A while back, I posted about Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle In Time” being rejected 26 times. While in a Twitter writers’ chat (#writechat, hosted by author Julie Isaac), I discovered that Mark David Gerson has also posted about Madeleine L’Engle’s rejections.

Find out more in his great blog entry: Feeling Rejected? Don’t Be Dejected!

Want to find out about other famous author rejections? Visit Writers & Rejections: Don’t Give Up!

C.S. Lewis, received over 800 rejections before he made his first sale.

Lewis’s works have now been translated into more than 30 languages and have sold millions of copies over the years.

C.S. Lewis Quotes:

What you want is practice, practice, practice. It doesn’t matter what we write (at least this is my view) at our age, so long as we write continually as well as we can. I feel that every time I write a page either of prose or of verse, with real effort, even if it’s thrown into the fire the next minute, I am so much further on.

I am sure that some are born to write as trees are born to bear leaves: for these, writing is a necessary mode of their own development. If the impulse to write survives the hope of success, then one is among these. If not, then the impulse was at best only pardonable vanity, and it will certainly disappear when the hope is withdrawn.

Want to find out about other famous author rejections? Visit Writers & Rejections: Don’t Give Up!

Sources:
Examining The Resilience Of Responding To Rejection
Rejected! by Scott Nicholson
C.S. Lewis Wikipedia entry
Great Writing Quotes - BitterSweetLife

John Kennedy Toole was an American novelist from New Orleans, Louisiana.

Toole sent the manuscript of his novel, Confederation of Dunces, to Simon and Schuster in the early 1960s and despite initial enthusiasm about the work, S&S eventually rejected it, commenting that it “isn’t really about anything.”

After Toole’s suicide in 1969, his mother convinced author Walker Percy (then a faculty member at Loyola University New Orleans) to read her son’s manuscript. Percy loved it, and LSU Press did an initial printing of 2500 copies in 1980.

A year later, in 1981, Toole was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The book has now sold more than 1.5 million copies in 18 languages.

Want to find out about other famous author rejections? Visit Writers & Rejections: Don’t Give Up!

Sources:

Survival of Rats by Michael Allen (PDF)
Wikipedia entry

Ray Bradbury says he received at least 1000 rejections during his writing career, and he’s still getting rejections. Bradbury submitted more than 800 manuscripts before he made his first sale.

Since then, he has written more than five hundred published works — short stories, novels, plays, screenplays, television scripts, and verse, and was awarded the National Book Foundation’s 2000 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, an the National Medal of Arts in 2004.

From his Wikipedia entry:

Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury is widely considered one of the greatest and most popular American writers of speculative fiction of the twentieth century.

On writing rituals:

Every day at 9:00 a.m., for two hours, I begin a new short story, sometimes finishing it, or write an essay or poem. This routine has continued for sixty-five years. I have my favorite cat, who is my paperweight, on my desk while I am writing.

Quotes by Ray Bradbury:

You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.

Libraries raised me. I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.

Want to find out about other famous author rejections? Visit Writers & Rejections: Don’t Give Up!

Want to find out about how other authors write? Visit Author Writing Habits.

Sources:
RayBradbury.com
B&N interview with Ray Bradbury
Examining The Resilience Of Responding To Rejection
Rejections: three methods of coping (Gotham Writers’ Workshop)
Ray Bradbury Wikipedia entry

It’s become one of the classic rejection stories but in case any of you haven’t yet heard about it: After reading John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, a publisher apparently forwarded the mss to a colleage with a note that read “You’re welcome to Le Carré. He hasn’t got any future.” The book went on to become a bestseller and Publisher’s Weekly named it “best spy novel of all-time”.

It’s a wonderful quote and inspirational to anyone who has ever had a negative review. Although this quote has been widely circulated, however, I’ve been unable to track its original source (e.g. proof that this actually happened). If anyone can help me, I’d be grateful.

