mXm : : Rejection is the currency of any creator – of music, of art, sculpture, writing • Dear John letters as they are also known. Personally, I think that writing efforts, writers, authors – given the nature of their craft, bare their souls in attempting to describe passion, pain, anger, fear – all the human emotions – and in the process of the actual writing, the conveying of such, are required to expose themselves – leave themselves vulnerable . . . . and the subsequent rejection by publishers, agents – the public, leaves scars – sometimes deep scars. Over the next days / weeks even, this page will carry visual copies of actual rejection letters sent to writers – who pressed on, persevered – and became world famous in spite of rejection.
This is the actual rejection letter sent to Alice Walker.
The following is written by : : Emily Temple, who is the managing editor at Lit Hub. Her first novel, The Lightness, was published by William Morrow/HarperCollins in June 2020
Tis (almost) the season for resolutions. If you’re a writer, here’s an idea: resolve to get rejected. 100 times this year, if you’re lucky. After all, some very famous books (and authors) began their careers at the bottom of the NO pile. To inspire you to keep on writing and submitting, here are some of the most rejected books I could dig up.
Of course, this list is incomplete, and I’ve given preference to books that were rejected but are now well-known and widely loved. (Books that were rejected many times because they were pretty mediocre are just not as interesting.) Even with the higher-profile books, I discounted those with numbers I couldn’t verify, or those that weren’t specific enough—for instance, it looks like Margaret Mitchell’s oft-repeated 38 rejections is a myth; Alex Haley may have gotten “hundreds” of rejections before publishing Roots, but they weren’t all necessarily for the novel; ditto Kate DiCamillo’s 473 rejections before Because of Winn-Dixie; Eimear McBride heard nothing but no for A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing for 7 years, but I don’t know if she got ten nos or a hundred. Some authors, like Beatrix Potter and Proust, got so many rejections that they decided to self-publish—and good thing they did—but I don’t have numbers on those either. If you do, give strength to your fellow rejectees and add on to the list in the comments.
