Do Not Submit Until: A Checklist
A big part of what I do every week is read and rate other people’s work. I don’t mean for my writers groups, where we usually share works-in-progress (and therefore it’s not about rating but more about trying to be useful to a person who’s trying to make a thing), but for people who believe their work is no longer in-progress and is ready for The Public. I do this kind of work both in the prose world (particularly as an essay reader for Hippocampus Magazine) and the screenwriting world (where I evaluate scripts for Coverage Ink and the CineStory Foundation). I suppose I do this in the piano world, too, through piano teaching and adjudicating. In some ways, I guess all of my work falls under the category of “Evaluator.”
No matter the format or the genre, rejection is almost always due to one of a few common missteps. I want to share them so that we can all put our best writerly feet forward—because I, too, am a writer who submits my work to the mysterious realm of Readers who I hope will take my work seriously and consider it for a next step. (Oh my gosh, what an icky, egotistical and vulnerable thing to admit!) (Oh my gosh, get out of here negative self-talk!)
First, here is some good news: readers are hoping to be enthusiastic about your work.
Reading a whole bunch of scripts or a whole bunch of essays can be a fun way to spend your time, but it’s mostly a lot of work. Any time a writer makes me really enjoy that work is a win for both of us. It’s the same concept in music: typically, when people show up to a concert, it’s because they’re hoping to experience something good. (Sure, there are those who just like to be critics, but we’re not concerned with them!) As a pianist, I struggled with performance anxiety for years, and re-training my brain to believe that listeners are on my team is still something I’m working on—but I know, rationally, that it’s the truth.
Try not to take this for granted: before a reader has even started to read your work, they are rooting for you. They are opening your file thinking, “I hope this one is freakin’ awesome because I’d love to give a solid 100% to some writing today!” Nobody wants to spend their time reading stuff they don’t think is good.
So, why do readers reject your submission if they’re so eager to love your work?
The most common type of submission I see, whether in prose or screenplay form, is a submission that is simply not ready.
I think that as creators, we are often so eager to get our work into the world (even if we would never admit such a vulnerable thing) that we fling it out toward the public before we’re actually finished making it. We don’t always realize we haven’t finished making it, and when we’re so close to our own work it can sometimes feel impossible to know if the thing has actually been made or not.
But here’s another piece of good news: you’re closer than you think.
In my work as a reader and evaluator, it often feels like the pieces or screenplays I read are early drafts. Nine times out of ten, submissions feel like they just haven’t been worked on enough, and that’s why they don’t get passed through the next level of the gauntlet. If we stick with this estimate, if you simply work hard enough, you’re already in the top 10% of submissions!
For what it’s worth, I have never read an essay or a screenplay and thought it was a totally irredeemable waste of time and hoped a writer abandoned their project. A rejection never means: “Stop what you’re doing.” A rejection means: “We don’t think this is ready yet” and/or “This is not right for us at the moment.” It cannot mean anything else. How could it? We don’t even know you. (For more on rejections, I conducted a deep dive on this topic last year.)
Six Steps Before Submitting
To combat that whole “we can’t trust ourselves to know when our work is ready” problem, these are six steps I highly recommend taking before submitting your work for professional consideration. If you take all of these steps seriously, your work will already be among the most competitive out there.
1. Take Your Time
Time is your friend. It takes time to develop ideas, it takes time to put ideas on the page, it takes time to fashion what’s on the page into a coherent experience, and it takes time to sit and not-think and then to think again in between revisions.
Edvard Grieg worked on his famous Piano Concerto in A minor for nearly his entire life. He wrote it when he was 24, but he revised it seven times and “finished” it a few weeks before his death at age 64. I’m not recommending you wait until death to feel like your work is complete (and spending forty years on one project is, well, up to you) but I want to illustrate that the passage of time is a valuable thing. The Grieg Piano Concerto that is known today is the final version—not the version he completed at age 24. (Would he have gone on to keep revising it if he hadn’t died? Undoubtedly!)
