There is no single moral of the story if you are expecting someone to spell it out. Gathering a single moral limits the potential diffusive force of a story. Ellis’s interview with the details of his publishing journey has several layers of learning about how a rejection can aid one’s writing process. It is true that rarely will a rejection letter carry a feedback. On the miraculous occasion of it happening, it may be in the best interest of your own writing self to read without hysteria what the editor has to say about your piece.
Long lists of rejection letters received by famous authors are available across the web. Most of the websites hosting such letters will give a selected quotation from the rejection letters received by the authors. What is usually left unsaid is: had any of these letters helped any of the authors?
The ‘help’ from the rejection letters can be gained in various ways. In the case of Ellis, the series of rejection letters that his Reunion received encouraged him to do something different than what he had previously planned. He “began to write a more commercially viable, more plosive piece of work, just to get my ‘foot in the door’”. Ellis clearly states the reason he did not go into self-publishing: he wanted to follow the “classic route of finding a publisher directly”, and see his book in print.
Does this mean authors aspiring to be published must always take the traditional route of finding a publisher?
James Joyce faced legal obscenity charges against his colossus work Ulysses. When he refused to remove the passages that were deemed profane by the court, it was impossible to have Ulysses printed in the traditional method. Sylvia Beach, owner of a small bookstore Shakespeare & Company printed the book in what was a financial commitment on part of Joyce. Joyce is only one name in a long list of authors who self-published when traditional publishers were wary of publishing. In the twenty-first century, with opening up of avenues of e-publishing, the author aspiring to be published has even greater opportunities.
On other instances, a rejection letter unknowingly marked out the individuated spirit of the writer that sets him apart from the crowd. Jack Kerouac received a rejection letter that said pointedly what the editor disliked the most: “[Kerouac’s] frenetic and scrambled prose perfectly express(es) the feverish travels of the Beat Generation”. According to this particular editor, this was inadequate for being a potential print publication. Ironically, this is the crux of Kerouac’s writing. His individual exclusive perspective of the Beat Generation is the material that captivates the reader.
A contemporary non-fiction author, Richard Gilbert, writes in the latest edition of the Narrative Magazine, how he catapulted a hint from a rejection slip to his ticket to publication in one of the best non-fiction magazines around : River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative. He writes about how he learnt the art of braiding stories after being instigated by rejections that were
“weirdly for that genre, were complimentary and encouraging”.
There are numerous instances of writers who walked the traditional path of finding a publisher and yet had held onto their conviction of their manuscript. One such instance is Richard Bach. His book Jonathan Livingston Seagull was rejected by publishers before it went on to become a best seller when it was published in 1972.
There is no magic path to publishing. There are different roads at each crossing. What matters most is the value you attach to your craft and to your hard work. It is this commitment that helped Ellis not to lose hope at being rejected repeatedly. He kept doing the one thing that he desires to do - write with the aim of publication. And, maybe, “Brit Writers were [truly] a god-send”.
Postscript:
Head over to Ideas, Inventions and Innovations if you desire to read a bit more about lessons that can be learned from rejection letters.
by Sushmita Paul
The Unofficial 'Brit Writers and Writers Everywhere' blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment