Not-Floundering Friday #6: The Shark-Sleep Model

Cold Truths, Survival Tactics, and Warm Blankets for Surviving (and Loving) the Writing Life

This used to be easier.

Which is ironic, really, because the oceans where writers have always had to swim must have seemed even more vast, the reefs and welcoming caves even further apart. So distant as to seem imaginary.

We’re talking way back in the early nineties, when I was first starting out. The goal, then as now, was never to leave yourself without hope. To create the sense, no matter how illusory, that your career was always in motion. That you were still swimming even while you slept. Like the shark you surely were.

This is the method I was taught in grad school, and that was suggested in all the reference and literary-life self-help books like Writers’ Market:

You took a stack of manila envelopes. In each, you placed a cover letter, and a self-addressed, stamped return envelope to make the rejection of the story you were about to send as easy and cost-effective as possible for the editors (or, more likely, beta-readers) on the other end. Because, let’s face it, they’re busy people, they have to read all this stuff, all you had to do was write it. (Have you seen the Hal Hartley movie “Henry Fool”? Absurd, funny, brutal, and maybe the truest movie ever made about writing. There’s a scene in that about the above which I’ll come back to on another Friday. But see the movie.)

Anyway, you took a copy of your new story, sealed up the first envelope, pasted on stamps, gave the whole thing a secret goodbye kiss or whispered blessing, and sent it off.

And when the self-addressed envelope with your rejected story in it came back— weeks, months, even years later—you didn’t even sit down. You went straight to the stack on your desk, put the copy of your story in the next envelope on top, sealed that up, gave the new submission package its kiss, and immediately launched that on its almost certainly doomed journey.

And that was…good, actually.

No, really. In this way:

From the moment I sent out my first story, I’ve literally never had a day when there wasn’t at least one thing of mine out there somewhere. Far from me, where I could no longer touch it, but where I could imagine it being found. Read. Maybe even loved.

And that feeling— of perpetual motion, of me swimming without any certainty that I was getting or even going anywhere— went a long way, all by itself, toward keeping me from sinking. From glancing around, seeing the vast and mostly empty ocean, and sinking to the bottom in despair.

From floundering, in the truest sense of the word.

Today, there are so many more things we can do (and all of them more efficiently) to create that sense of movement. Truth to tell, there are almost too many ways.

You can throw up a Substack post, say, and then check back periodically to watch the view-counter and let yourself dream people are actually reading your words and getting something helpful from them.

Or you can record a video of yourself reading a story, create a YouTube channel, and post that right up. During the pandemic, the magnificently talented and charming Peter Atkins and I climbed back into our costumes from the Rolling Darkness Revue, a performing ghost story show we did together every October for years, and set about recording low-tech new versions of some of the stories we’d each performed in various iterations of the show. Now those are right here forever whenever anyone wants them.

Have an agent? You can shoot off an email and badger him/her/them about something. If you have an agent, that means they have at least one property of yours, and that means there’s always something you can badger them about. Risky, I suppose (see “they’re busy people” note above). But even a prickly “Yeah, I’m on it, back off” response will serve as proof that they still know you’re there!

Need an agent? Or a lit mag to which you can offer your new story? Or venues where you might give a reading, or MFA programs you might want to attend, or small press publishers looking for new writers? The links above are just to some of the remarkably clean and current databases on the Poets & Writers website. And that’s just one site.

Got genre-specific work? Check out organizations like the Horror Writers of America, whose most important function is to help connect writers to opportunities and each other.

Got your list of places to which you want to submit ready? Almost all of them now take electronic submissions— never mind those stacks of envelopes— and there are portals like the Submittable Submissions Manager that work almost like the Common App for college applications, and will have you dropping work into the ether in no time. Little harder, admittedly, to give your digital file its good luck kiss, I suppose…or what do I know, maybe not. You do you.

You can comment on another writer’s blog post. Fire off a clever tweet and @ somebody you hope will notice you. Who knows, they really might. Or forget the @-ing and just say something smart and kind and relevant on your social media of choice, then get yourself a coffee and settle back to watch those Likes roll in.

If you’re sensing an undercurrent of archness, or at least suspicion about the utility of any/all of the above…well, that’s either because I’m doing my job here, or because you are already definitely a writer. How likely are any of these to “work” (meaning, further your career, get you a big break, get you noticed, or enrich you) on any given day)?

I’m not going to answer that. Because, right, my hope for us all is not floundering.

Also, the reason I said there were almost too many ways to create that career-in-motion feeling is because you could spend your life doing these things, now. Technology and the web give us such a plethora of methods for creating the illusion that we’re getting somewhere that we can easily start to believe it. Or believe that there’s a somewhere to get to, a magical Writers’ Homeland where we will no longer need to do such things, or where others will do them for us.

That feeling is so seductive that it can lure you into thinking you should devote ever more time to all of the above. Instead of writing. Or living.

I say don’t do that. But do challenge yourself to take on at least one or two bits of writing business work at least once a week, Or once a day, even. What you’ll find, I suspect— or at least, what I’ve found— is that only occasionally will any of these actions trigger the response you’re hoping. And even when they do, the success won’t be what sustains you.

But…as with so many elements of this unconventional, frustrating, overwhelming, weirdly wondrous way of making a living…simply doing the work will give you a surprising amount of what you need.

Meaning, in this case, just enough sense of stirring a current to keep you swimming.