How do you know when a piece is done and ready to submit?
A Newsletter of Humorous Writing
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There are certain questions about humor writing that James and Luke get asked more often than others, and every now and then we like to tackle one of them for our subscribers. Today we're talking about how to tell if your piece is finished and ready for submission! And after that, we’ve got a couple of recommendations of things we’ve been into lately: a great new TV show and a whole dang streaming service.
How do you know when a piece is done and ready to submit?
LB: It would be so nice if there were an easy concrete answer to this question, like “Your piece is done after three drafts.” But it really varies depending on the idea you’re working on. Different premises require different amounts of work.
I’ve heard people express concern that if they work on a piece for too long it will lose some of the spontaneity of their early drafts. While it is possible to “over-knead the dough” as it were, if you’re finding your later drafts less funny than your early ones, it’s most likely because it no longer feels fresh and surprising to YOU. You can generally trust that people who haven’t read your piece a million times will find your jokes and premise funny and entertaining when they first encounter it.
JF: This is the “dress rehearsal before the sketch show goes up” dynamic -- just because you’re sick of the lines doesn’t mean the audience won’t love them and find them surprising!
LB: I also think it’s quite rare for people to revise their work TOO much. An issue I see much more often is people not spending enough time rewriting and editing their work. If you do a rewrite and it doesn’t work you can always go back to an earlier version! If you avoid rewriting because you’re afraid you’ll make your piece less funny, you’re missing out on a whole lot of potential improvements, including all the new, better jokes you can find during the revision process.
JF: Just to illustrate this point, there are a lot of issues that I see fairly regularly in Points in Case submissions that I think rewrites can solve. For example, there’s a subset of submissions that find their comedic footing in the middle of the piece; in these types of pieces, the beginning tends to be interesting, but the writer finds something more fun/specific/precise/etc. partway through. These tend to be borderline pieces for me, editorially -- does the piece feel too much like it’s playing with two separate ideas? Is the flabbier opening worth the interesting ending? Do I think readers will stick around until the piece gets good?
This is the kind of thing that a rewrite can fix! Tightening a piece up and getting to the fun faster will almost always improve these pieces. I know because this happens with my own writing: I tend to discover and gravitate towards more interesting things as I go through early drafts, and then in later drafts I refocus to highlight and foreground those discoveries.
And one other illustration from my editorial desk: I can confidently say I’ve never rejected a piece because it felt too rewritten.
LB: As I’ve mentioned previously, in our earlier newsletter tackling the question of how often is too often to submit to a publication, I think it’s good practice to take some time away from a piece before submitting. When you THINK you’re finished, let your piece sit for a few days, or a week, don’t look at it during that time, and see how it feels when you come back to it. If you do that, you’ll almost always find at least a few things you’d want to change, and after you've made those changes, I think you can be pretty confident that you’ve done all you can with a piece.
JF: This is something that can be difficult to do, because you want people to read what you’ve been sweating over! This is yet another reason why having someone whose taste you trust to read drafts is such a good practice: sending your piece out for notes will satisfy that urge to submit and get your work off your desk.
LB: It’s also possible for a piece to be simultaneously done and NOT ready to submit! By which I mean, sometimes as a writer you can decide that you can’t make any more progress on a piece, but know that it’s not quite at a place where you’d feel good about having it out in the world. When that happens, it’s okay to leave it on the shelf. Maybe you’ll eventually come back and find a new angle on it, maybe you won’t. But just because a piece is finished doesn’t mean you have to submit it.
JF: We’re probably sounding like broken records here, but publishing isn’t everything! It’s a big part of writing, obviously, but it shouldn’t loom so large as a goal that you’re sacrificing the quality of your writing.
LB: I think people also ask this question because they feel like they could just keep endlessly revising a piece and never find a good stopping point. And they’re right! You could just keep tweaking a piece of writing forever! Whenever I look back at my older pieces of writing, I always find things I would change if I were working on it now. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t done at the time.
JF: This is a lot of the fun of writing, too. I love tweaking, rearranging, playing with language. The desire to continually write and edit is a big reason why we all love doing this stuff!
LB: Not to get too “you never step in the same river twice” about this, but people are always changing, and a piece that you think is done one day might feel underbaked a week later. As you grow and evolve as a writer, your sense of when a piece is finished will change as well—but it will also get easier for you to make a judgment about when it’s time to leave a piece where it is. In some ways, it isn’t so much a question of knowing when a piece is done, but rather knowing when you are done working on the piece.
Some Recommendations From Luke and James
James recommends the new Hulu show English Teacher. You’ve probably seen Brian Jordan Alvarez’s loose, improvisational character videos online -- they’re great, but a few friends have told me they’re afraid that Alvarez’s talents at short-form Instagram videos won’t translate to something longer. Alvarez has been performing and writing for much longer than he’s been famous online, and his new show is incredibly precise and confident. The set-up and cast of characters are pretty standard sitcom fare, but the writing and performances are stellar. What really sets English Teacher apart, though, is how it approaches current and divisive political issues. The show avoids strict moralizing, but also doesn’t laze into lame, “all sides have valid points” pablum. The show is clear-eyed in its politics and opinions, but dramatizes how complicated things get because people are flawed and fumbling. It’s funny and effective to see how real people can’t ever pull off a perfect after-school-special ending.
Luke recommends The Criterion Channel. I’ve implicitly endorsed The Criterion Channel in the past with some of my recommendations for movies and short films. So why make it an explicit pick now? Well, because through the end of September, they’re offering a 20% discount on yearly subscriptions. If that’s not incentive enough to give it a shot, October is right around the corner and the Channel always has great, unexpected movie picks for the Halloween season—and, as is the case year-round, they won’t just be offering up highbrow arthouse fare. Expect some real fun crowdpleasers in the mix as well.
See you next week!
@lukevburns & @jamesfolta
We started this newsletter with our dear friend Brian Agler, and we want it to always honor his memory and his love of all things humorous. You can find our newsletter tribute to Brian here.
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