The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

Rejection letters
Challenges and successes

I recently met with a friend who told me about someone she knew who’d written a memoir. This writer submitted the work to an important agent and received a rejection letter telling him the writing was terrific, but he couldn’t represent the book because he didn’t think there was a large enough market for it. My friend told me that because of this one rejection letter, this writer was reconsidering whether the memoir was worth publishing. But Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), persisted despite 121 rejections of his manuscript! Agents and editors often act as if they can predict the future. Their job is to sell books, not write them. They study the marketplace, and they make judgments, often not about whether the work is good but upon whether it’s marketable. But sometimes a book that was rejected several times finally finds a publisher and becomes a word-of-mouth sensation.

The website One Hundred Famous Rejections can give hope to every writer whose work has been turned down.

J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997), the first volume of the Harry Potter series, was turned down by twelve presses then bought by Bloomsbury in London because its CEO’s daughter loved it. It started small. It ended up being bigger than big. (The novel was published as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone [1999] in the United States.)

Many publishers rejected Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) because editors believed a book written by an African writer wouldn’t sell. But then an editor at Heinemann in London reviewed it and believed it was the best book he’d read in ages. He insisted the press buy the book; it was published in a small print run of two thousand copies; it has since won awards and sold more than eight million copies throughout the world.

One rejection letter for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby said, “You’d have a decent book if you’d get rid of that Gatsby character.”

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) was rejected twenty-one times. One letter read that it was “an absurd and uninteresting fantasy which was rubbish and dull.” He won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1983.

One rejection letter means nothing. Several rejections mean nothing. A rejection letter is only saying “I don’t want to work with you.” Some generous editors offer worthwhile advice that a serious writer should consider. But other editors pen a variation on the themes of “I didn’t like it,” “I can’t figure out how to sell it,” “We don’t handle books like this.”

The problem with rejection letters is that they sound authoritative. And therein lies the challenge for us writers. Writers often lose heart and decide to stop work and abandon their projects. They mistakenly hear “The work is no good,” rather than “I don’t want to represent or publish this work.” Or writers might decide to change the work markedly because of an editor’s rejection letter, moving the work away from their own vision to try to make it match an editor’s.

Writing to please a potential agent or editor—and I know writers who have—is the kiss of death for a writer who’s trying to develop an authentic voice, who’s trying to write a deep and soulful work. Although throughout the process we’ll perhaps work collaboratively with a writing partner, or perhaps even an agent or editor, ultimately it seems best to ensure that the work is authentically our own. “Whether a publisher likes this or not, I’m committed to writing this work as best I can,” I believe, is the best policy for a writer. I’ve known writers who’ve spent months changing wonderful books in reaction to an agent’s criticism, only to have the same agents reject the books again. It takes courage for us to refine our own ideas about our work. We writers can all too easily be led down someone else’s primrose path.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love (2006), has said she can’t “understand why people work so hard to create something beautiful, but then refuse to share it with anyone, for fear of criticism.” She advises writers to send their work to agents and editors “as much as possible.” And when the rejection letters come back, to “take a deep breath and try again.” Gilbert believes it’s the writer’s job to complete the work; it’s the agent’s and editor’s job to decide whether the work is good enough to be published. “Your only job is to write your heart out,” she says, “and let destiny take care of the rest.”

Jo Ann Beard, author of The Boys of My Youth, approached rejection and seeming failure in a positive manner. “I guess I first thought of myself as a writer when I got a rejection slip,” she said. “That was a defining moment—meeting such a worthy adversary.” Beginning writers, she observed, need to use rejection letters as opportunities to rethink the direction of their work.

I’ve known writers who’ve sent out their work when they’ve known it’s far from ready hoping that an agent or editor will be struck by its potential. I believe this is never a good idea. Not only does doing this waste an agent’s or editor’s time, it invites rejection.

It’s a hard time for writers. Fewer publishers are willing to take chances. Writers are held accountable for their sales records, but publishers often don’t take responsibility for not having sold a fine book well. It’s a good time for writers, too. There are still fine editors willing to support a writer’s work; small publishers and university presses have innovative series; and, self-publishing is an option. (Virginia Woolf, for example, published every book from Jacob’s Room on through her Hogarth Press. She didn’t have to deal with editors, although her husband, Leonard Woolf, always read her work. And so she wrote her experimental works exactly as she chose to.)

During my writing life, I’ve received hundreds of rejection letters: “I can’t see us publishing this book. It’s not anything like what we publish”; “The writer treats the subject differently from the way the subject has been treated before and so I can’t see how we can market this”; “The writing is wonderful, but we can’t figure out how to publish this”; “It’s a hard market and I’m not sure we could find readers for this book”; “It’s not a good fit for our list”; “The book is about ordinary people leading quiet lives; we like books about extraordinary people overcoming great obstacles”; “The book falls between two stools.”

These are the letters we read and file. And then we plan how to move on, whether we need to make changes in the manuscript, and how to get our work read by someone else. We refine our vision, perhaps. We revise, even, to reflect our own sensibility and not someone else’s, and surely not to reflect what we think the marketplace wants from us.

Stephen King began collecting rejection letters before he was fourteen—he’d been writing and submitting his work to magazines from an early age. He “pounded a nail into the wall” in his room, and collected his rejection slips on it. “By the time I was fourteen…” he wrote, “the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.”

King’s response—impale the rejection letter on a spike and keep writing—is worth remembering.