Would You Want God to Read This Short Story? Well? Would you?

Lately, when I’ve finished writing something short, like an essay or short story, I’ve been asking myself a new question as I decide what to do with it.

The question is, “Would I want to be buried with this?”

Or: “Would I want this story or essay to follow me into the afterlife, whether that consists of the oblivion of tissue decomposing underground, or a bright and lovely heaven where I get to meet angels and people who died that I thought were hot and cool when we still had bodies?”

Or, to put it a less corpsey way: “Would I want God [assuming, for the sake of argument, there is a God] to read this?”

It’s a revision tactic that never occurred to me before, but it’s a question that’s worth posing to myself, I think, with respect to every little thing I write.

Because sending something to a magazine for publication, at this point in my writing life, can seem to be a low-stakes affair. It’s so slow. It can feel so very cold. And even the best work usually gets rejected many times before it gets accepted.

I have made jokes on Twitter about how I’m not really writing to publish work anymore so much as I’m looking to entertain the first-round readers at literary magazines. And it’s actually kind of true. Because those are the only people who I can feel pretty certain are going to spend any time with the things I write.

There are times, of course, when I know exactly what to do with something I’ve written. The work is good, the thing is finished, and it’s ready to be delivered electronically to an editor who will leave it in their submission queue for between five and fifteen months and then probably send it back with a form letter that says, more or less, “No thanks.”

It’s not always as simple as that, though.

Sometimes I’ve written something that I know has its strongpoints, its moments of grandeur, but I’m not sure if its parts add up to make a whole that anyone would want to put in a magazine. I know I like it, but will someone else?

It’s hard to know, sometimes. And so I’ve been asking myself, lately, when I face down a newly finished story or essay, “Would I want God to read this and judge me for it?”

It really puts things into perspective. Sort of.

The reason I impose this question on myself now isn’t that I’ve been writing trash and having a hard time recently. It’s quite the opposite.

I’ve been consistently writing good things. I’m enjoying a wave of producing new material that I like and which doesn’t involve much handwringing over adverbs. I haven’t been having to pry the sentences out of myself, or force myself to remain seated long enough to write something despite my always-throbbing anxieties.

Like, recently, I had this idea for a short story whirling around for several months in the electric dryer of my mind. I finally started writing it on a Sunday, when I didn’t have much necessary-money-work to do, and I finished it on a Thursday.

I was able to write it so quickly—and that is very quick, for me—because my money-work involves writing, and so I’m nearly always writing, or editing, or doing some such thing. It’s rare that I get to focus on my own work for even a few hours at a time, and so when I do I can move through it in a fairly straight line.

At least, that’s how it is when I’m riding a wave like this one, in which the things I write emerge without much friction, and I don’t spend a lot of time sitting around and thinking I should have gone to law school.

That’s all it is—it’s a wave. And waves end.

I am painfully aware of how they end. And so I want always to get as much as I can out of a wave and still escape it in time so that it doesn’t crash down on me. I don’t want to slip up and get saltwater in my mouth, which I guess in real-life, non-metaphorical terms means messing up a short story in a big way. Or writing the same story multiple times without realizing it, standing still when I need to keep moving.

I don’t trust my own productivity. It makes me nervous.

And so I started asking myself the burial/God question, as a way to try to think faster than myself, to avoid the pitfalls I don’t even see there in front of me.

I’m not even religious, or anything like that. I just want to be a good writer.

That’s all.