Pushcart Press: Rotten Reviews and Rejections uses the quote on their book page (saying it came from a rejection), but I have a copy of the first edition book and was unable to find the quote anywhere in its pages; it must have been added to a later edition. If anyone out there has the new edition, I’d very much appreciate it if you could check for an attribution and let me know.

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold was le Carré’s third novel, not his first; I mention this because several of the sites who used this quote had this fact wrong. And if the quote was indeed taken from a publisher’s note to a colleague, then how did the contents of that note get circulated? Why would the colleague keep the note?

In trying to track down the quote, I did come across interesting info about the author and thought I’d share:

John le Carré rarely gave interviews and when he did, he even more rarely talked about himself.

A good writer is an expert on nothing except himself. And on that subject, if he is wise, he holds his tongue. Some of you may wonder why I am reluctant to submit to interviews on television and radio and in the press. The answer is that nothing that I write is authentic. It is the stuff of dreams, not reality. Yet I am treated by the media as though I wrote espionage handbooks.

And to a point I am flattered that my fabulations are taken so seriously. Yet I also despise myself in the fake role of guru, since it bears no relation to who I am or what I do. Artists, in my experience, have very little centre. They fake. They are not the real thing. They are spies. I am no exception.

On writing habits:

According to his brief message on his website, le Carré still writes by hand.

On categorization:

Le Carré believed that authors should not try to categorize their own books. “I think that is a job for the literary bureaucracy and not for the writer.”

On isolation:

I am at a stage in my life — now quite late — where I am completely reconciled to what I am as a writer. I know what I can and can’t do. I love writing. I feel it is my best time. But I still feel, as I think most creative people do, absolutely isolated.

On writing at a later age:

When you’re my age and you see a story, you better go for it pretty quickly. I’d just like to get a few more novels under my belt. Then I’d like to have somebody standing behind me with a hammer who says, “Okay, that’s enough.” Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven’t made is to talk about the unwritten book.

Random facts about the author you may not have known:

His early books were popular reading at the KGB.

John le Carré is a pen name. The author’s real name is David Cornwell.

One of the framed letters he has up on his wall comes from his publisher, Victor Gollancz, in 1963, saying that his advance for The Spy Who Came in From the Cold has been increased from £25 to £150.

Quotes by John le Carré

Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.

A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.

Sources:
Times Online interview
Salon interview
Johnlecarre.com/biography.html
The Globe & Mail interiew
Kirjasto.sci.fi bio
Wikipedia entry on John le Carré
Pushcart Press: Rotten Reviews and Rejections
On the Survival Of Rats in the Slush Pile

Yasmine Galenorn (@YasmineGalenorn on Twitter) says that she had 600 rejections piled up before she received her first book contract, including rejections from short stories, poetry, and novels. Her first eight contracts were for nonfiction, and she still has seven novels in the closet (“and they’ll stay there!”).

Now New York Times bestselling author Yasmine Galenorn writes the bestselling urban fantasy Otherworld/Sisters of the Moon series for Berkley and the upcoming Indigo Court Series (also urban fantasy).

Her advice to writers in her workshops:

I cannot guarantee you success, but I guarantee you this: if you quit, you WILL fail.

Sources:
@YasmineGalenorn on Twitter
Yasmine Galehorn website
Yasmine Galenorn Wikipedia entry

James Patterson’s first novel, The Thomas Berryman Number, was rejected 26 times before finally being accepted by Little, Brown in 1976. One publisher held it for seven months (which made him hopeful) before turning it down.

The book went on win the Edgar Award for the best first mystery novel.

Patterson now holds the New York Times bestsellers list record with 39 New York Times bestselling titles overall and has sold more than 150 million books worldwide. He’s the only author to occupy the #1 slot on the New York Times Adult Fiction and Children’s Chapter Book bestsellers lists at the same time.

His writing habits

According to an interview on his website, Patterson takes about a year to write a book from start to finish.

