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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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.

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