The Road(s) to Publication

This is the seventh in a series of articles written by Farah Ghuznavi as Writer in Residence at the Commonwealth Writers website, based in the UK. Commonwealth Writers is the cultural initiative from the Commonwealth Foundation, and Farah is their first Bangladeshi Writer in Residence.

Revision is your friend: I just know I'm not going to make myself popular with this one! But the truth is, there is no way of making your words sing unless you are willing to revisit and revise what you have written more than once. I have met many aspiring writers who send out an insufficiently polished draft, without realising that by doing so they are in fact sabotaging their chances of being published. Your story needs to be the best version possible in order to stand out against all the competition it will face for the attention of editors and publishers.
My short story 'Getting There' has been published three times so far: in the US, the UK and India. In the most recent version of the story, which appears in the Lifelines anthology published by Zubaan Books, two scenes have been significantly rewritten, reflecting what I have learned since I first wrote the story four years ago. And while I'm not suggesting that anyone should be a raving perfectionist (in my case, let's face it, with the stress on the 'raving'), the truth is that 'Getting There' has been through a total of around twenty revisions since its first incarnation, about five of them substantive. So be prepared to revise your work, polish the working draft, take a break, and repeat the entire cycle as necessary. For each painstaking round of revision – and to be quite honest, I much prefer the process of doing multiple revisions to the anxiety of vomiting up the first draft – you will significantly improve your chances of selection.

Source: Photo: Prabir Das

Try to give something back: Writers talk (and hear) a great deal about the need to network effectively, and it is undoubtedly useful and interesting to communicate with your peers. But there is another aspect of such communication that is severely underrated – that of making a contribution to the community(ies) that you are part of. This is of course very much an individual decision, but personally, I believe it's a good policy to dedicate some amount of time to helping others out.
This may seem counterintuitive in a world where we are already struggling to protect our writing time, and it is certainly true that an author will receive many requests: for help, for feedback, for advice. You certainly can't respond to all of them. And you shouldn't – otherwise you will never be able to get on with your own work. But whenever possible, it is worth providing a little help to a fellow scribe. Among other things, it builds goodwill; except, of course, in the case of folks who consider themselves entitled to everyone else's attention and help. Watch out for those. The hard truth is that there is no reason why anyone should be interested in reading your work – unless it is outstandingly brilliant – if you have never been willing to read anyone else's. After all, no one owes you anything; least of all, the publishing industry.

Keep on keeping on: In the end, the likelihood of having your work published comes down, at least partly, to persistence. Seeking out opportunities for submission requires time. Scouring the Internet for literary magazines that are a good fit with your writing is hard work. There are certainly more opportunities out there than most of us are aware of. The Commonwealth Writers website occasionally provides information on this, and I have also provided links to a handful of other websites at the end of the article. A good way of maximising your chances of finding submission opportunities is by collaborating with others to exchange information, although some people are reluctant to do so. In most cases though, your work will have to win out against significant competition in order to be chosen, regardless of whether or not you choose to share news of publishing opportunities with your immediate network. So it is rarely a zero-sum game.
It's also worth keeping an eye out for trends in the industry that open up new options for publication. For example, an interesting development for writers in South Asia is that there currently seems to be a greater receptivity in India for writing from other parts of the region. Perhaps at some stage in the near future, we will see a committed pan-South Asian readership; if not, just yet, a pan-South Asian publishing industry.

Avoid negativity: One of the hardest things in this business is to stave off the bitterness that can set in after multiple rejections. One of my short stories, 'Tangled Threads', went through a year-long process in a competition in the US, where it fought its way through three rounds of cuts. You can imagine my disappointment when it was dropped in the final round of the award process, especially since I had allowed my hopes to rise (against my better judgement) as I survived each of the first three sessions of culling! After giving into self-pity for a day or two, I reluctantly realised that there was another way of looking at this. The in-depth critiquing process that the story had survived for so many rounds could actually be taken as a quality endorsement of sorts. At least it meant that 'Tangled Threads' was reasonably well-written. I will admit that I still feel an occasional twinge at the memory of that near-miss. But I'm definitely getting better at reminding myself about the quality endorsement part.
Facing up to rejection isn't made any easier by the success of others. It is reasonable enough to feel envy when someone is doing particularly well, to think “I wish that would happen to me”. We all go through that; on a fairly regular basis, even. But it becomes something else entirely when you allow it to dominate your thinking to the extent that you are in a constant state of frustration and anger. Not least because such a frame of mind, however understandable, is deeply counter-productive. I was struck by one of Buddha's sayings, which applies here: “Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.” Occasional envy is natural, but a writer indulges in wholesale negativity at their own peril – at the cost of their peace of mind, and possibly at the cost of their creativity.

Put it out there: We no longer live in an era when writers can expect to be 'discovered'.  Promotion is a reality that every author has to face up to, but there are very different ways of doing it. As is the case with the entire publishing process, there are that things we can control, and things that we can't. I find it useful to focus on the former. So, at the risk of being considered an idealist, I will confess that I do believe in the “build it and they will come” approach. It's worth remembering, though, that creating something of value is only the first step. You have to make sure that you actively put it out there for editors and publishers to discover. But do that only after you have done a thorough quality check of your own work.
In summary, while monitoring industry trends and developing your own strategy for publication is all very well, I'm inclined to think that the most important part of any writer's path to being published lies in the hard work an individual puts into writing and re-writing. The publishing industry is undergoing a massive transition, and no one quite knows where things will end up. So any predictive exercise is likely to be a matter of second-guessing.
Personally, I write about the things that move me, the things that are important to me, and the stories that drive me to tell them. I very much hope that someone will be interested in reading them once I have finished, but I never write them with an audience in mind. If I did, I would worry too much about pleasing that audience and not nearly enough about pleasing myself. And judging from my own experience as a reader, I suspect that trying to guess what readers want – unless you decide to go for the lowest common denominator – becomes a form of Russian roulette.
I also believe that whatever the gimmick of the season might be, readers will always want a good story: something they can relate to, and something that touches them in some way. That story can be about almost anything – but it needs to be convincingly written, preferably without hidden agendas or speculative intentions.
David Foster Wallace has claimed that all writers are slaves to “an overwhelming need to be liked”, and perhaps that is precisely what each of us needs to battle against. Because no story will be liked by every reader, and the attempt to cheat the odds may mean doing an injustice to the story you are trying to tell. Speaking for myself, I am perfectly happy to settle for pleasing some of the people some of the time. Especially if they are the right people: the readers who understand my work, and enjoy the stories that I am trying to tell. The ones who 'get me'.
 
Try out your luck with these folks (no entry fees or reading fees required!):
http://www.openroadreview.in/guidelines/
http://www.desiwriterslounge.net/papercuts/ submissions
http://www.earthenlampjournal.com/ submissions.php
http://sharkreef.org/submit/
http://themissingslate.com/submit-work/
http://www.sugarmule.com/details.htm
http://www.commonwealthwriters.org/prizes/

This article is reproduced with permission from Commonwealth Writers. Any feedback or comments are very welcome at the CW website at: 
http://www.commonwealthwriters.org/post-seven-roadstopublication/
You can read more about Farah's work here: http://www.commonwealthwriters.org/farah-ghuznavi/