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Writing Advice Remix with TO HAVE AND HAVE MORE Author Sanibel
Welcome back to Writing Advice Remix, the interview series where we take common writing advice and remix it for practical application. Today, we’re diving into my favorite piece of advice to push back against—“Novelists should write short stories to get noticed by agents and editors.” If you’ve gone through an MFA program or attended a class taught by an MFA graduate, you may have heard this advice at some point. The idea here is that establishing a portfolio of short story publications will help a writer stand out while querying or on submission to publishers. This week, USA Today bestselling author Sanibel joins us to debunk this advice and explain what writers should actually do instead.
Sanibel is the author of To Have and Have More, a satirical novel about overprivileged prep school students learning to navigate the world and their relationships with each other. I first discovered Sanibel and her work through this excellent interview with
, and I’ve been following her on social media ever since. I’m so excited to share her insights on content creation and platform building with you all.Before we jump in, you know what to do: take anything that’s useful to you and your writing life and leave everything that’s not behind.
1. What’s the worst piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? What problem is it supposed to solve? And why is this advice actually unproductive?
The worst advice I’ve received is: just focus on the writing and everything else will fall into place. Being urged to pour everything into craft and “develop” as a writer—a literary version of “build it and they will come”—completely overlooks (or idealizes) what it’s actually like to be a writer today. I received this “just be patient” advice from every possible direction when I was trying to sell To Have & Have More: in my MFA, from agents, and from publishing professionals.
My theory about why this crappy advice is spouted is 1) it’s what writers want to hear (wouldn’t it be great if writing was all it took to get noticed?) and 2) it trains us to tolerate unreasonably long waits. Let me tell you: Patience is not rewarded. If you want a career in this lifetime you have to start a Substack and network and make content—but most writers don’t want to hear this. They prefer to believe that all the waiting to get an agent, waiting to go on submission, waiting for editors to get back (which adds up to years) is going to pay off. In that time, you get accustomed to the anxiety of your career being determined by someone else and feeling like whatever scraps you’re offered are the best thing you’re going to get. Normalizing this insecurity/dependency/docility is great for the industry and terrible for us.
This advice is unproductive because it’s basically telling you to do nothing. A subcategory of this “be passive” advice I received was: Write short stories. I was told on multiple occasions that something I could do to “move the needle” while I was waiting for my book to sell was to write short fiction. Total busy work and awful advice unless you are a short story writer. The idea, as it was explained to me, is you’re an unpublished novelist with no track record. How can you legitimize yourself and build some credentials? Get shorter pieces published in respectable lit magazines. Agents/editors read these mags and they will see your story and then reach out because you have demonstrated promise.
This advice makes it sound like publishing short stories is easy. Submitting to lit magazines (not to mention the effort it takes to write a good short story) is an enormous lift. I tried this, got a ton of rejections/nonresponses, and wasted a lot of time (I effectively spent a ton of time doing nothing).
2. Now that you’ve written, revised, and published your book, how would you reframe that advice into something that’s actually helpful for writers?
I’ll reframe the “write short stories as a way to get noticed” piece of advice. If you’re willing to put time and effort into something as laborious as writing and shopping short stories, take that energy and repurpose it into something that will amass followers and give you a platform. Start a newsletter. Make TikToks. Drum up an audience that you can present alongside your manuscript and say: See, these people are clamoring for my book. Do everything you can to remove dependency on others and have leverage.
The “write short stories” advice is basically: do writing-adjacent activities that are not your immediate craft with the hope that they will indirectly attract attention for your main thing. If you’re going to take that advice (and take time away from your main thing) then do it in the most efficient way possible (aka not short stories).
Rather than looking to get validation from a “respected” lit journal/magazine/website, become the platform yourself. Circumvent the gatekeepers. The practical problem this solves is you won’t be dependent on gatekeepers to approve your piece. With your own platform, you can pitch yourself directly to your audience whenever you have something to say.
3. What are three concrete steps a writer can take to incorporate this revised advice into their writing process?
Step 1) Start thinking of yourself as your own manager now. You can’t be “the talent” exclusively until you’re a name. Whether or not you want to be, you are also marketing and branding and PR. I was shocked to learn that even if you’re with a big 5 press, you’re expected to do a lot of marketing yourself. They ask you to provide the list of people to send your ARC to. They want you to post about your book tour. They want you to bring the audience to your events. Don’t wait until you’re about to go on tour to acquiesce to the marketing part of the job of being an author.
