On Turning Writing Community, Writing Habits, and Submitting Work Into A Life

No single act makes you a writer. Some thoughts on the process.

Every so often a student will, as they are graduating, ask me for advice about what is next for them. I’ve even wondered if it should be its own class. And I have been meaning to offer some advice to new writers specifically that may also be useful to older writers and so to do so, I’ll describe a few choices and practices that have helped me and perhaps they will help you also.

Me at the first OutWrite Conference in San Francisco, in March of 1990—after my undergraduate degree and before my MFA program. Photo by Rick Gerharter.

Many undergraduate students will ask about the MFA and more should ask me than do. That said, it is not the only path and I do believe it. I also believe most undergraduates are not ready to go on immediately. My standard answer if students ask me about whether or not they should apply to an MFA program is to ask them if they are submitting work to magazines and contests. If they are not, I typically suggest that they get into the practice of it and to build the sort of self-esteem that comes through the experience of getting published or even winning a prize, even coming in on the short list. One of my favorite prizes as a young writer was a typewriter I won through a Story Magazine contest as a runner-up.

Out of context, that advice does sound like taking moonshots before taking more moonshots, and to some extent, it is. And you need to get into the practice of betting on yourself. Applying for something makes you organize yourself in relationship to your dreams and plans. Submitting work makes you read it as a stranger might and to see what you’re doing in some new way.

I tell students this because in my experience, if you go to an MFA program without having done anything like that, you can quickly find yourself undermined just through inexperience. And by this I mean that if you have the feeling of winning a golden ticket that will save you when you get into the program, you are in danger. You are already giving that institution too much power. You will save you, as it were. To believe otherwise is to give too much power to the faculty and your new peers. You may find yourself in a crisis if you feel you are letting them down somehow, more afraid to disappoint them than yourself. I say this because by the time you are in graduate school, you need to know it’s important to be able to disappoint a teacher if you feel you are right about what you need to write, perhaps especially if that teacher is a hero to you. You are not there to become someone’s acolyte. You are there to locate you in all of this and to give yourself what you need to live and work as a writer.

To explain by example, I took my first fiction writing classes starting in 1987. I graduated in 1989, and by the time I got to my own MFA program in 1992, I had done the following:

• Published my first short story, as a part of winning a national college fiction prize my teacher, Phyllis Rose, had submitted me for as I graduated in 1989—the prize asked faculty around the country to nominate student work.

• Worked as an intern at a nationally circulated LGBTQ studies journal, OUT/LOOK, and published a cover story essay with that magazine for the Queer Nation issue.

• Wrote my first magazine feature story for OutWeek and reviewed my first books for The San Francisco Review of Books and the Advocate.

• Helped organize the first OutWrite conference in San Francisco.

• Worked as assistant to the editor and then assistant editor at Out Magazine, during the magazine’s start-up.

As I left NYC for Iowa in August of 1992, I’d seen the way queer writing communities came together around that first writing conference, and the way political organizing for direct action—which I was doing at the time for ACT UP and QUEER NATION—could give you the skills you needed to organize for cultural production. I had also discovered the way the friends you made at an independent bookstore job—A Different Light, in my case, one of the early LGBTQ bookstores in the country—led to my magazine internship and from there, to that first conference where I made friends that helped me find other opportunities, in this case the assistant job at Out. The editor who hired me, the late and much beloved Sarah Pettit, did so in part because she’d read the essay I’d written and published at the magazine where I’d written my cover story for OUT/LOOK and she’d also read my work in OutWeek. But it also helped that we’d met at that conference and become friendly there.

Me in 1990 at a computer the manager of A Different Light let me use in the back of the store. Photo by my coworker at the time, the amazing performance artist D-L Alvarez.

I had an angel in that bookstore job also. My boss at the time, my manager, the late Richard Labonté, himself an editor—he would solicit a story from me, “Best Friendster Date Ever,” for Best Gay Erotica 2006, co-edited with Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and included with writers like Dennis Cooper, Marcus Ewert, Patrick Califia, Kevin Killian, and Sam J. Miller, that would later find new readers in Susie Bright’s Best American Erotica 2007, where it would be included alongside stories by Katherine Harrison and Octavia Butler, and then over a decade later, in Garth Greenwell and R. O. Kwon’s Kink, with another distinguished cohort—Brandon Taylor, Carmen Maria Machado, Melissa Febos, Roxane Gay.

