New MFA Week: Submitting to Literary Magazines

Robyn Murphy graduated from the fiction program last spring, one year ahead of schedule. I first got to know Robyn when, a few weeks into the program, she made me introduce her at the annual New MFA Readings series. I needed a piece of paper to write down information on Robyn, and she produced from her purse a business card for a swing-dancing place that appeared to be chicken-themed. The information I wrote on the back of the card was innocuous–she’s from Connecticut, she went to CMU and dropped out of law school after a semester–but that chicken swing dancing card gave the distinct impression there was more to Robyn. Talking more to Robyn, and later taking a workshop with her and having my jaw drop at an outrageous sex scene, confirmed it. It wasn’t until after Robyn had left Pittsburgh in late April to re-join her husband in Connecticut that many people discovered that Robyn was secretly well-published, with stories in The Berkeley Fiction Review, The Cream City Review, Parting Gifts, Barbaric Yawp, and Gertrude. Robyn generously agreed to share some of her secrets and strategies, and here they are below:

I was a junior in college when a writing professor gave me the most helpful piece of advice I have ever received.

“I think this one is done,” she said, handing me back a story that I had written for her class, and revised three or four times. “You should try to get it published.”

For many of us who are writers, the idea of a short story being done can be a difficult one to grasp. We write a story, then revise it a few times, bring it into a workshop, then tear it apart and start again. Bring in the revision, lather, rinse, and repeat. We are so used to making changes that it is a shock to be told that something is completed, and it is time to step back. It helps to have a teacher say it the first time, but when the writer is off on their own, there also comes that point when a piece is done, and the revision must stop.

One of my favorite stories in history is about Hannibal making a surprise attack on Rome. To do so, he had to bring a herd of elephants over the Alps. Getting a story published is a bit like that – after hauling a stubborn pachyderm all the way up the side of a mountain, you have reached the summit and are sitting down for a nice break when you realize that, hey, now you can see the whole damn mountain range. What you thought was your goal, writing a good story, was actually just the first obstacle.

My helpful professor did not give me any advice on how to go about getting published, and it was actually not until I was halfway through an MFA program and with several publications behind me that I met a professor willing to give practical advice on the subject of how to get a story accepted. Certainly getting my MFA was not a requirement or secret backdoor to publication – it was worthwhile for the sake of becoming a better writer, but it doesn’t make the process any easier.

At its essence, trying to get published is easy. Print a copy of your story, pick a magazine to send it to. Write a cover letter – this should start with “Dear Sir or Madam,” and include word-count and a brief description of the piece. I don’t mean “this is a story about a young girl coming of age (with the help of her beloved dog) while being menaced by the inner trauma of her upcoming dance recital.” Try to avoid that. Instead write, “this is literary fiction.” Your cover letter should be as brief as possible. Thank the editor for their time, and end with listing any previous publications. If you don’t have any, here’s what I used to write: “as I am presently unpublished, I would appreciate any suggestions, comments, or corrections.” Include contact information and your signature, and you’re done. (I did accumulate one of each over time – use paper clips, not staples; my self-addressed-stamped-envelope stamps were cute; and to put my page numbers on the bottom right-hand corner) Don’t forget to include that self-addressed and stamped envelope – that’s what your rejection slip will go into.

There are two secrets, however, that will help. I learned these through a great deal of trial and error, though in retrospect they seem rather obvious:

1) You will be rejected. A LOT. Usually with nothing more than a mass-printed slip of paper that comes back to you seven months after you submitted your story, right when you were just starting to imagine that your story had patiently worked its way up through the ranks and was landing on an editor’s desk. I have two accordion-style hanging folders that are filled (and by filled I mean absolutely stuffed to the gills) with nothing more than these unmarked rejection slips. My relationship with my mailbox is one of barely restrained anticipation and seething resentment.

