Is It Ready?

On deciding when your work is ready to send out

You’ve finished the fifth draft. You’ve taken feedback from people you trust. You’ve proofread. You’ve changed the title eight times. You’ve cut out all the unnecessary adverbs. You’ve proofread again.

Is it ready? Should you send it out?

Don’t worry—the answer isn’t “it depends.” We don’t accept that as an answer on this substack. It depends on what? To what extent? Under what circumstances?

In today’s newsletter, I’m going to try to establish some guidelines as to what “ready” looks like, depending on where you’re hoping to send your writing.

This advice is based on:

• what has worked for me

• what has worked for other writers I know

• what I know I should do but never actually do

• what I wish I’d done last time I had to make this decision

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So you want to send your writing to…

A friend, mentor, faculty advisor, or workshop.

The draft should be:

• 100% written, first page to last page

• Proofread

Those are the only non-negotiable ones. (If you feel tempted to overlook the first point, please read this.)

Sharing a draft with a friend or mentor or advisor is pretty low-stakes. They’ll understand that this is an early draft, that it doesn’t represent the absolute best you can do, and that you’re asking them to evaluate it as a work-in-progress.

However, in order to get the most out of your friendly reader, I would also suggest the following:

Don’t share the draft if you know what’s wrong with it. If you know there’s a major plot hole in your story and you send it to your friend, your friend will say: “There’s a major plot hole.” This is a waste, not just of their time and your time, but of your Feedback Capital with your friend. If your friend has the bandwidth to read one of your stories every two months, why would you waste one of those slots on a story you already know how to fix?

Don’t share it if you don’t like anything about it. “I made a mess—how can I clean it up?” is not the kind of favor you should be asking. If you don’t like the story enough to dig into it and keep working on it, there’s little use getting feedback on it.

Don’t share it if you’re not ready for feedback. If you’ve just finished the draft, if your feelings about it are still tender and possessive, if all you want is unmitigated praise, don’t send it to anyone yet. Wait for those feelings to cool down.

Do share the draft if you’re unsure what’s wrong with it. You suspect there’s an issue with the plot, but maybe it’s just the pacing, and you’re thinking about cutting one character but what if you should actually keep that character and cut a different one… Crossroads and uncertainty are good indicators that it’s time to show the draft to someone.

Do share it if you think it’s done. It’s probably not done—but if you feel good about it, and if you can handle hearing that it’s not done after all, go ahead and send it around.

I know what you’re going to say. “Can’t you give the same advice, but in handy checklist form?”

I sure can!

Share your draft with a friend/mentor/advisor/workshop if and only if:

• the draft is 100% written (no gaps! no placeholders!)

• you’ve proofread at least once

• you’re not sure how to revise it

• you still care about the draft and want to keep working on it

• you’re ready for honest feedback

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A freelance editor.

A lot of the same criteria apply here: you should only send work to a freelance editor if you can handle criticism, if you’ve finished the draft, if you’re unsure how to revise. But because freelance editors are so expensive, I wouldn’t suggest hiring one unless you meet these additional criteria:

• you’ve exhausted your free resources (friends, writing groups, faculty)

• you have tried revising this thing on your own and you simply can’t do it

• you have money to burn

To be honest, I think freelance editors are rarely the right solution. I know there are good ones out there—I briefly tried to be one of them—but even the best freelance editors are charging you for something that you can get for free. If money is a serious factor for you, a freelance editor should not be your first resort.

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Literary journals, magazines, online pubs, etc.

When you’re submitting work that will be considered for publication, your standards for “ready” should obviously be much higher. You don’t want to rack up a lot of unnecessary, irreversible rejections by sending out a half-baked story. You want the story to be as good as you can make it.

However.

This very sensible, very common advice can be taken too far. I’ve seen writers get this advice so deep in their heads that they never send anything out at all. The story isn’t perfect yet—gotta keep revising, buffing, polishing, reevaluating, second-guessing. Such writers often wait for someone with authority to tell them that their story is done, perfect, ready to go out. Even when they get that green light, they sometimes hesitate. Is it perfect enough?

As with all spectrums (spectra?), there’s danger in both extremes. You don’t want to fire off a draft that barely hangs together. You also don’t want to spend so long futzing with your draft that you never actually send it out.

“Ready” is a sweet spot in the middle: it’s not the first draft, and it’s not the six hundred fortieth draft. Here are some good signs that a draft is ready to submit to journals:

You have received feedback on it from someone you trust,¹ and you have addressed that feedback. You don’t have to implement 100% of their suggestions, but you do have to come up with a solution for every problem they point out. There shouldn’t be any extant problems in the draft—you shouldn’t be sending it out thinking, “Great, I addressed everything except the implausible character motives!”

You have read through the draft in its completed form without changing anything. This is the real test: can you read through the whole draft without cringing, wincing, or bumping at anything? If you are still making significant changes every time you read back through, the draft isn’t ready. If, on the other hand, the only changes you’re making are to toggle back and forth between two synonyms, or to rewrite the same sentence one way and then the other way, that means you’re happy enough with the draft to send it out.

The draft is of a length, style, and format that plausibly resembles things you’ve seen published in the journals you’re submitting to. Is the word count within standard range? Is the prose polished enough that you would be unsurprised to see it on the pages of a print journal? Have you flipped through the journal you’re submitting to and thought, “My story is at least this good!”? If so, send away.

