7/8/2023 0 Comments Your not a quitter![]() ![]() The business idea that you knew was gonna make you wealthy? The idea you had for an invention? What happened to that book you were writing? You can do anything that you set your mind to, so don’t quit pursuing your dreams. But it’s up to you to make sure that you see them to completion. David Barnett’s latest novel, Calling Major Tom, is published by Trapeze.Article was originally posted on.Whether you ever will be … well, there’s only one way to find out. Nobody did that to you, you just weren’t quite good enough. If it makes you cry “like a little girl” to hear an editor say of your novel “I just don’t love it enough”, then wait until you start clocking up those one-star Goodreads and Amazon reviews.Īnd one more. Being published doesn’t mean you’re a success. Saying things like, “I have next to no interest in contemporary fiction and avoid literary debuts by British female writers, which all seem so safe and samey” makes you sound a bit … up yourself? When you get there, you’ll find that the vast majority of authors are hugely supportive of each other. Two tips: one, don’t badmouth the rest of the writing community. I expect to see you casting off your anonymity a year or two down the line and following up this piece with news of your first deal. You obviously have talent you managed to get an agent, which the vast majority of writers never do. I hope, Anonymous, that you give it another go. Writing is art, but it is also a job, and one that you have to do to the satisfaction of the people you expect to chuck wads of money at you, so their investment in you makes sense. That implies a path laid out for us, an unshakeable future that is planned and unchangeable. It is no one’s “destiny” to be a published author. I feel pity and scorn for people with dreams.” What writers don’t do is give up after their second go, like Anonymous: “Four years on, I still can’t look at the new fiction tables in Waterstones they make me feel like an infertile woman at a baby shower. I failed over and over again but each time, I failed better. Yes, it makes you feel bad, but it can also galvanise you to self-improvement. Rejection is part and parcel of being a writer. We might never make that million-pound debut, but we can still be published.īut only if we embrace rejection. But think of them like models at a fashion shoot we’re never going to look as good, but we can still wear the same clothes. They’re the ideal we’ve been conditioned to think of as the measure of authorly success. Yes, there are those hip young writers who get picked up for a three-book deal on the basis of a single chapter – but they make the news because they are the exception, not the rule. Robert M Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: a karma-bashingly astonishing 121 rejections. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, 38. ![]() John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was famously rejected with the terse note: “He hasn’t got a future as writer.” Stephen King’s Carrie was rejected 30 times. Literary history is packed with stories of bestselling authors whose work was kicked out multiple times. I had done my best work, but it was never good enough, or it was the right book at the wrong time, or the wrong book at the right time. It would have been easy to quit after the second or third round of rejections. And all were rejected, several times over. I can’t even remember how many full-length manuscripts I wrote before my first novel was published in 2013 – eight, maybe? All of them were written while I had an agent, who deemed all of them publishable and submitted them. “I finally gave up, to save my sanity.”ĭear Anonymous, you’re not a failure. “Years of work and emotional investment wasted,” you write. You’ve had precisely two books on submission to publishers. ![]()
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