The process of sending written work—stories, essays, poems—to editors and agents who represent authors’ work is called “submission.”

Just now, I am submitting a complete novel.

The novel concerns a women who marries unwisely, suffers mightily, and must find a way to remake her life. It might sound like a metaphor for my writing life.

It is not.

It is the fullest expression I have managed of my faith in the ability of the human soul to overcome adversity. This is because I do not believe anyone gets through life without suffering.

Gary taught our granddaughter an exchange: He says, “We’re all gonna die!” and she responds, “No, we’re just going to suffer.” And then they both laugh like idiots.

Writing and submitting is like that, too.

The first draft of this novel (my fifth) was about 77k words, the second draft was longer. I cut and rewrote and it got much longer—more than 81k—and then for the 4th draft I deleted nearly all the backstory about how my main character got herself into the initial mess of estrangement from her family and a bad marriage. I am not actually very interested in how people get into messes. I think most of us don’t see them coming. I think most of the terrible events we must overcome could not have been avoided. Avoiding trouble isn’t the issue—there is always unavoidable trouble. The trick is surviving.

I wrote a book about overcoming trouble, not about getting into trouble. \

So I wrote, rewrote, read the manuscript aloud to my husband, sent it to a friend who writes YA (young adult) books, sent it to a smarter friend who is an academic and a good reader. I read it again. I changed the title seven or eight times. At draft nine I began submitting. Gary just read it again, and his reading was smart and helpful. After his input, I restructured the chapters because I wanted 24 chapters instead of 33. This is now draft 10. No one has actually read the novel as it stands. Except me and mostly Gary.

I have written a synopsis of four double-spaced pages, a version of that synopsis on two double-spaced pages, a version that is 500 words, and a version that is 300 words. I have written a query letter that accompanies my submission. In fact the query letter is all that most agents read.

In the past, my work has been criticized for being “too quiet” or lacking in plot. My query letter suggests, in an even more brief summary, that a great deal happens in this novel. There is death and loss and overwhelming grief. All this is true, but I may have gone overboard. One agent wrote back the yesterday, someone I know through another writer, and

“I read this query letter, it’s thoughtful and well-written. I don’t, however, have the mental energy to read a novel of this description, the world has become such a violent and angry place, I find myself unwilling to read fiction which deepens that impression.

“I’m sure there are others who will disagree with me and toward that end, best of luck . . .

So I went back to my query letter to undo some of the negativity. In the mean time, I had sent that unfortunate letter, submitted it, to a dozen agents. It is too late to take them all back. I want to rewrite the query as well as the novel. (Though, to be fair to myself, that letter was rewritten more than a dozen times.) I changed the title again.

I lie awake at night and think through this novel I am submitting; how the story began with an experience in my freshman year of college; how I first tried to write it and that story gained my admittance to a Masters of Fine Arts program in writing; how I recognized that the flaw of the short story was that it was meant to be a novel; how more and more this work of fiction details the truest events in my life; how I originally wrote about my character’s unhappy marriage; and how I cut dozens of pages because that unhappiness didn’t matter. Marriages are sometimes unhappy. I wanted to write more about what comes after.

Several days ago, a woman stopped me on the beach to ask what I was doing. “Mostly picking up trash.” I had a handful of plastic. She was a retired teacher and we commiserated for some time on the poor quality of writing instruction. We talked for a long time and I told her I wrote.

“Are you published?”

I said, “Oh, yes.”

But non-writers do not know how little that means. I have published essays and poems and even stories. I am in books. None of this matters very much except to me. It is not significant. I told her I was waiting to hear about a story, that the magazine liked it but accepted no more that 0.2% of the hundreds of story sent to them.

“Why not send it to somebody else?”

And right there is the catch. Yes, some journals publish more of what is submitted than others. But I want to be accepted by better journals. I want to fly up there overhead. And that requires that I write and revise, and then take my chances submitting. It means a lot of rejection.

Submit to the market. Submit to the inevitable. Submit. It sounds like a sort of violation.

Submitting work to a stranger is not a violation; it is an act of faith that someone I do not know will read and value a story that I needed very much to write.

That is simply the truth.

I found a piece of blue-green sea glass the other morning and a smooth flat pebble spotted green. I held them tight in my hand while I talked to the retired 2nd grade teacher whose grandson attends a private school in Seattle and does not know how to revise.

I held color in my hand and then after I came home I spread my novel all over the floor in order to complete this revision.