All of that began when I met Richard. He was the first bear I’d ever met, magnetic and mischievous, he looked out for us all at the store, pushing people together if he thought they’d do well together on projects. He let us use the upstairs of the store for meetings for the OutWrite conference, for example, and he would let me use the computer at the back of the store to write, and the printer to print. He supplied not just my hours and pay but also the infrastructure to a dream and the friends who helped me get there.

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When I finally applied to MFA programs I knew I could have stayed at the magazine where I was working but I saw how much I wanted only to write. My magazine job felt like an interruption of my thinking. And so I tried to get a fellowship to make that happen and then I did.

I have described the MFA process I underwent elsewhere, in “My Parade,” an essay that appeared in n+1’s anthology MFA vs. NYC as well as online at BuzzFeed and in my essay collection, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel.

I will instead point to the other experiences that led me to where I am now. Students in this era often have lined up very fancy and expensive jobs where they are making high salaries and there’s a lot of pressure on students approaching graduation to be one of them. This was much less true when I was graduating. I wish these students the best even as I know burnout levels at those jobs are high, and I know many writers who used to be lawyers. But a first step you can take for a different kind of life is to find yourself a job in a city with a literary community. Everyone looks at New York City, but there’s other places. Do you like New York City? Can you afford it? Smaller and more affordable cities with vital literary scenes exist, like Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Columbus, Atlanta, Minneapolis, and so on. Bookstore jobs don’t often pay great but you can supplement that income through freelance writing, copy-editing, waiting tables or bartending, any number of side hustles. You don’t want too many side hustles though, as you want to be able to write.

How can you make community where you are? Is there an independent bookstore with a reading series and if not, can you create a reading series? With them as a partner or a host? Many bars need to fill a slow night in smaller communities. What is a community need that you see that you could fill? In ACT UP SF we used to say if you thought of it, you gave yourself a job. I think that still applies.

Also? Do not neglect the quiet job that doesn’t come home with you. And if you’re not good at waiting tables, admin jobs inside of research and cultural institutions can also help out. Much of the admin staff at Columbia University for example when I taught there is made up of working artists who are making a good salary, have benefits, vacations, and aren’t seeking tenure while adjuncting or on the visiting writer track. This is more common than people often talk about. Emily St. John Mandel was an assistant to a scientific researcher for many years while writing and publishing her first few novels.

Founding a literary magazine, creating a conference around your interests and community, these are kinds of mutual aid work if you want them to be. I remember walking around a used bookstore in Brooklyn with a former student who wanted my advice about these friends of hers who were creating a magazine and wanted her to be the managing editor. I told her to go for it. That magazine was, is, n+1.

Some principles to keep in mind:

• Work that doesn’t extend beyond work hours, and work that doesn’t leave you unable to write are important for first jobs. Low overhead/cost of living also. I still focus on low overhead.

• Belonging to a status quo is not the same as belonging to a community. Getting into an MFA program can provide things that are very meaningful—visa sponsorship, healthcare, an income, work experience if it comes with teaching, and possibly a community. But the community part you choose and it continues after the program ends. And that could just be showing up regularly for a reading series at a bookstore or the open mic at a bar or bookstore. Slam poetry certainly has showed us this.

• You will find yourself in a cohort whether you go to grad school or not. You may find people who help you think faster when you talk together—pay attention to that. Don’t let those people slide out of your life. You may find them through political organizing.

• There’s the jobs everyone applies for like being a fact-checker at the Nation or Harpers or Vanity Fair and there’s a reason—people do find great success there. A job that is easy to fill at many magazines that almost no one thinks to apply for is to read the slush pile for a magazine. The name, slush pile, does sound gross. This is work that is unsolicited. It doesn’t mean it isn’t good. Doing this work is helpful a number of ways. You learn what the magazine is looking for. You learn how to submit your own work. You learn how to write a cover letter by reading many cover letters. What works but also what doesn’t work. This is often but not always the work of interns. It is often a kind of volunteer work for small magazines and it isn’t the sort of thing you can do full time but it is an education of a kind that is invaluable, and you do meet people. This is just one of the ways you can find your way in.

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This newsletter has gotten a bit long but there’s more. I’ll likely have to make this a series. I’ll end this letter with some advice I’ve offered to many students and to readers of my old blog, about using the the Best American series anthologies as a guide, advice I first received from Annie Dillard when I was a college student and she was looking out for us. That blog post really was written for another era now, one that doesn’t exist the same way, and it was time to revisit that advice. Some of it holds up and some does not. But I’d like to take it further based on what I’ve since learned.

