Even Writers Get Sophomore Slump: What To Do About It

This post goes out to my advanced writing students who are challenged to keep moving their careers forward by pitching themselves again and again and again…

Let’s say, you’ve been published. Perhaps you’ve even been published quite a bit. Maybe you have up to twenty clips, when at one time you had none.

Hey, this is great! Congratulations.

And now, here comes the sophomore slump.

The sophomore slump is caused when writing for publication is no longer new. Gone is the challenge of figuring out all the how-tos required to get your words into print.

You’ve been there. Done that. Ho-hum. This is getting kind of…tedious.

For many writers, the end of being-a-beginner can mark the beginning of not-knowing-quite-what-to-do-next phase.

Fortunately, having been through the sophomore slump and having plenty of students facing the sophomore slump, I have two ideas for you:

Idea Number One: Continue with the success you’ve already established. I know, it’s hard. Because jumping through these hoops might now seem rote. That’s okay. If you don’t repeat the momentum you’ve established, you will lose your writing rhythm and with it your confidence. So, keep writing, keep submitting, and keep getting published, even if you are starting to feel that you should be beyond this stage by now. (P.S. Everyone feels this way. Typically, they are not past it but just bored.)

Of particular importance as you look for a bigger yield from past publications are what I call “warm leads.” Warm leads are the editors you’ve already worked with who like and print your work. Continue serving these editors. This is your bread and butter writing and can likely bring you a lot more money once you stop castigating yourself for not publishing somewhere else. Likely, nobody is judging you for where you publish anyway…except you.

Idea Number Two: Pitch the places you’d rather be. One of the pitfalls of the sophomore slump is not making enough time to reach out to the places, where you’d rather see your work published. But if you are not working in a focused way on where you’d rather be,  you are not going to get there.

Do your tougher pitches first. Then do the work that is the bread and butter after. If you have to balance this with a day job, figure out your highest energy times of day and do your new, more challenging work then. Then follow with the work that has become habitual. I realize that you don’t have that much time to squeeze writing in when you work full time, which is why you need to plan better than writers who have more time.

Here’s a few more tips:

When it’s time to stretch yourself as a writer, you’ll succeed faster if you don’t over-pack your schedule. Work in a focused manner on the next-most-coveted publication at a time. And then the next. Then the next. Etc.

Stretching is necessarily uncomfortable for most writers. Expect to be feel challenged and let the freshness of the challenge energize you instead of throwing you. (You were bored with all the stuff you already knew how to do, remember?) View a steady diet of do-able challenges as invigorating your writing, not throwing you off track.

Get a new rhythm. Steep challenges first. Then the same old, same old. Repeat.

Keep at it. Don’t stop the old work as you wait for acceptances at a higher level. That’s the freelancer kiss-of-death.

Pitch ten times as much as you think you need to and you will succeed. If you under-pitch, you’ll be likely to give up, grumbling about how “impossible” it is to move up the ranks.

But if you are an idea-bubbling, pitching machine, every editor I know will love working with you.

Remember: Less worrying, more querying. This is your ticket to success!

~ Photo by Alotta Ada