Step 2) While you’re writing, keep a list of passages/lines/chapters that will translate well to promo. When it comes to writing-adjacent activities, I always think in terms of efficiency: how can I make 2 pieces of content (say, a 90 second reel and an op-ed to pitch to Electric Lit) out of the same material? In other words, how can I spend the least time working on things other than my book? The answer is: your book is your marketing content. An example: I’m writing a scene where my sad rich girl main character unintentionally offends a middle-class friend because she is shocked that the friend’s family “only” has one car. This is a super light lift because the only thing I need to add is a TikTok headline (“rich people faux pas”) and a hook (opening line) because most of the video I will describe this exact scene and plug my book.
Step 3) Write a variety of pitches (taglines, soundbite-ready summaries) for different audiences. You’re competing against shortform video, newsletters, memes, TV series—how will you convince people to read rather than scroll? You’re an entertainer now. Making brainrot has taught me that your pitch doesn’t have to be accurate. Only 10% of my book takes place on Nantucket but I know people are enticed by the place so I made 25 videos this summer that capitalize on the name recognition.
4. Let’s talk about To Have and Have More. How did you integrate this advice into your own writing process?
A sad rich girl learns that life without consequences isn’t privilege—it’s purgatory.
I’ll share how I’m practicing what I preach for a new book I’m working on (a retelling of the Odyssey from Athena’s POV). In a year (or two), I hope to be promoting it, so I’m doing the promotional legwork alongside the actual writing. When an idea comes to me for a punchy tagline (or if I come across a culture article that speaks to my book’s themes), I save it. I know I’ll appreciate this list in 2027. Promo ideas feel effortless during the writing stage, but by the time you’re post-editing and months removed from the book—and suddenly asked to draft reading group questions or write a letter to booksellers—you’ll be knee-deep in your next project and all those one-liners and content ideas that felt so organic will be hard to retrace.
5. Looking beyond this specific piece of advice, what's the most important lesson you've learned about craft?
I know I’ve evaded answering the capital C craft question so I will stay on task for this final one: read (and write) outside of your comfort zone. You’d think that consuming a lot of “sad rich girl” content (Sofia Coppola movies, unlikeable heroine books, etc) would be good for writing a sad rich girl book because I’ve become an expert in this niche. But knowing your literary “ancestry” too well inevitably hems you in.
If you treat craft too much like a subject that you want to master, you obsess over that “master” status. You stop taking risks because if you “fail” then you expose yourself as a non-master. I think it’s natural to want to graduate from “amateur” status but I actually think being amateur is the best place to be. It allows you to experiment and this is where, I think, the best type of creativity gets to play out.
It’s like college admission essays (consulting is my day job). Kids are so loath to take risks because they’re scared of “breaking the rules” or doing something wrong but the more you try to adhere to “what readers want” the more boring your essay sounds. I’d rather write something “bad” than something “boring”. By reading outside of my comfort zone, I don’t get attached to a certain type of language that “sounds right.”
USA Today bestselling author Sanibel grew up in Princeton and studied Classics at the University of Pennsylvania before getting her MFA at The New School. Her work has appeared in NYmag, ELLE, Air Mail, and Literary Hub. She lives in Greenwich Village with her husband and is working on a satirical reimagining of the Odyssey from Athena's POV.
Where to Find Sanibel:
Sad Rich Girls (Bindery)
What are your thoughts on writers becoming content creators? Does the modern writer need to create “brainrot” on social media to build their readership? What other options do debut writers have for connecting with readers in today’s attention economy?
Let’s talk all about platform building and content creation:
Until next time,
Kat
I like the advice and then I don't. Creating content doesn't mean taking ownership of your platform.It's not like you show up on social media and suddenly an audience appears. It takes a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of patience, it is essentially the same concept of writing short stories while you wait. Getting published in lit magazines is super tough, and I totally agree that we should't wait for the so called "gatekeepers" to validate our work. But creating brainrot content is not the solution in my opinion and it can be extremely distracting. So the point is, do you create something of value whether is a short story or blog post even if nobody will ever read it, or do you waste your time chasing engagement on social media?I don't have an answer, but like probably most writers I keep the unrealistic hope that having a good story to share will be enough.
Look forward to reading To Have and To Have More. That being said, I think there’s a value in short story writing — even if you get rejected from every literary magazine possible and no one but you reads it. I’m someone who struggles with finishing longer form projects like novels. Writing and finishing short stories gives me greater confidence as a writer and helps me develop my creative voice in a lower stakes way versus writing a novel.
I think a lot of folks writing novels would benefit from learning to write in a concise way that short stories demand, because they really teach you the value of every sentence and every word (similar to poetry.)