Sometimes — okay, a lot of times — I write pieces that don’t immediately get accepted for publication. With certain forms, such as short stories, it’s a matter of persistence. The submission process is notoriously slow, and I only submit to publications that pay, somewhat limiting the pool of candidates. I recently received a rejection from a prestigious literary magazine, Guernica, two years after I submitted the piece. But I have confidence in that story and am continuing to send it out.

Some pieces, though, are more time-sensitive, niche, or have limited publishing prospects. Even when they fail to get published, I don’t give up on them. After many years of writing, I’ve learned that patience and perseverance are just as essential as craft and building a platform.

For example, I wrote an op-ed on Korean adoption that did not get picked up by any of the increasingly vanishing outlets that publish the format. Some months after, I was asked to write an essay for the newsletter of an adoptee organization and was able to repurpose the op-ed for them. Years later, I tailored that same op-ed for a Generation Women DC live storytelling event, where it was favorably received. Now, I’m planning on adapting that same piece to enter in a nationwide storytelling event. A piece that didn’t get published as originally intended led me to a new way of getting my story to an appreciative audience.

Not that I think every piece I write is worthy of publication. I wrote a novel that will never see the light of day. However, I do not consider the years I labored over it as wasted. I learned a lot from that failed attempt and built on that knowledge to write novels of which I am proud.

I’ve been in a flash writing group for many years, and not every piece I produce for it is a keeper. In my “write club” folder lurk many stories that do not merit revision and honing.

But in that folder are also quite a few pieces that have been published, as well as some I think are worthy of publication but haven’t yet found a home. In response to a hermit-crab essay prompt, I once wrote a satirical piece called “Instructions for Your New Korean Child.” I submitted it to a few places, including the Rumpus’ humor column and the Margins’ flash-fiction feature, but I sensed it was just too niche, too unexpected, and maybe even a little repellent for non-adoptee readers.

About a year later, the piece was included in the BIPOC Adoptees Zine, a fundraiser for a nonprofit organization whose work I greatly admire. Approximately a year after that, I read the piece at a storytelling event at a conference for adult international adoptees. From the laughter and groans of recognition of the audience members, I knew my piece resonated and was thrilled that it had finally found its true home.

It’s happened more than once that something I wrote but never submitted because it didn’t fit neatly into a genre — or stopped submitting when it seemed too outside conventional literary-journal tastes — matched the theme of an anthology’s call for submissions and was accepted. I’m thinking of a ruminative essay on the covid pandemic, anti-Asian hate, Japanese internment, and the artist Isamu Noguchi that found a home in the anthology Writing the Virus, and also of a prose poem to my Korean mother that will be forthcoming in an anthology of women writers, among others.

I am currently working on a collection of short stories portraying my adoption from the viewpoint of multiple first-person witnesses. Not every piece will make it into the book that, fingers tightly crossed, will one day be published. But the stories left on the cutting-room floor won’t be dumped into the trash. They may one day be re-worked into another piece, donated in support of a worthy organization, or be perfect for a themed call for submissions.

If you have confidence in your work — and you really must if you hope to make it as a writer — never give up on it. Keep those pieces that don’t get published close; one day, they may just find their way to their proper home.

Alice Stephens is the author of the novel Famous Adopted People, which took her five years to publish. Her historical novel, The Twain: A Tale of Nagasaki, took 13 years to find a publisher and is forthcoming in February 2027.