![]() ![]() Thankfully for Elvis - and alas for me - many thousands of others utterly disagree with me, and forcefully so as well. For example, I think Elvis Costello has never met a note he coudn’t strangle, though his wife actually is a pretty good singer. ![]() This is extremely difficult to find, believe it or not and everyone’s opinion is different which is a blessing. What I look for in general is a strong voice on the page, and strong emotional content in the material (as opposed to sentiment or melodrama which is often confused with it). Are there crappy wriers with fantastic ideas out there, true too. Are there good writers with crappy ideas out there I won’t take on? Absolutely. Yes, I read everything, even now after 20 years in the business. Perhaps rejection is an opportunity for some self examination of THAT particular PROJECT, rather than continually believing ALL those others must be wrong. Does it really matter why? Go on with getting your act together and finding the girl who WILL go out on a date with you. ![]() It’s like obsessing over why the cute cheerleader will happily chat with you in class but just won’t go out with you on a date. Parsing the letter (one I haven’t used for many years and I tried, obviously utterly unsuccessfully, to make as much about my needs as the writer’s submitted project, and which is way pre-millenia! - hey anyone got rejection letters from Max Perkins too?)seems frankly to be a bit of a waste of everyone’s energy. However, it is a part of my job that is unavoidable, and so, of course, an antagonistic situation is created whether one likes it or not. No one likes to be rejected, that’s just part of the human condition. The worst was a typewritten note that told me I was a loser and couldn’t write and the story I’d submitted was the worst the editor had ever read. The best rejection I ever got was a handwritten note from George Scithers of Amazing Stories: it kept me going for ages and renewed my belief in myself that I could write publishable fiction. With a number of published books under my belt now (including fiction and nonfiction) I think it fair to say I genuinely understand both sides of the equation here. ![]()
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