a timer for 5 minutes and write 5 sentences, as Beth Kaphart suggests. I started—and finished—more drafts than I could have without simplifying the process like this. This article is an example; I was afraid that I didn’t really know what I was doing, but once I started, I kept writing even when the timer went off. 

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The fears don’t go away. You only learn how they manifest for you (such as perfectionism in my case) and learn to manage those (such as by taking more chances rather than self-rejecting my work).

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It’s okay to put projects on hold or to quit them. Last year, I took a hiatus from my blog for Psychology students after I found that I enjoyed writing essays more. I wrote a “book” on writing on my blog but quit it after 20 chapters when I realised it wasn’t giving me any joy and wasn’t taking me closer to my writing goals. Letting go of these projects allowed me to focus on the things I did want to write and publish.

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For the nonfiction writers: don’t look for inspiration in everything you do. Memoirs, profiles, travelogues, essays, etc. come from our experiences and observations of the world. Insecurity and fear can make everything start looking like a potential writing topic. Alternatively, if you’re young, it can lead to a feeling of helplessness that you can’t write nonfiction because you haven’t suffered or travelled the world or had exciting experiences.

Either way, depending on our lives to inspire our writing makes everything feel instrumental. I’ve made that mistake too many times—it stems from a fear that ideas are finite, that if you don’t write about this breakup or that night out with friends, you’ll lose a golden idea. But ideas are infinite; everything in our heads can be remixed in endless combinations to create something new.

As writers, we must remember to also just live. Our lives are not tools or resources—at least, not always. Some things must simply be experienced; if we deny ourselves that immersion, we lose joy, and making any sort of art can become difficult as a result. Our brains and our hearts deserve that space. Giving that to them made me more relaxed, less afraid of losing ideas, stopped making me feel frustrated that I didn’t have the kind of exciting life that would lead to gripping stories and therefore made me dissatisfied with my life, and pushed me to think of other unexpected things I could write about. 

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Some of your favorite pieces will never find a home and that’s okay. Some will need more time to find a place. Others will never do so. It’s okay to hang on to our darlings because we write for ourselves too.

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What else? I quit trying to write every day. I stopped keeping track of how many words I wrote because it was the number of submissions, rather than words, that took me closer to getting more acceptances. Ditto for blogging every day; the blog was not the work, writing essays was. The blog ended up consuming a lot of my attention, distracting me from doing the writing that I actually wanted to do.

And it’s better to focus on the latter, to write the stuff you want to read. When you write solely for the publication and not also out of an interest in a topic, it shows in the quality of your writing and the amount of effort you make to get it out into the world. It leads to failure, which in turn is demotivating. And that’s the last thing you want if you want to be prolific.

And the most important thing of all? Keep the process as simple as possible. Everything else is extra (not unnecessary, but an addition, an enhancement.) No matter your writing goals, the core remains the same: read, write, edit, submit, repeat.

While I’m carrying these lessons with me into the New Year, I’m also trying to look beyond my usual writing habits and let go of certain reservations because I’ve been feeling stuck creatively. Following is a list of some ways I hope to do this, although I don’t have to do all of these all the time:

1. Reading for reading’s sake, rather than taking notes on everything or analysing every text for any essays I could make out of it.
2. Rereading more of the books I’ve loved in the past, to refamiliarise myself with the kind of writing I enjoy reading.
3. Taking fewer notes, to allow myself to introspect and reflect more deeply while writing essays instead of worrying about getting my facts and citations right.
4. Writing what I usually wouldn’t write—a hermit crab essay, a graphic essay, a poem. I want to worry a little less about what my target publications want and sometimes just play with words; see what I can come up with when I write on topics I usually don’t think about, and try forms that I’ve previously resisted trying because they felt too difficult.
5. Also trying not to spend too much time scouring publications’ archives to check whether they have published the kind of thing I want to write. Someone needn’t have done what I want to do in order for me to do it, and I shouldn’t worry about whether it’ll get published before I even write that thing. I want to be unafraid to write stuff I haven’t seen anywhere else before; I want to spend more time writing what I want to read. It won’t necessarily make me a more prolific writer, but it’ll definitely make me a more playful writer. And I love playing with words. 

What about you? Which of these would you like to try? And what lessons  did you learn? Add a comment below!

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Bio: Ratika Deshpande (she/her) just finished her free, online book on the art, craft and business of writing. You can support the project here.