Have you ever gotten a first draft onto the page and felt that high of, “I have created something! This is brilliant! I am so good!” and then followed it up with—gulp—submitting it somewhere? Only to come down from the high about 24 hours later and realize with regret that the thing you sent was not your actual finished thing but just a general sense of the thing and now you’ve wasted a submission? I do this on a regular basis so I can personally attest to the value of waiting those first 24 hours before you send it anywhere. After the 24 hours are up, you’re probably going to recognize that you’re only getting started. And if you don’t recognize this, I urge you to pursue another draft anyway, because you’ll likely discover where you’re going as you go.
In her super practical and motivating book Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro from Blank Page to Book, Allison K Williams advocates for the writing of seven drafts before a piece of writing is ready to go. Each one of these drafts can consist of multiple revisions, and she recommends letting your work sit for a week or more between drafts. As I write these words, I realize I unintentionally provided an example of the seven-drafts success two paragraphs ago! So perhaps this works for music, too. (Screenwriters, I’m sorry, you will literally never stop revising your blueprint until you have seen it in a whole new format on-screen, so you’d better get used to rewriting.)
2. Separate Your Self from Your Work
The earlier I am in the writing process, the more precious my unfinished thing is to me. Right now, my two works of writing that are most precious to me are projects that mainly exist as intentions in my brain. When I get their first drafts done, I will undoubtedly feel intimately connected to them and I will protect them like little baby birds who can do no wrong. This is good—we should connect to our work, of course!—but it also means I won’t be in the right headspace to evaluate my work clearly. This is why taking time between drafts is so important.
These are other strategies to get yourself separated from your work in order to see it from a fresh angle:
Read it out loud. You might feel silly, but you will experience your words in a completely different way than you experience them silently in your head as you write. Jami Attenberg recently wrote about the “Read-Aloud Draft” in her Craft Talk newsletter (which I highly recommend subscribing to!): “I cannot stress to you enough how important this kind of draft is to me. It is extremely effective.”
Print it out. If you can, reading your words on a physical page instead of the screen can be surprisingly insightful. I start off every revision with a print-out of my current draft, and then I write all over it and cross things out as I see fit. Some of my notes-to-self are as vague as: “make beautiful” or “this is weird” or just “no.” The fact that I’m not actually currently editing it as I go through the page (since I can’t! It’s printed!) frees my brain up to simply point out where something is not working or scrawl out ideas that pop into mind. When I’m marking up the printed-out words, there’s no pressure to actually make them better yet. It’s the future me’s job to take these notes and figure out what the answers are.
Find actors. This one is mostly for screenwriters—and the actors can be Actors with a capital “A” or a few friends happy to read something aloud for fun. Table reads are invaluable for experiencing the pacing and the voices in your own script in a way that you simply cannot accomplish by yourself. Table reads have taught me that I tend to mentally read my own scripts in a Gilmore-Girls-style-rush. They also force me to really consider the roles I’ve created for actors, which means considering if my characters are people that real humans would actually be enticed to play. This seems silly—surely we try to create interesting characters from the get-go?—but once your work starts coming to life, it’s impossible not to see it clearly, with all its big lovable flaws on naked display.
3. Don’t Be Precious—Share Your Work
When I urge writers to hold off on submitting their words until enough time and work and thinking and not-thinking has occurred, I do not mean to keep your piece to yourself and never show it to anyone. Readers are your friend! Writers groups are the best! Share a first or a second or a third draft with writers you can trust with your baby bird of a project. Ideally, share your work with more than one reader to get different perspectives. If four people bring up the same note, it’s probably a note worth doing something about. Similarly, if four people give you completely different feedback on the same scene, it’s likely that your scene is not working for some reason (and maybe it’s none of the reasons that your readers gave you, but now you are armed with more data points to help you move forward!). You do not have to agree with your notes, and you do not have to take every note, but it’s good writerly practice to be open to them and to consider them.
If getting notes on your work feels hard or turns you into a defensive monster (hey, we all have these moments), you don’t need to consider them right away. Think of your notes as something you are collecting. Write them down, file them in an appropriate place, and don’t think about them if they make you tense. Sometimes I’m not in the best headspace for notes, so I have to go into “Notes, schmotes!” mode, which I find helpful. Once again, time is your friend, and in a few days or a few weeks or a few months, those notes will be waiting for you when you’re ready for them.
