“Look, writing a novel is like paddling from Boston to London in a bathtub. Sometimes the damn tub sinks. It’s a wonder that most of them don’t.”
—Stephen King, The Paris Review interview
Serious literature does not have a monopoly on rejection.
“Publishing is a brutal business,” writes Patrick Anderson in The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction. “For every writer who makes it big there are a thousand who don’t.”
After reviewing Jacqueline Susann’s original The Valley of the Dolls manuscript, Don Preston reported to his boss, Bernard Geis: “She is a painfully dull, inept, clumsy, undisciplined, rambling and thoroughly amateurish writer whose every sentence, paragraph and scene cries out for the hands of a pro.”1 So the populist publisher ordered his editor to sign her anyway and go pro himself. Preston put his nose to the editorial grindstone, vetted Dolls from T to A, and the “porn-lite” ms. went on to sell 30 million copies.2
Noted New York agent Aaron Priest told singer/songwriter/business school dean Robert James Waller that his 42,000-word ms., The Bridges of Madison County, was “pretty odd” and “not the kind of stuff that sells.” He sent it out anyway as a favor to his Pulitzer client Jane Smiley, the ex-wife of Waller’s friend and essay editor Bill Silag, who ran the Iowa State University Press. Time Warner snapped the novel up for a song and unloaded 50 million copies.3
The professional prognosis for another industry record breaker, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, had seemed even gloomier. J.K. Rowling weathered twelve rejections. The magical adventure may never have seen the light of day had Alice Newton, the eight-year-old daughter of Bloomsbury’s CEO, not given the ms. a thumbs-up and her father not hesitantly advanced £1,500 for the title. Topping any sorcery in the series, Potter turned the welfare mother into history’s first billionaire author, leaving her YA colleagues in the dust. “I think it is probably fair to say that most children’s authors struggle along earning about £2,000 a year,” said Christopher Little, Rowling’s agent.4 While the novelist was penning the fantasy in London cafes, she had battled suicidal depression, which gave her the idea for the happiness-sucking Dementors. Though she had pressed on and overcome her demons, George W. Bush, like monarchs of old, turned her down for the Presidential Medal of Freedom because of her witchcraft.
Fellow supernaturalist Stephen King also paid his literary dues before hitting the horror mother lode. He cut his teeth on Steve King’s Garbage Truck, a University of Maine newspaper column. After graduation he hawked stories to men’s magazines. Then he hit a wall with Carrie, rejected by thirty publishers. “We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell,” said one.5
Drunk and disgusted, King tossed the thriller in the trash. “My considered opinion was that I had written the world’s all-time loser,” he recalled. His writer wife, Tabitha, fished it out and urged him to give it another shot. Doing so, the twenty-six-year-old novelist was hardly more optimistic: “I didn’t expect much of Carrie,” he went on. “I thought, who’d want to read a book about a poor little girl with menstrual problems? I couldn’t believe I was writing it.”6
While teaching high school English by day, he finished the tale by night on a portable typewriter in his trailer. Doubleday picked it up, and the title quickly sold a million copies. His dedication read: This is for Tabby, who got me into it—and then bailed me out of it.7
Finally, we come to the case of sensation Stieg Larsson, whose Millenium trilogy has outsold Grisham, Brown, and King combined. As a teen he founded two science fiction fanzines and published his rejected stories; in the 1990s he turned to crime fiction, which he burned due to further rejection.8 After failing to gain admission to the Stockholm School of Journalism, nobody would hire him even as a reporter. He traveled to Africa for fresh material but returned to Sweden broke and with malaria. He worked at the post office, then as a news agency staffer. In his spare time he launched Expo, an anti-Nazi leaflet and received his first fan mail—skinhead death threats. Freaked, fed up, and exhausted, he told a friend: “Nobody cares, nobody gives us any money. I need a one-time solution.”9
Which was? “I will write a couple of books and become a millionaire,” he told his collaborator, Mikael Ekman, over whiskeys one night in 2001. Ekman laughed, calling him crazy. Stieg stubbornly set to work. The next year he asked another writer friend, Kurdo Baksi, if he might be interested in taking a look at a nearly completed thriller. Baksi, too, thought it was a joke. “Stieg, I don’t think you’re so good at literature.”
The first installment of the Millennium trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was released three years later, making its author a posthumous millionaire. Larsson suffered a fatal heart attack just prior to its release by Norstedts.10
But some remain skeptical about the authorship, thinking his common law wife, Eva Gabrielsson, a writer and translator, might have had a hand in it. Another former journalist colleague and mentor, Anders Hellberg, described Larrson’s early writing as “impossible.” “Nothing was good,” he told The New York Times’ Charles McGrath, “not the syntax, the way of putting things, nothing.”
Couldn’t Larsson have improved since the early years? the reporter pressed the skeptic.
Hellberg admitted that he didn’t know but was certain of one thing: “I believe that to write is a talent. You don’t just pick up a guy from the bus station and expect him to do it.”11
1 “One Hundred Famous Rejections,” May 22, 2012.
2 Richard Fuller, “Jacqueline Susann’s Life in Writing,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 26, 1988. http://articles.philly.com/1988-02-26/entertainment/26242810_1_bernard-geis-associates-irving-mansfield-life-of-jacqueline-susann
3 Jack Doyle, “Of Bridges & Lovers, 1992-1995,” June 25, 2008. http://www.pophistorydig.com/?tag=amblin-entertainment
4 Accio Quote! (J.K. Rowling archive). www.accio-quote.org/articles/1997/spring97-telegraph-reynolds.htm
5 www.writersservices.com/mag/m_rejection.htm
6 Robert W. Wells, “From Textbook to Checkbook,” Milwaukee Journal, September 15, 1980.
7 Khaled Hosseini also has his wife to thank for the completion of The Kite Runner. The celebrated debut novel which, like Carrie, became a major motion picture, started out as a short story. The author abandoned it for two years, concentrating on his L.A. medical practice. He said he returned to it after “my wife dug it up,” read it, and started crying. (“Success Stories: First Novelists, Debut Novelists.”) http://www.bookmarket.com/debutnovels.htm
8 Michelle Paull, “Unpublished Stieg Larsson Manuscripts Discovered,” June 9, 2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/09/stieg-larsson-unpublished-manuscripts?INTCMP=SRCH
9 Nathaniel Rich, “The Mystery of the Dragon Tattoo,” Rolling Stone, December 23, 2010.
10 According to The New Yorker’s Joan Acocella (“Man of Mystery,” January 10, 2011), Piratförlag, the first publisher to whom Larsson submitted, returned his ms. unopened because they refused to consider debut novelists.
11 Charles McGrath, “The Afterlife of Stieg Larsson,” New York Times, December 20, 2010.