Publication Is Not the Point of Writing

A thought inspired by learning chess

I’m not sure I’ve told y’all this but I enjoy picking up new things I’m not naturally adept at, because this allows me to get back into the mindset of learning for learning’s sake and makes me appreciate the training I’ve had as a writer--I teach a “Dance As Writing” class to MFA writers at Sarah Lawrence for exactly this reason. Lately I started learning chess, where folks are constantly worried about their rating, the number that signals to others how good they are--one is usually rated 1,000 to be considered an intermediate player and I’m around 700 right now, so I have lots of room to grow!

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

I read a chess article recently that calls one’s chess rating one’s “shadow,” and makes the point that there’s no reason to be worried about your rating because your rating is just an external marker of your ability; if you focus on getting better then your rating will naturally follow. It occurs to me that for writers, the equivalent of “rating” is “publication.” There’s no point in worrying about getting published, or, if you’re already published, getting published in a specific venue or a specific tier of publication, because publication is just a shadow of your skills as a writer. Therefore, all you need to focus on are sharpening your skills, and the publications will follow.

I’m not saying publication has no value--of course it does. Publication after all is what allows writing to become financially sustainable as a career. But its value only follows one’s writing ability, and it is in that sense that publication is just a shadow of one’s skill. So sure, of course we want to send our work out to journals and magazines, agents and publishers, but there’s no point in worrying once we’ve done our best, because that distracts us from working on our craft, getting better and better so that, whether or not our work gets accepted, we continue learning and growing as writers.

A final anecdote: I submitted short stories regularly while I was doing my fiction MFA in 2007, but never got an acceptance. I continued writing stories and intermittently submitting without success, then stopped submitting around 2012, but I kept writing stories, and just focused on getting better, as well as getting a feel for when a story is publishable. Then a decade later around late 2021, after having had a whole ass career as a journalist, I ended up writing a story that I judged to be publishable, and submitted it. It got accepted so I started writing more, and I’ve ended up publishing stories regularly and writing a collection, because I’d spent the previous decade just focused on getting better rather than obsessing about getting published. I wonder how much sooner that would have happened if someone else had given me my own advice!

Until next time,
Meredith