Blind Optimism is Better Than None at All

By Dana Shavin

I have been struggling to write the same story for three weeks. About a week in, I thought it was finished, so I sent the seventeen-page behemoth off to my trusty writing mentor, thinking she would respond with high praise and a directive to submit it instantly to the most prestigious journal I could find. This is not what happened. This is not even close to what happened.

So I worked on it for another week. There’s a well-known joke that circulates among writers, that wh...