Welcome back to Keep Writing, where back-to-school season is in full swing. If you’re new here, warm welcomes to you: Help yourself to the Jenga tower of adult Lunchables on the table before wandering through our archives.
I have been chasing the perfect title for a piece for almost three years now.
I know how important titles are. They serve as a work’s calling card, its first impression, its first line of defense. I put a lot of faith and weight in titles. But this one eluded me.
And so it sat.
I waited, patient, for the right name to come to me. I thought that the more I read, the more I thought about it, the more I let it percolate, the more a perfect title would show itself. Which is about as logical as waiting for the right job offer to magically manifest itself without a search, right? Sure, occasionally it happens, but it’s a once-in-the-bluest-of-moons kind of sitch.
I had a shortlist of titles that I kicked around, but none of them felt like that lightning strike of perfection that I was looking for. I wanted it to vault out of my brain fully formed and ready for battle like Athena leaping from Zeus’ skull.1 But the more my draft sat, the less I remembered about it, and the less I remembered, the tougher it was to name.
I lost three years’ worth of submitting chasing something I can’t catch. All for a title, which I know damn well is one of the first things editors suggest changing (because, frankly, I’ve been the editor changing it). So take this as a call to action: If a piece in your drafts folder has been idling, ready enough but waiting for perfection, dust it off and send it out into the world.
Sure, there is something to be said for giving your work time. You need space to distance yourself from your creation in order to view it objectively. And there are legions already written about the importance of not submitting your work until you are 100% happy with it.
But I don’t know how many of us can ever be 100% satisfied with something we wrote.
There’s always a word to tweak or a phrase to fiddle with, you know? There are always alternate titles to kick around. There’s the temptation to rewrite the introduction for the 17th time. And eventually, we’ll need to save our work from ourselves and submit it somewhere.
It’s not perfect, but it is done, and that’s a million times better than perfect anyway.
Because completion is achievable. Readiness is achievable. Perfection isn’t.
Not for work done by human hands, anyway, which is what makes your work gorgeous and vulnerable and rare.
But everyone’s sliding scale of “maybe this draft could use more work” to “OK, now I’m just changing things to change things” is different. If you’re struggling to know when something is done—or could be done, if we’d just wrest it from our ever-revising hands—the following criteria may help.
You find yourself editing things, only to change them back to your original on your next read-through. When your edits aren’t sticking the landing, it’s time to let go.
You are tweaking words and sentences, not paragraphs and sections. Your red pen is hovering over individual words and phrases, not making sweeping changes.
Your gut is not telling you something is wrong; your brain is just wondering if it could be better. Your gut is right, and you should listen to it. If something feels wrong, it probably is wrong, and you should try to fix it. Your brain is a different beast entirely. If you’re trying something different “just to see,” you may never exit the drafting process.
When you read your draft, you generally like what you read. Let your draft sit in a drawer for a bit. Give it time to breathe. If you then pick it back up and like what you see—if you enjoy the act of reading it, even if you want to make some small changes—trust that feeling. It’s a good one.
Your critique partners have small suggestions, not huge balks or major questions. There’s always going to be something to nitpick in a draft. And your readers are never going to agree with each other 100%. But if no one is marking up major problems in the margins, that’s a sign that your work is ready for others to read.
Your deadline is approaching. Even if it’s a self-imposed one. Sometimes a ticking clock is the only thing that makes us finally relinquish control of a work.
Give yourself a little grace to learn your process. Maybe you send something out a little early and learned the hard way; that’s how you grow. Maybe you sit on a draft for years like I did; that’s how you learn. You’re only human, after all—which is what makes your work worth reading in the first place.
I finally gave my piece a name and sent it out into the world last week. The title still isn’t “perfect,” but it’s no longer preventing me from finding it a home—and I bet, in a year or so, I won’t be able to imagine calling it anything else.
Until next month—
Keep writing,
Nicki
Calls for Submissions
Spotlight: Rawhead: Horror, sci-fi, and speculative work
Academy for Teachers: Flash fiction starring teacher protagonists
The Passionfruit Review: Love poems
Spotlight Pick
Rawhead: Horror, sci-fi, and speculative work
Send “art and literature that explores the shadowed corners of being” to Rawhead for its first special issue of “horror, the uncanny, and everything that crawls out when the dark is welcomed in.” For poetry, send up to 7 poems (15 pages max). For prose (fiction or nonfiction), send one long piece (3,000 words max), two shorter pieces (4,000 words max total), or up to three pieces of flash (1,000 words max each). No submission fees. No general payments, but one standout writer per issue will receive a $100 award.
Deadline: Sept. 15
Superpresent: “Truth”
For its Fall 2025 issue, the quarterly magazine Superpresent seeks submissions that have to do with its chosen theme of “Truth.” Send up to three poems (one per page) or 500-2,000 words of prose (essays or short stories). No submission fees.
Deadline: Sept. 1
Academy for Teachers: Flash fiction starring teacher protagonists
Just in time for back to school: Send stories between 6 and 499 words that feature a K-12 teacher as the protagonist/narrator for your chance to win $1,000 in the Academy For Teachers’ “Stories Out of School” annual flash fiction contest. The judge for this year’s contest is Paul Tremblay. Writers need not be teachers but must be over 18 to enter.
Deadline: Sept. 7
Skeleton Flowers Press: ”Heraldry” submissions
Skeleton Flowers Press is seeking submissions for the second volume of its Autumnal Equinox series: “Heraldry is the art of creating a physical representation of proof of identity and of tracing and recording genealogies. We invite our writers and artists to delve into their origins, explore the stories that define you and let your creations be a tribute to your heritage.” Send fiction, nonfiction, or poetry under 2,500 words. No submission fees, no payments that I can find.
Deadline: Sept. 7
Starlite Pulp: Pulp fiction
For its upcoming winter issue, Starlite Pulp seeks pulp fiction in a wide range of sizes, from flash to “20k word beasts.” Any genre related to pulp is fair game, including “horror/crime/adventure/western/Sci Fi, or anything in between.” Submissions are $3, and payment is $25, a contributor’s copy, and inclusion in a podcast with all the authors in the issue.
Deadline: Sept. 28
Honeyguide Magazine: Stories about black cats
Appropriate for the upcoming spooky season: For its annual “Black Cats are Good Luck” story contest, Honeyguide Magazine seeks “stories of reflection, changed lives or mindsets, and the [black] cats who brought blessings into human lives.” Send fiction or nonfiction about black cats up to 3,000 words. Submission fee: $5. Winner will receive $150 and publication.
Deadline: Sept. 30
The Passionfruit Review: Love poems
For the 2025 Passionfruit Poetry Prize contest, “the theme is love – and it’s yours to interpret as broadly, as interestingly, and as tenuously as you wish,” explain The Passionfruit Review’s editors. Guest judge is Amlanjyoti Goswami. Send poems up to 40 lines. First prize is £600 (roughly $813), second prize is £100, and third prize is £60. Entry fee: £4 (roughly $5.50) for 1 poem, £6 for 2, or £7 for 3, but fee waivers are available if the fee would prevent a poet from entering the contest. All submitted poems will be considered for future publication in The Passionfruit Review.
Deadline: Sept. 30
As pictured on this truly incredible vase. God, do I want that shield.
I have heard it from other authors--when is the book finished? I just finished my novella and I wrestled with this question. After my last edit where I stopped myself from making big plot changes for nothing, I am publishing this week. Like in a job I once had there was a saying: Sometimes you have to fire the engineer and go to production.