Rejection isn’t always bad
By BILL DUNCAN
The View From Here
As a writer I know the sting of rejection. So does anyone who puts pen to paper. It goes with the territory.
I have often told students in my writing classes, they should genuflect when they enter a library out of respect for those who suffered martyrdom to be shelved there. Each term I usually give an ending lecture on rejection, just to show how many famous writers have experienced rejection.
I think it is time that the average reader understand the personal struggles writers experience trying to get into print. I have collected this information as part of my lecture series and I think the reading public will be astounded by the tenacity of those of us who write.
Pulitzer Prize winning novelist William Saroyan got over 7,000 rejection slips before he sold his first piece. Margaret Mitchell got 38 rejection slips with a novel she called “Road to Tara.” The publisher changed the title to “Gone With The Wind,” and you know the rest of the story.
Tony Hilerman was told by a publisher to get rid of all that Indian stuff. Steven King’s best seller, “Carrie,” was rejected 30 times and one editor told him in writing, “We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias.” I figure I’m in good company considering one publisher rejected a children’s book I had written saying that children didn’t know what the word allergic means. One editor rejecting my book about the RMS Queen Mary said the writing was pedestrian. I hope he didn’t mean I could walk on water.
Theodore Geisel was told his Dr. Seuss books would be too difficult for children to understand. “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” by Richard Bach got 140 rejections and one publisher told Bach he had given it to his children’s book division, but they said it was too mature. The creators of the Chicken Soup for the Soul anthology also got 140 rejections before the run-away series series was published.
But writers are ingenious people. Andre Bernard turned his rejection into a book, “Rotten Rejections: The Letters that Publishers Wish They’d Never Sent.” He has an extraordinary collection of rejection letters sent to now famous writers. It only proves that in my business, rejection is only one person’s opinion and not always the right opinion.
Here are some examples:
A letter sent to William Golding, “Lord of the Flies” author:
“…an absurd and uninteresting fantasy which was rubbish and dull.”
“Watership Down,” author Richard Adams received this rejection note:
“Older children wouldn’t like it because its language is too difficult.”
Sylvia Plath was told, “There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice.”
An editor who turned down “The Diary of Anne Frank,” wrote:
“The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the ‘curiosity’ level.”
Irving Stone’s epic novel on the Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh was rejected 16 times before it was published and sold more than 25 million copies. One editor rejected it as “a long, dull novel about an artist.”
An editor turned down “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov, with this notation:
“…overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian…the whole thing is an unsure cross between hideous reality and improbable fantasy. It often becomes a wild neurotic daydream. I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.”
One editor who rejected “The Spy who Came in from the Cold” the first novel of John le Carre wrote a colleague: “You’re welcome to le Carre, he hasn’t got any future.”
An editor’s summary of “Catch 22,” by Joseph Heller said:
“I haven’t really the foggiest idea about what the man is trying to say. Apparently the author intends to be funny – possibly even satire – but it is really not funny on any intellectual level.”
After reading about the rejections of all these literary giants, I think I will dig out that great American novel I stuffed in the bottom drawer of my desk.
(Bill Duncan can be reached at P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)