In Favor of Clicking the Submit Button Too Soon

By Kate Langenberg

It was a fairly straightforward challenge: write an essay of no more than 500 words about a vacation gone wrong.

I hadn’t been looking to enter a contest about travel writing. I was just reading the news online like I do every morning and happened to click on the book club section where I found the call for submissions. I laughed a little as I remembered the mishaps my husband and I had had on our honeymoon.

Being adventurous and thinking we were invincible, we had rented a car and driven through northern Italy. The rental, a standard-issue Fiat with front-wheel drive, might have worked out great had we intended to stick to highways and main roads, but that would have been boring, and we were not boring people. Main roads were for tourists who didn’t like to veer off the beaten path. We were determined to veer—which we did, straight into a giant pothole on a dirt-covered, boulder-strewn road that swallowed one of our tires and left our rental car—and our ability to travel to our next destination—in a precarious state.

I whipped up an essay about that experience almost fifteen summers ago: how we ended up with a flat tire that was completely unfixable, and how we had to drive around with a donut recommended for a very limited number of kilometers at low speed. It was a ridiculous situation, considering we were scheduled to drive to Florence in a few days to catch a train heading south. The route to the city—the entire country, really—was full of winding, hilly roads populated by drivers familiar with the terrain and eager to speed through it.

We scrapped our plans, including our day trip to Siena, and made the best of staying close to our Greve hotel, which ended up being a wise and relaxing choice. 

I wrote the essay in the span of an afternoon. I stepped away to walk my dog, returning an hour later to review my word choices and word count and to shorten a few paragraphs. It was a little long, but I liked the story, and I figured if a matter of 100 words would keep the website from publishing it, then it wasn’t meant to be. This was me choosing not to overthink it. I plugged the text into the submission form and sent it off.

Which is exactly what all the advice about writing and editing tells you not to do.

What you’re supposed to do is sit on anything you write and come back to it days, maybe weeks, later. You’re supposed to show it to other people, seek feedback, and not let your eyes be the only ones to read it. You’re supposed to find flaws that you’ll be glad to catch before the people wielding the gavels look it over.

Or, you could trust your gut.

You could listen to the little voice inside your head that tells you what you’ve written is good, and on that instinct, you could hit the submit button without obsessing for days or weeks over a few hundred words.

Of course, this approach might not make sense for every type of essay or piece of writing you create. Some pieces need to marinate; some need more time to come together. But when you have a story that flows easily from mind to page in your signature voice, it might be worth trusting your intuition that it’s good enough to submit because it came together in just a few hours.

As a chronic overthinker, this is not my usual process. I’m one of the people who does spend days and weeks editing and rewriting. I read sentences out loud to my husband, asking him which versions sound better. Sometimes it’s the most minor changes that leave me riddled with indecision.

I wonder, often, how much is too much time spent perfecting my writing? Am I perfecting it for myself or for someone else? The conclusion I frequently reach is that I’m doing it for someone else. It’s more difficult to discern what might appeal to other people, and that’s why my second drafts take so much time. There’s much less guesswork involved when I allow my voice to remain clear and strong instead of pushing it to the verge of something unrecognizable.

I was delighted to learn my essay had been chosen for publication. Trusting my instincts had been the right decision. The essay had come to me readily, and instead of second-guessing myself, I took a chance. I did what felt natural. I veered off the beaten path, hit submit, and this time I didn’t get swallowed by a giant pothole.

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Kate Langenberg is a writer with a background in trade nonfiction book publishing, journal publishing, and marketing communications. Her essay, La Dolce Fiat, was recently published on Boston.com. She lives in Powder Valley, Pennsylvania. Read more on her website.