A passage that ought to give all struggling writers hope, from Booker-prize winner Graham Swift’s Making an Elephant. He’s talking about the time before he’d ever published a word, though he’d been “a writer in theory and spirit for some dozen years; in practice – if not in print – for some five or six.” On the subject of rejection slips, “which can, of course, be the most cruelly impersonal things around” he says:
“They would come with an individually inscribed ‘Sorry’ or ‘Almost’, a ‘Not quite’ or ‘very nearly.’ Thankfully, they never seemed to have the tacit message, ‘Go away.’ I’m not sure how many stories I sent Alan before he finally took one…”
Yes, Virginia, there is hope in ink on the rejection slip.
