Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to get published. I wrote four novels that nobody wanted, sent them out all over, collected hundreds and hundreds of rejection slips.
It's easy to feel spurned, especially when you return to your apartment and stare at the hundreds of rejection letters tacked to your bulletin board.
Like pretty much every short story writer, I submitted to every market under the sun and hoped for the best. The rejection letters I've collected over the years can probably make a book of their own.
Every published writer, myself included, was at one time unpublished. All writers know what rejection feels like.
Getting your work published is a major struggle.
Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil-but there is no way around them.
Being an actor is mostly about rejection and being out of work. It was a fast lesson in all of that stuff.
Acting is a life of rejection.
I kept sending out stories and getting rejected.
I wrote short stories for seven years and used to mail them out. You couldn't send them by e-mail. I called them manila boomerangs. I'd seal the self-addressed stamped envelope inside an envelope and I'd mail it off, and it would come back six weeks later with a rejection letter in it.
I had immediate success in the sense that I sold something right off the bat. I thought it was going to be a piece of cake and it really wasn't. I have drawers full of - or I did have - drawers full of rejection slips.
My paternal grandfather was a failed novelist. He stacked boxes of rejected manuscripts in a closet.
The problem with being an actress is there's a lot of rejection.
I've had way more rejections than I've had jobs.
I got nice rejections explaining that historical fiction was a difficult sell. But I kept trying.
I was very naive, and I thought it was just a matter of writing my first book and sending it in, and for the rest of my life I would be writing books and collecting royalties. Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to get published.
Speak to any editor and ask them what they turned down, and they'll have long lists of books.
My 20s were a blizzard of rejection slips.
I wrote for free for, like, fifteen years; I could redo my parlor in rejection slips. It would be surprisingly tasteful - they use nice paper.
I could write an entertaining novel about rejection slips, but I fear it would be overly long.
You're going to have more rejection than acceptance.
If you are going to be a writer, you have to have self-belief, every writer gets rejections, they say the difference between a successful and unsuccessful writer is an unsuccessful writer gives up, if you keep going you will succeed.
I earned my writing stripes with a large man's shoebox overflowing with rejection slips... more than 100 before I got my first, 'Yes, we want this,' accompanied by a check.
I was a house dad. Once, my wife was working as a dispatcher at the fire department, and I was staying home and writing while baby-sitting my son, who hardly ever slept. So I wrote in twenty-minute patches. Some of that early stuff is just dreadful. I got a thousand rejects.
I am the luckiest novelist in the world. I was a first-time novelist who wasn't awash in rejection slips, whose manuscript didn't disappear in slush piles. I have had a wonderful time.
