Broke, bit­ter, usu­ally half-cut by lunchtime

Two months ago, as I was in Las Vegas shoot­ing Osama bin Laden with a machine gun, a man con­nec­ted to the pub­lish­ing industry was read­ing the choicest extracts from my novel. Before him were two stacks of paper: one piled heavy and high and marked ‘NO’, the other much shorter, marked ‘YES’ and, I’d like to think, haloed with tinkly stars dan­cing to a heav­enly coloratura.

He sat back, tilted his head a little and flicked his eyes between the stacks. Back to my manu­script. Back to the stacks. He may have sniffed. Then he picked up a pen, scrawled some­thing on my extract, tossed it onto the taller pile and, pre­sum­ably, went back to swig­ging cheap vodka from the bottle.

A month later, at home, a let­ter arrived. It was from the man, and it began like this:

A form rejec­tion let­ter. Note mis­spelled name and con­spicu­ous gap after ‘recommended’.

There’s a hoary rule of thumb that goes around about aspir­ing writers, which is this: about one in ten of people who write will ever be pub­lished, and of that for­tu­nate ten per­cent one in ten will make any money from it.

It’s not the kind of thing writers like to dwell on, for the same reason you don’t see signs above the race at the MCG which say ‘Remem­ber, You Have Stat­ist­ic­ally Exactly One Chance In Two Of Win­ning This Game!!!’.

No, instead play­ers run out under signs which say things like ‘Guts And Determ­in­a­tion!’, ‘You’re A Win­ner!’ and ‘Kill! Kill! FOR CHRIST’S SAKE, KILL EVERYONE!!!’, and for good reason – when your chances are slim, you’ve got to talk your­self up.

Which is why writers react so badly to rejec­tion, while at the same time wear­ing them as badges of hon­our. There are, in fact, only three kinds of writers:

1. broke, bit­ter, usually-half-cut-by-lunchtime;
2. sel­louts, and
3. J. K. Rowling.

And by ‘sel­louts’, I mean of course any­one with more suc­cess than me and less than J. K. Rowling.

Rejec­tion means that you are going to spend slightly more time in cat­egory 1 before advan­cing to cat­egory 2. I’ve now received my first rejec­tion, which means two things to any­one who has recently heard me say the novel is ‘basic­ally finished’:

1. you will be wait­ing longer than you think, and
2. I may have stolen your watch.