Rejection, a novel

As a case in point, J. The following is a list of authors who have been treated almost as badly as you have been. If nothing else, you are in good company.

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Watership Down by Richard Adams. The Deer Park by Norman Mailer. I'd been workign on.

In the middle of the novel was one, absolutely critical paragraph, and it had been lifted from the original short story. It was none other than the very excerpt I had chosen to post online as an example of unforgivable writing. When i called my editor and tried to tell her that I had to cut that paragraph, she was incensed, and said "it was the only good paragraph in the novel," and if I cut it out, I'd be in breach of contract, and the publisher would sue me to the tune of twice the size of the advance.

I eventually caved and the novel was published to no acclaim, and sales were bad enough to pretty much guarantee that I'd never have another deal like that again. In the mean time I'd sunk the advance into bitcoin at the peak, and lost it all.

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Pretty much every author out there will have a rejection story or two. Today, responses come mainly online. Guessing the likelihood of acceptance now relies on your interpretation of an email subject header. They may not be signs of final acceptance, but they are proof that you are trying, that you are taking part in the process. The idea of taking all those rejections—the bad ones and good ones alike—and giving up would have been like letting go of my skin or my face or my bones.

I got terribly depressed of course, then I pushed on and wrote another story, another book, taking the kinds of risks I had to with my work. Another reason to save your personal rejections is that you never know when you can use them. I used one such rejection as a back cover blurb for my story collection.

Before being published by Press 53, the manuscript was one of three contenders for the Tupelo Press fiction prize. The rejection therefore was meaningful and positive, and very usable. Writers, though, are used to seeing forms. Harried editors have time so often only to place a pre-printed and cut rejection slip—not even, usually, a full piece of paper—into a self-addressed, stamped envelope. When a new one arrives, we grow accustomed simply to updating our files and sending the work out again.

So, when a full sheet of paper arrives, with a real signature, already this is something special to bounce us out of that normal process. It is instead something that keeps us going, no matter how many forms arrive in the inbox. Most writers I know continue to work on their submissions for years, even after acceptance, feeling they can always improve.

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Accept that most writing is never final, even amongst the best. I put 10 stories in the mail the mail! Which meant, obviously, that I got rejections constantly throughout the summer, sometimes multiple rejections in a single day. I think it was good to be crushed then, because it made me take the time to figure out what tools I was missing as a writer, and to work to remedy those lacks. If you get acceptances, let them carry you through what will certainly be more rejections.

Kennedy , one of our most renowned and respected poets, had his first book rejected 16 times before acceptance.