Don’t Let It Bring You Down
In his forward to the current summer issue of The Missouri Review, editor Speer Morgan recalls some notable rejections
from the publisher Alfred A. Knopf of works by authors who would later be famous. In several cases, if the submitter had read and taken seriously the readers’ reports from the august publishing house, they would have given up writing and found a more sensible profession. Vladimir Nabokov’s book Lolita was “too racy”; Jorge Luis Borges’s collection of stories was “utterly untranslatable”; a novel by Isaac Singer was “Poland and the rich Jews again.”
Morgan’s counsel?
[Essential] to success… is fearlessness or tenacity by the artist. At some point in their career every serious writer or artist must do the irresponsible thing. He or she must keep working, however improbable success may seem.
Good words to read from someone in a position to be dispensing rejection slips (several of which I have received). Craft instruction from writers in the business of dispensing it, and tips from agents and editors at writing conferences or on blogs, can be extremely helpful, but it can also accumulate into a kind of L’Académie française, a smothering weight of do’s and don’ts, discouraging just the kind of fearlessness Morgan calls essential.