I have an evolved series of routines. It’s interesting, when I was watching the filming of the movie ["Kiss the Girls"], one of the things that struck me about Morgan Freeman is the confidence that he has as an actor. He’s just so confident.

Over the years, at least with respect to thrillers, I’ve become very confident. I know that somehow I’m going to get it right, that somehow the ending is going to come to me. I guess a little of that is, yes, I have developed some rituals.

One is to do a very exacting 30-40 page outline. It helps me get organized. I will tend to do nine or ten drafts. I do about a draft a month. On each draft, I work on something in particular. For example, I might work on a couple of characters who I don’t think are rich enough or I might work on plot twists, and then on a couple of drafts I might just work on the writing itself. Early on, I just work on the story.

Want to find out about other famous author rejections? Visit Writers & Rejections: Don’t Give Up!

Want to find out about how other authors write? Visit Author Writing Habits.

Sources:
James Patterson website
We Read biography
How To Deal With Rejection

Ursula K. Le Guin wrote after the children went to bed and (when they got older) during their school hours, but it took many years before her stories and poems found acceptance. Her work now includes 24 novels, 10 volumes each of poetry and short story collections, 15 children’s books, as well as literary criticisms and translations.

Le Guin’s early stories were rejected because editors found them a challenge to categorize. From an NNDB.com bio:

Although editors were routinely praising the quality of her writing, they also found her stories difficult to pigeonhole. Typically they were rejected as not being “quite right” for the style or genre of a particular magazine or publishing house. In large part this was because much of her early material was neither wholly fantasy/sci-fi nor quite mainstream fiction. In later years the whole new sub genre of magical realism, introduced by South American writers, would underscore the limitations of such constricting genres.

Here’s a copy of a rejection letter that was sent to her agent in 1968:

Ursula K. Le Guin writes extremely well, but I’m sorry to have to say that on the basis of that one highly distinguishing quality alone I cannot make you an offer for the novel. The book is so endlessly complicated by details of reference and information, the interim legends become so much of a nuisance despite their relevance, that the very action of the story seems to be to become hopelessly bogged down and the book, eventually, unreadable. The whole is so dry and airless, so lacking in pace, that whatever drama and excitement the novel might have had is entirely dissipated by what does seem, a great deal of the time, to be extraneous material. My thanks nonetheless for having thought of us. The manuscript of The Left Hand of Darkness is returned herewith.

The book eventually found a publisher, and ended up winning the 1969 Nebula and 1970 Hugo awards. Le Guin has received the National Book Award, five Hugos, five Nebulas, the Kafka Award, a Pushcart Prize and several “lifetime achievement” awards among dozens of other honors.

Want to find out about other famous author rejections? Visit Writers & Rejections: Don’t Give Up!

Sources:
Ursula Le Guin website: A Rejection Letter
NNDB.com
Wikipedia entry on Ursula K. Le Guin
Salon article on Ursula K. Le Guin
Epoch Times article

20 publishers rejected William Golding’s Lord of the Flies before the book found a home at Faber & Faber and was published in 1954. Quote from one publisher’s rejection letter:

…an absurd and uninteresting fantasy which was rubbish and dull.

Initially, Lord of the Flies was rejected from the reading pile at Faber & Faber, but was championed by editor Charles Monteith. When it was first published, it didn’t sell well. From Monteith:

The book began not only to be talked about but to sell and before
long we had to order a reprint. In the United States, where we
had great difficulty in placing it, it made little impression at first,
but after a year or two, a paperback edition began to spread like
forest fire through university campuses.

One of the changes that Monteith made, by the way, was to change the title of the book, which was originally Strangers From Within.

William Golding went on to win a Booker Prize in 1980 and the Nobel Prize For Literature in 1983.

Sources:
Wikipedia entry on William Golding
Examiner.com’s piece on famous authors who were rejected
Faber Firsts