You still like the draft. Sometimes, during the revision process, a story can lose its spark. You might feel compelled to submit it to journals anyway—after all, so much work went into it. But I always feel better when I submit stories that I still like and stand behind. That long-awaited acceptance email won’t feel so good if you click it open and think, “Oh god no, they took that story.”

Checklist time. Submit your story/poem/essay/etc. to journals if and only if:

• you’ve addressed all the feedback you’ve received on it

• you can read back through the draft without wanting to change anything

• you still like it

• it is plausibly publishable

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Agents.

You have probably guessed that a lot of the above feedback applies to submitting your work to agents. Before you even think about querying, you should:

1. finish the draft

2. get feedback on the complete manuscript from 1+ trusted readers

3. address all their feedback

4. get feedback on the new draft from 1+ trusted readers

5. address all their feedback

6. rinse and repeat steps 4-5 until the changes are small enough that you can handle them on your own

7. final edit, proofread, reread

If you follow these steps—especially steps 3 and 5, the steps where you have to actually listen to the feedback you’re getting and actually act on it—you should end up with a manuscript that’s ready to send to agents.

But since I know you love a good checklist…

You’re ready to query agents with your manuscript if:

• you absolutely cannot think how you could possibly make it any better

• you love the manuscript so much you’re willing to still be talking about it 5 years from now

• you have received (and acted on) feedback from someone who is incentivized to be honest with you²

• you are not aware of any red flags in your manuscript (e.g. too long, too short, problematic content, awkwardly straddles genres)

• you can handle your manuscript getting rejected

I’m not being glib about that last one. By the time your manuscript is ready to go out to agents, you will have poured many precious life-hours into it. Rejection by agents can feel like a dismissal of all those hours. Do not query agents if you’re counting on good news to validate all the time and effort you spent. You should already believe that the production of this manuscript was worth it before you send it out to agents.

That is the only way to survive rejection: by taking pride in your work in an absolutely intrinsic way. You created something cool and maybe also it will get published. Whatever happens in the querying process, you need to hold onto your pride in having created and finished something that you like.

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Okay but what if I really want it to be ready?

You’ll notice that in all this talk of how to judge whether a draft is ready to be sent out, I haven’t talked at all about timing.

What if you have a deadline? What if you have some momentum you’re afraid to lose? What if you’re really, really impatient?

I recently finished the second draft of a new novel. (Really more of a 1.5th draft—I didn’t change that much.) I printed it out for my partner to read and give notes on. And then I thought: you know, maybe I should actually just send this to my agent now!

I tried to come up with reasons. It might be helpful to have her feedback at this early stage! I want her to know what I’m working on! I think maybe there’s not that much wrong with it! I want to have something new to submit sooner rather than later!

Eventually, I had to admit to myself that these were not reasons, they were justifications. The only reason to send an early draft of my novel to my agent was that I was impatient. I wanted to feel like things were moving. I wanted to feel like the novel was done.

Thankfully, I waited a few days, until my partner finished reading. He gave me excellent notes and helped me see all kinds of things that I wanted to fix about the current draft. I was able to take some time, process, start planning a revision—and as a bonus, I didn’t have to send a frantic email to my agent (Please don’t read this version!!!).

The point of this anecdote: the question of “Is it ready?” has absolutely nothing to do with the question of “How soon do I want it to be ready?”

Yes, sometimes you have a deadline and you have to turn in something sub-par. Yes, sometimes you have enough momentum going that on balance, it’s better to turn in something rough now than something polished in six months. But this is exceptionally rare, and easy to overestimate.

If you find yourself trying to justify turning something in before it’s ready, take a moment to ask yourself: what is the actual cost of waiting a month? Six months? A year? Sure, maybe your agent said she’d like to submit to editors in the summer. Did she say the summer is the only time she’s willing to submit? Did she say it would make a material difference to the success of the book if it’s submitted in the summer vs. fall?

Probably not. Probably what makes a material difference to the success of the book is… the book itself.

So I would encourage you (and myself) to strip away all considerations of timing and momentum and impatience and just ask yourself: Is it ready? And if it isn’t ready—well, you have the checklists now. You know what to do.

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In case you missed it—on an episode of The Shit No One Tells You About Writing, literary agents Carly Watters and CeCe Lyra discussed (at length!) my article No News Is Bad News. They had a bit of a different take from me, so if you’re at all curious about the other side of that debate, you should have a listen.

As always, let me know in the comments if there’s anything in particular you’d like me to cover.

Thanks for reading!

1. Eventually, once you get enough experience writing stories/poems/essays/etc., this trusted person can be yourself. But if you’re just starting out on the submission game, I’d suggest running all “final” drafts past at least one reader.

2. This is a rather delicate point to make in the footnotes of a substack, but there are some people we go to for feedback who are not really incentivized to tell us the hard truths. A freelance editor wants to help you improve your book, yes, but also, they’re running a business—they don’t want to shatter your hopes or provoke a nasty review. A professor wants you to improve as a writer, but they also want you to feel good about your time in the program and speak well of it once you graduate.

So when I say you should solicit feedback from “someone who is incentivized to be honest with you,” I mean someone who can tell you “This isn’t working” without fear of negative consequences.