When I was a student of writing in Annie Dillard’s class at Wesleyan in the spring of 1989, she taught us a way of using the Best American anthologies as a roadmap to contemporary publishing. A tool for writers—it wasn’t just an honor roll. Dillard herself was editing an edition of that anthology, Best American Essays of 1988, that would come to be a favorite of mine, introducing me to many writers who became and stayed favorite writers of mine, in particular, Anne Carson. Former students of mine will be familiar with the essay from that volume, “Kinds of Water,” which I love dearly still and read once a year for a decade.

Annie told us she taught out of Best American Essays in part because it took the temperature of the best of what was being published and who was publishing it. But there was more to it than that, she explained.

1. After every essay or story or poem you admire (these rules apply for the Best American series in general) take a look at the magazine who published the story, mentioned under the title, and if you feel like your work is at all close to that work, note that and consider it as a place to send your work.

2. In the back of the anthology is a list of the notable essays, considered but not ultimately included in the anthology. There’s also a list of the magazines the editors consulted, and these magazines are typically where you want to be published in order to be noticed by editors and agents. Being published in those magazines means a chance to be included in a future edition of the anthology because it means the magazines either nominate work to the series editor or the series editor pays attention to them in their reading.

3. You should read a copy or two or more of the magazine to make sure it’s the right place for your work. Part of submitting work is making it easy for the editor to say yes, and that means, knowing what they publish. And then search for them online to see if they have submission guidelines, which they often do, often at greater length than they did back in 1988, when I received this advice. This will tell you how the editors want the work submitted and formatted, what information to include, any maximum length considerations and any genre considerations or limitations, subject matter of interest, etcetera. Most of these places use Submittable but not all of them do. It is a good idea to make a Submittable account. You can also use Submittable to apply for grants, residencies and prizes.

Dillard wanted us to publish and told us the basics on how to format a manuscript—at the time, with a title page that included our name and address, telephone number, the title and the word count, all information an editor wanted up front. The story or essay, she said, should begin on the next page. Pages should be numbered and have headers or footers with your title in case someone dropped the manuscript—that way, it could be easily reconstituted in order. I would amend the advice some years later when I learned that your name was a problem in the header or footer for those journals, contests and writing programs who read blind, as in, reading without knowing the author’s name. The manuscript should be double-spaced typed and in an easy to read font—12-14 point became a standard, and Courier or Times New Roman also. This was the end of the 1980s though and our fonts were quite limited, it should be said. I don’t know if people even use Courier anymore. I think Times New Roman is a safe bet these days.

She was at pains to have us know right up front that nonfiction makes more money than fiction. “It sells more copies and publishers pay more for it. A bestseller on the nonfiction list has always sold more copies than the fiction bestseller at the same rank.” Even just a few essays could help us keep afloat, she said, as publications paid more for essays than for stories and bought more of them. I remember thinking about this when a decade later, a commission from Edmund White for my essay “After Peter,” published in his anthology Loss Within Loss, did in fact help me afford to go to my first writer’s colony and work on my first novel when I was otherwise making my living waiting tables and teaching writing at Gotham Writers’ Workshop. I remember that essay paid 1000.00, which was a lot of money in 1999, and would still get a lot of people’s attention now.

Personal essays were also the best way for an editor to meet your voice, she told us. If you didn’t have clips, for example, you could send an unpublished draft as a sample. And if they liked your voice, it meant that even if they didn’t take the essay they might consider you for something they’d commission. And as these kinds of essays were written using experiences that had already happened, it also meant the editor and the magazine might take a chance on you as they didn’t have to spend any money to send you anywhere. You had already done what was needed to write the piece. I would find this to be both good and bad in the years to come.

She told us to make a study of the magazines we wanted to be published by, to study the different sections of a magazine, and to pitch to those sections accordingly. Features were longer, unlikely but still possible to land as a newcomer. But a column was typically 800 to 1000 words, easier to use for a first time submission. I learned women’s magazines paid the most, with men’s magazines usually paying a little less, and newspapers typically paid the least. Literary magazines could be all over the place, sometimes paying nothing but contributor’s copies. This of course is a bad deal, but as I learned, having a publication credit was important, and if the essay or story was republished, say, after having been chosen for Best American, or O. Henry, or the Pushcart, or in Harper’s, you could see more money or more attention. You could also sell your book. It is not uncommon to get a first book deal out of an essay in Best American Essays. I know of a number of writers for whom this happened in the edition I edited.

Dillard’s Best American was one I’d keep for years because it had essays that I kept learning from. It sits in my office now as a bullwark against total inertia.

So this is a very long post. I hope it helps. I would love any further ideas and advice you have for people setting up a writing life in the comments, of course, and thank you for reading. Good luck to us all.

—Alexander Chee