When Is My Writing Ready to Submit? And Other Questions

When it comes to preparing work for submission, writers often hear the same old platitudes: Polish your work. Kill your darlings. Send your best. But those oft-repeated suggestions don't tell you when your writing is actually ready to submit. Unlike other pieces of the submission process, readiness is in the writer’s control—it’s just a matter of how you get it here.

Evaluating whether your work is in good enough shape for submission takes a bit of forethought. The path from first draft to ready-to-submit is lined with moments of discovery, revision, and feedback. As you write and revise, here are seven key questions to ask yourself as you make your way toward the finish line: submitting (and tracking!) your work. Let's break it down.

1. Is the piece you want to submit a first or early draft?

If your answer is yes, your work—whether it's a poem, short story, or essay—is NOT ready to submit. First and early drafts are often messy. You’re in a generative phase, putting everything on the page, uncovering storylines and ideas. Your writing doesn’t need to be good at this point because your work isn’t done.

After you finish your first draft, take a break for a few hours or a few days. Once you’ve gotten a little space from your work, go back to the piece with fresh eyes and do some rewriting, adding or replacing content along the way. Remain open—you’re still in discovery mode, working toward a solid, rough draft.

A funnel is a good way to visualize the “readying” process—the route you take from a first draft to a ready draft. Your messy first go pops into the top of the funnel, and as you revise, a focused, refined version emerges.

2. Ask: What’s it about?

Understanding what you’re trying to do with the piece—what question, issue, or emotion you want to explore—is an essential part of the revision process. I often refer to this as determining the “aboutness” of a piece. There are two levels of “aboutness:” the surface narrative, what happens in the story, and the deeper meaning, what’s bubbling up thematically within the prose or poetry. Let’s see what that looks like in practice.

In their braided essay "The Crane Wife" (The Paris Review, July 2019), CJ Hauser writes about a failed relationship and a whooping crane research trip they take after the breakup. That's the surface story. Thematically, an examination of personal boundaries emerges, as Hauser considers the societal expectations placed on women to perform and compromise.

On the surface, Elizabeth Bishop's well-known villanelle "One Art" is about how easy it is to lose things—a reading underscored by its repeated refrain, The art of losing isn't hard to master. But on a deeper level, Bishop is writing about grief and loss, an emotional pain she can’t master at all.

“What is it about?” is the most critical question to ask and the most challenging to answer. Your understanding of the “aboutness” of your piece may evolve as you revise—and that's okay. You can always return to that question (and the other questions outlined here) as you make your way through the funnel.

3. Does the piece feel coherent?

The next step is to ask yourself whether your work feels coherent. Have you connected the dots? Does the piece hold together? Is there a clear narrative arc from the beginning, through the middle, and to the end?

You set a premise with your opening, identifying what will be explored. From there, you want to establish a clear throughline and shape the piece toward a meaningful ending. Consider how the paragraphs, and then the sentences, and even the individual words, interact. Do they connect?

4. Is the writing clear?

Once your piece feels coherent, the next step is to review it for clarity–to be sure each sentence, phrase, and word is understandable and says what you mean. If the writing is unclear, confusing, or difficult to parse, you will lose your reader.

Read your work aloud. Does it make sense? Does the metaphor work to explain the abstract idea? Does the lyrical language convey a clear, correct meaning? When you stumble on a sentence, phrase or word that isn't clear, often the best revision strategy is to forgo fancy craft and say what you mean directly.

5. Have you copyedited carefully?

As the revision progresses, your piece gets tighter and you’ll find yourself making fewer changes. The aim of the copyedit, then, is to make sure the writing mechanics are correct and consistent. Check spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Look for typos, missing words, and inconsistencies in verb tense and point of view. Refer to a usage guide like the Chicago Manual of Style. If you use an app like Grammarly, be aware these apps catch basic mistakes, but not everything.

6. Have you proofread the piece and checked the guidelines?

Congratulations—you are at the bottom of the funnel now! Time for a couple more readthroughs to proofread and catch any last typos. This is also a good time to carefully review the outlet’s submission guidelines and format the piece accordingly.

7. Feedback: why, when, and how does it fit in the funnel?

Asking for feedback is a personal choice. But I can say that I have rarely submitted a piece for publication without getting feedback from at least one trusted reader—someone I know who can provide craft-based feedback and won’t hold back.

Start reaching out once you have a good sense of what the piece is about and where it’s going. This is where insights from another reader can be useful, and you can ask for feedback from this point in the funnel and onwards.

But how do you prompt those insights? Early on, I'm prescriptive about feedback. I ask the reader to answer specific questions:

1. What's it about, on the surface? This is usually straightforward.
2. What lights up? Yes—I want to know what's working up front. A little validation keeps me engaged and inspired to move forward.
3. What's it about on a deeper level? I'm looking for their response to align with what I'm trying to do with the piece and what the piece means to me. Sometimes, I’m surprised by what a reader finds in my writing. These generative surprises are typically very useful.
4. What are the opportunities for revision? Does it cohere? What don’t you understand?

You might also consider reaching out for feedback a second time after you've completed your major revisions before you move on to the copyedit. This is another helpful step to get your piece in the best possible shape before you submit.

Revision isn’t linear—it’s a process of narrowing and refinement. The funnel analogy provides a clear path for how to work through your piece's big-picture issues, its “aboutness,” cohesion, and clarity, and address the writing details with the copyedit and final proofread. At that point, you will know your work is finally ready to submit.

Join me and a roomful of writers at the next Submit It Now! session on July 1, 2026, from 7:30 pm to 9:00 pm EST. Always free. Register here for the Zoom link. I’ll spend some time reviewing Substack journals—what that means, how to find them with examples, plus the pros and cons of submitting to these outlets. As always, you will have time to work on submissions.