Publication Is Not the Point of Writing

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!

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.

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