devi | (no subject)

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writing about writing

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Ho hum, two rejections in the past week. But never mind. Stephen King said in that book about writing that you haven't really earned your stripes or learned your craft if you haven't got... er, a certain thickness, some inches anyway... of rejection letters on a spike on your desk. But hold on! All my recent ones have come by email! They have no physical thickness! I will never fill up the spike on my desk and never succeed! King Has Said It So It Must Be True.

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Print them out, and spike 'em.
Print them several times, on thick paper. That way, success will come all the sooner! :-)

Wow. You just took the suggestion I was originally going to make and took it to a whole new level. I applaud you- quietly, though, since I am in an office and people will look at me strangely if I clap at my computer.

How thick can I go without blatantly taking the piss? Corrugated paper? Then again, that would kill the printer...

Perhaps what he means is that the rejection letters must collectively be the size of a book. Thus you merely need your rejection e-mails to collectively be the length of a manuscript (originally mistyped as “menuscript”, which sounds horribly geeky).

Alternatively, print out the e-mails and stick them on a spike. But this strikes me as a waste of paper.

What’s your target for the number of rejections you receive this year?

As many as it takes, damnit.

Ahem.

There are better things than that you can do with a big spike on your desk, if you've got one.

Ironically, I think the spikiest desk-object I have is that award I won. I should spike my rejections on that! Marvellous!

That'll learn 'em!

Why not compile your rejection letters into a book (printing them if need be).

Then publish that...

I think someone did...

I did hear of a student house where they covered one wall of the kitchen with job rejection letters. Kind of a negative approach, but it amused them.

Damned, all the good ideas have gone. :-|

NEVER GIVE UP!

Pay no heed to rejection letters - They're gonna happen 95% of the time to ANYONE. Keep at it!

Send them back! Reject their rejections!

I think I heard of someone doing that for a prank... taking issue with what was written in job rejection letters and sending them back as unsatisfactory!

Trouble is, both of these were too short to be interesting in that way. Just 'this story was OK but it didn't do it for me' in both cases. Not much to get my teeth into there...

My own analysis of the way these things work suggests to me that the whole concept of authors being picked up from unsolicited submissions is mostly a myth in the modern world. Again and again I find that if you managed to find a sufficiently detailed biography of an author there's frequently some special detail - however minor - that means they didn't quite just send out manuscripts and get accepted.

And on the rare occasions when a hit author is found in that way the whole thing's more like a lottery win than a triumph for self-evidently great literature.

That's not really true, though, in my experience I've known a lot of people who have been picked out of the slush pile.

Good luck, bluedevi! I've got a nice stack of rejections building myself...

Any chance of more info on these cases ? I'm not a writer myself, but it wasn't just a throwaway remark (ah, good old internet) I've been looking into it quite a bit.

^^^ Yes - success stories this way, please!

Cultivate your stack, and it shall bear fruit.

I have a sneaking feeling the world of short story magazines is quite a lot like that, yes. I've been submitting to places like Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine, which generally has six or seven stories an issue, four of which will be by household names. This makes me feel a bit dispirited about writing shorts at times. But hey, it's also like the lottery in that if you're not in you can't win.

Spike your computer! Like that thing that guy from The High Life does in Goldeneye.

We'll never reject you though. (Unless you specifically ask us to.)

Mr King is clearly stuck in the 20th century. What you ought to do is get a modelling program, build a hypercube, texture each face with your rejection letters, and then pile them all up in a 4 dimensional space - taking the process into a whole new dimension!

Or, umm, perhaps not.

By the way, where magazines are concerned, I don't know if you've seen this? (the magazines list is about half way down the page). Also, the link I was wittering on about at lunch is here.

And if I end up eating anything else with wishes in it, I'll save one for your next (current?) story submission:-)

I like the idea of a spike of rejection letters.
But I also like recycling the mail that I don't want.

So here's my solution - spike 'em and put them in the smallest room. Rejection letters - soft, strong, and thoroughly absorbant!
;-)

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