Hemingway is famed for saying, “Writing is easy. You just sit at a typewriter and bleed.”
But what if that isn’t enough? What if a publisher rejects a manuscript stained with eight pints of your blood? Do you drop to the ground, white as a sheet, and die?
No.
You get up and bleed some more.
Writing isn’t an art that anyone takes up to get rich. It isn’t an art anyone takes up to make money or earn fame for themselves. Sure, that may be the eventual outcome, but no entrepreneur starts out by saying, “I’m going to write the next Lord of the Rings and become rich!”
If they do, they’re delusional.
Writing is an art that is taken up out of love and necessity. All the authors I know do it because not writing is equivalent to death.
“But Pat, I can’t bleed more! I don’t have anything left!”
Is that really the case? Have you bled out? Are you soul-spent? Have you given all you have to give, not only in this life, but in all those that came before and all those to come?
If the answer is no, then pull yourself up. You’re not even close to finished.
Perseverance is the most important quality a writer can have, even more so than creativity or basic writing skills. Everything anyone needs to be successful as a writer can be encapsulated in perseverance: the ability to read more widely, to learn a broader vocabulary, to study the authors of the past. But without the ability to get up, dust yourself off, and sit back down at your desk after the imagined future of your work explodes in your face, you’ll never reach the end of the road.
Madeleine L’Engle was rejected 26 times before a publisher picked up A Wrinkle in Time. 5 publishers rejected Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. One publisher stated that On the Road was nothing more than “frenetic and scrambled prose.” Dune, the single best-selling science fiction series of all time, faced 23 rejections before publication.
Harry Potter was rejected 9 times before J.K. Rowling took the world by storm. My favorite novelist of all time, C.S. Lewis, was reportedly rejected more than 800 times before selling a single piece of writing.
Had these authors given up, the world would be a vastly different place. Had C.S. Lewis given up, it’s possible I wouldn’t be writing this article.
So bleed. Make your desk look like a murder scene. Fill your wastebasket with your organs, splatter your vitals across the walls, take a blood oath with the Muse — but don’t ever give up.
If you have a story in you, bleed it out to the world.
Patrick is a freelance writer, novelist, entrepreneur, and adventurer. Follow his travels at Voyager’s Quill.