It is impossible to read your own work from the perspective of someone who is not you. Ultimately, whether it’s prose or screenwriting or poetry, your goal when you submit your work is to give a reader-with-some-sway a really good experience. So, why wouldn’t you test it out on other readers first? No matter how good you think your writing is, if 10 people read your work and none of them react the way you were hoping for, you likely have more work to do. Conversely, if 10 people (with trustworthy opinions!) are raving about it, go forth with confidence, my brilliant friend.
4. Be Honest With Yourself
When you’re not in the mama-bird phase about your baby project, answer these questions honestly. They can help guide you if you’re at the fork-in-the-road that is the decision to submit or to keep working on your project.
Does your writing merely show potential? Or does your writing actually deliver on that potential?
Are you hoping your work might get accepted based on potential alone, and that an editor or a producer could help you get through a few more hoops? If so, can you identify and navigate any of those hoops yourself?
Is your story sculpted into a polished, coherent, and interesting experience? Or have you simply laid out all the materials to make the experience out of?
If I told you that I only read the first 3 pages of your work, would you respond with, “But wait, it really gets going on page 10”? If so, can you get the heart of the story started earlier?
Is your work as short as it can possibly be? Is every word of it essential to the reading experience?
Can you say what your piece or screenplay is about in one word? Does every section of your draft serve that word?
5. Check Your Bias
This is mostly directed to my fellow white writers, but we all have biases related to gender, disability, race, body size, sexuality, and so many other things that can creep into our thoughts and our written words. The words we use to describe our characters (whether fiction or nonfiction) can be loaded whether we mean them to be or not, and the characters we write with every intention of authenticity might in fact reinforce harmful stereotypes.
These are a few examples of things I regularly come across that immediately turn me off of someone’s work:
women characters who are overly described by their appearance (especially in a script full of male characters who are described more by their personalities; also especially when the description is a subjective word like “attractive” or “cute,” which doesn’t actually give me a visual)
fatphobic language that assumes a fat body equals an unhealthy, unhappy, or unsuccessful person
characters (usually BIPOC) who feel like caricatures in a script full of plenty of people (usually white) who are not caricatures
language that assumes a person with a disability inherently “has it worse” and therefore needs pitying
female characters who are unnamed in a script full of male characters who are always named (“MOTHER,” “GIRL,” and “GIRL 2” are not names—it’s 2023, I don’t know what else to tell you)
Not only do these kinds of things feel icky and offensive, they also signify lazy writing—or at least a writer who hasn’t done all of their homework yet. It’s okay to make bias-related mistakes (you’re going to!) but at least do your best before submitting your work for professional consideration. Check out Writing the Other, the Bechdel Test, and Writing Diversely if you’re in need of resources. And, when in doubt, ask someone!
6. Know Your Dang Audience
This is the easiest one, friends! I cannot emphasize how important it is to understand the vibe of the place where you are submitting your work. Sometimes the “personal essays” we read at Hippocampus are clearly meant for a travel magazine. Sometimes the screenplays I evaluate seem like they’re written by someone who has never read another screenplay in the same genre.
Read and study things that live in the space where you want to see your own work. This is a no-brainer learning opportunity that an unbelievable amount of people seem to completely skip.
That’s it!
This might sound like a lot of work to do, but it’s important to also keep in mind that you are never going to create anything that’s perfect (I know, horrifying). Remember Grieg and his seven-draft process that ended only because he died? Life is about balance and the creative life is no different. Make your work as good as it can possibly be, yes, and win all those readers’ affections, of course—but it’s also true that you do just have to send work into the world and be okay with the fact that it’s a snapshot of where you’re at right now.
Sometimes—after all the drafts, all the time, all the reads—you reach a point where the question is: “Do I really need to revise this piece ad infinitum or might it be better for my creative growth to throw it into the world, see how it does out there, and get a new thing brewing?”
So, at least try. Give it your truest, best effort, and send it on out.
And remember: we’re all pulling for you.
The planner photographed in the top image is from Ivory Paper Co., and it is my most faithful partner-in-creative-crime.
60 Things That Will Land Your Screenplay in the Trash is a helpful checklist for screenwriters.
In case the 40 years Grieg spent revising his Piano Concerto stress you out, here are 20 songs that were written in 20 minutes or less. So, if you’re the next Paul McCartney—go for it!