Writing Is the Antidote (to publishing in the digital age)

Acceptances, every one

A guest post from Jennifer Berney:

It sounds quaint to say it now, but a decade ago, before the internet took over the world of publishing, I used to get excited for the mailman’s arrival. Most afternoons, he left me nothing but bills and credit card offers, but sometimes I opened my mailbox and spotted one of the bright red self-addressed-stamped-envelopes that I’d been waiting for.

During that era, I printed short stories every Sunday afternoon, stuffed them into manila envelopes, and sent them off, several at a time, to various literary journals. I purchased red envelopes for my SASEs, in part because they were easy to spot in the mailbox, but also as a kindness to myself. I couldn’t control whether the SASE contained an acceptance or a rejection, but I could ensure that it was packaged in a way that pleased me.

In those days, the process of submitting and waiting for a response wasn’t so unlike the work of writing itself. There was a ritual to it, a set of superstitions. It took discipline to muster up the nerve to send out my work, just as it took discipline to sit down and write. Both the act of writing and the act of submitting required stores of patience—I often revised a story multiple times before deciding to abandon it, and it often took nearly a year for any given rejection notice to arrive. Neither the writing process nor the publication process ever offered instant gratification, and yet they both felt important, character-building, and mutually supportive—the rejections pushed me to try harder, and the occasional acceptance kept me from losing hope.

I took a long hiatus from submitting my work, and when I returned just over a year ago, I discovered that the world had moved online. I no longer need a stockpile of red envelopes, and I no longer wait for the postman. For the most part, this is convenient. Electronic submissions save me time and expense. However, I find that there’s a surprising emotional cost. Because news of publication might arrive in my inbox at any moment, that sense of anticipation—once confined to my thirty-second walk to the mailbox—must now spread itself over the course of the day. Furthermore, there is no rhythm or regularity to the replies I receive. When I submit to an editor these days sometimes I hear back hours later, or sometimes months, or sometimes never. I wonder constantly how to train my brain to bury that anticipation, that curiosity. It’s hard, I find, to focus on the writing itself when there might be news awaiting me just two clicks away.

The process of publishing no longer complements my writing; it competes with it. And, of course, it’s not just the submission process that has changed. Now that most of our work appears online, writers are now privy to all sorts of information that would have once been left to mystery.

When I published my first short story in a small literary journal in 2005, I assumed that some people subscribed to it, that it arrived in their mail and landed on their coffee table. Probably plenty of these copies went unread, or were read selectively, but it seemed likely that some people—a few of them at least—would read my story. I would never know how many, or who they were, or what they thought, or if they caught the typo on the second page of the story—an error I’d noticed too late. I would never know these things, and in some ways it was better that way.

Today, when an essay or story goes live, I have access to data that I can track from moment-to-moment. I can see how many people liked it, tweeted it, or otherwise shared it. I can track how many people clicked over to my blog. If I were bold enough, I could probably ask the editors how many visitors clicked on my story. I can read not only the comments that appear below, but comments on the website’s Facebook page which are often less kind. All of this information means that my readers are less imaginary, more immediate. When comments are kind, they are gratifying, but when they are critical they add yet another layer of chatter to my brain, more voices in my head that I must contend with every time I sit down to write. These voices are louder than the snail-mail rejections, which never contained any clues or explanations. The voices of internet critics speak in no uncertain terms; they carefully enumerate all of my sins.

I do not wish we could go backward. The digital age has offered writers so much—it has allowed us to find each other more easily, to build meaningful communities; it has brought more good work to more people. But while online publishing has undeniably enhanced our writing lives, it has also complicated them. All of the opportunities for submitting and promoting our work, for making connections, for tracking responses—all of this perpetual anticipation and over-stimulation can leave me feeling like an old rubber band stretched nearly to the point of breaking.

When I began writing in the first place, it was because it helped me avoid the constant feeling of being worn thin. And so, at the end of the day, writing itself turns out to be the only antidote I’ve found to the chaos of the information age. Now more than ever, the blank page provides a source of comfort and stillness and silence. The act of engaging with that page, of diving deep to fill it with words, has become the only way I know to quiet the voices of distraction, or ease the feeling of vulnerability that comes from sharing your stories, your truth, and your secrets with the internet.

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Jennifer Berney is a queer mama, writer, and teacher. She is a contributing blogger at Brain, Child, and her work has also appeared in The Manifest Station and Mutha Magazine, among other places. She lives in Olympia, Washington, and blogs at Goodnight Already. You can find her on Twitter @JennBerney.