SORRY folks I’m not talkin’ ‘bout those rejected by their lovers, but I’m talkin’ of we poor writers and the continuous rejection we face as we try to build a career in writing.
History is replete with examples of writing that was rejected time and again that finally made the best sellers list, and it is with such tales that we hacks plod on every day, wielding the pen and hoping our stuff will one day not return with tell tale rejection slip but payment cheque!
Once a famous editor George Horace Lorimer sent back a manuscript to an author hopeful. She retorted; “Last week you rejected my story. I know you did not read it, for, as a test, I pasted together pages 15,16,17 and 18, and the manuscript came back with pages still stuck. You are a fraud, you reject stories you haven’t even read!”
Lorimer wrote back, “Dear Madam, at breakfast when I open an egg, I don’t have to eat the whole egg to discover it’s bad!” A woman once submitted several chapters and an outline of a romantic novel to a publisher and awaited word in vain from the editor for several weeks.
Finally she wired: “Please report on my story immediately as I have other irons in the fire.” Prompt came the reply: “We have considered your story and advice you to put it with the other irons!”
And here’s one for all you aspiring writers who want to give up writing and are fed up with life: An American writer named John Kennedy Toole wrote a comic novel about life in New Orleans called “A Confederacy of Dunces.’ It was so relentlessly rejected by publishers that he killed himself. That was in 1969.
His mother refused to give up on the book. She sent it out and got it back, rejected, over and over again. At last she won the patronage of Walker Percy who got it accepted by Louisiana State University Press, and in 1980 it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction!
‘Lust for Life’ by Irwin Stone was turned down by seventeen publishers; ‘The Ginger Man’ by A.P. Donleavy was refused by sixteen American and ten British publishing houses; ‘The Good Earth’ by Pearl Buck was declined more than a dozen times. But all of them turned out to be best sellers!
So rejection doesn’t mean the end of the road, but the beginning of a determined, single minded, resolute journey till you finally taste the sweet nectar of success! And it’s not just about writing that you learn to face rejection. Face it head on, work at yourself, and win..!