To say to someone that they will be rejected seems as pointless as mentioning that the sky is blue, but it does bear repeating, because the sheer mass of rejections is amazing. It doesn’t get easier, either, after the first few hundred. It doesn’t even get easier after your first publication. It is something that must be dealt with, and accepted. You will be rejected. A LOT.

2) Simultaneous submission is your friend. Anyone who claims otherwise is a liar. Here is a concrete example – when the friendly professor advised me to try and get published, I took that story she had labeled ‘done’ and sent out seven copies. I probably spent the first three months twitching as I wondered what I would do when it was accepted by The New Yorker and Esquire. Both magazines were kind enough to solve my dilemma by rejecting my story – as did the remaining five magazines. It took about a year for those first rejections to get back to me. Had I sent out one copy of my story, then waited patiently for each rejection before sending that story out to the next magazine on my list, I would right now be unpublished, and not yet even through that first list of seven.

Sending out a story requires a system. My system involves making a list of every magazine I would like to be published in, broken into three tiers. In this way, it is much like the system people are familiar with when it comes to applying to colleges. The first tier are magazines like The New Yorker, or Zoetrope – huge publications with years of history that have published Updike. These are places that if I got in, I would probably die on the spot – much like I would’ve expired if Harvard had accepted my application back in high school. Once every publication on my first tier has had an opportunity to reject a story (a process that usually takes around five months), I move to the second tier. These are publications that I would be thrilled to be published in, but not to the point of death. This tier should be a lot bigger than that top echelon, and mine includes titles like Pleiades and The Gettysburg Review. Working through this list should take a while, probably over a year. Then there is the third tier, places that I would be extremely happy to be published in, but this tier should be smaller than the second. This section is somewhat like your list of safety schools. These tend to be magazines that have a circulation of under a thousand and are operated out of someone’s garage – and will, interestingly enough, probably be your greatest source of feedback. The editor of The Podunk Press (no, you haven’t heard of it, because I made that one up) rejected three short-short stories from me before accepting a fourth, but gave me excellent notes on everything.

It is important to mention here that good record-keeping is essential. When you are waiting between five and nine months for a story to be rejected, the last thing you want is for a magazine to receive it twice. I use index cards, each one labeled for a magazine. First I write the month and the story title of each submission, then later on note the month I received my rejection as well as any comments or editors names that were included.

Getting rejected, as you have probably gathered, takes a long time. Sometimes longer than acceptance, which can be a bit frustrating. My first story was accepted six months after I submitted it. To get that one acceptance I sent out twenty-one copies of the story over a year-long period. That is also one of the stories that made it. When Hannibal started out with his elephants, he had thirty-nine. According to my history teacher, he made it out the other side with five. Those odds are not unlike what a writer faces when regarding publication.

The hardest part of the publication process is to wait months, and then receive rejection. There are times, however, when the sting of rejection is lightened. I have a third hanging folder in my file cabinet – it is far thinner then my other two, but it is one I peruse far more often. This one is labeled “ink,” and in it are all my rejection slips that came with notes attached. Some are simple, such as an anonymous “I enjoyed reading this.” Others include helpful information, like “Story showed promise, try again!” with the name of that supportive editor attached. Others are just plain fun, such as my personal favorites “try playing up the Mormon angle” and, on another, “text was too erotic for our publication, do not hesitate to try us again.” The most helpful note I ever received, however, was from The Bellingham Review, and it read “Your story made it to the final round. Only twenty-five stories out of a thousand make it to the finals. Please submit again.” This is something that is easy to forget in the rounds of rejection – that your story, even if it is written to the best of your ability, is one among many that are well written. Receiving a rejection note with ink on it means that your story made someone read it twice, and that it stood out among the dozens of others that that particular editor read on that day. A note with ink means that your story will someday be published, and that it is just a matter of finding the right editor, on the right day, at the right magazine.

Like the idea of getting elephants over mountains, beginning the submission process seems long, unhappy, and hopeless. It is all of these things. But until you begin, you can never succeed in getting through the Alps (and terrorizing Northern Italy for ten years!). And it all begins with realizing that a story is “done.”