Feeling frustrated? Indulging in a little (or a lot) of writer self-doubt?
To Kill a Mockingbird author Nelle Harper Lee was so disenchanted with her manuscript that she threw it out the window of her New York apartment. Luckily, since those were the days of typewriters rather than computers, she retrieved the pages, tore them apart and completely revamped her book. To Kill a Mockingbird would win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961 and go on to sell 30 million copies.
Laura Ingalls Wilder did not publish the first in what would become her Little House on the Prairie series until age 65. Over the next eleven years, she would write seven more novels based on her childhood growing up on the American frontier. Since 1932, the year she published Little House in the Big Woods, 60 million copies of these classics featuring her American pioneer family have been sold in more than 100 countries.
Unfortunately, self-doubt only escalates when professionals reject our work, which almost every writer experiences. When that happens, as it inevitably will during your writing career, it will help to remember that Dr. Seuss‘s first book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, was rejected 27 times.
He’s far from the only one. After throwing away several drafts of his novel Carrie, Stephen King finally finished it, only to have it rejected 30 times.
Of course, one of publishing’s most successful publishing empire’s–Harry Potter–only took hold because of author J.K. Rowling‘s persistence despite multiple rejections.
The lesson in all this? Wave goodbye to all that writer self-doubt. You have to believe in your writing abilities, even as you retain enough of a critical eye to know when your book is working and when it needs an overhaul.
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