Writing success compounds itself. Did you know that?
Writing gets easier as you go.
By that, I do not mean that the act of writing, the creative process itself, gets easier.
That is not the case at all.
I mean that finding acceptance and popularity can be more easily attained.
This is also the case for many other things that are subjective in nature.
A glass of wine can taste different depending on how much you think it costs.
A certain painting might look better if I told you Van Gogh painted it.
And an editor might be more accepting of your work, the more previous success you have had.
There is a beauty to this: For one popular piece of art makes your entire back catalog more valuable.
That, and it is utterly astounding what a little encouragement can do for an aspiring writer.
So be encouraged today – and keep going.
The first of these hopeful notes was from Algis Budrys, then the editor of Fantasy and Science Fiction, who read a story of mine called “The Night of the Tiger” (the inspiration was, I think, an episode of The Fugitive in which Dr. Richard Kimble worked as an attendant cleaning out cages in a zoo or a circus) and wrote: “This is good. Not for us, but good. You have talent. Submit again.” Those four brief sentences, scribbled by a fountain pen that left big ragged blotches in its wake, brightened the dismal winter of my sixteenth year. Ten years or so later, after I’d sold a couple of novels, I discovered “The Night of the Tiger” in a box of old manuscripts and thought it was still a perfectly respectable tale, albeit one obviously written by a guy who had only begun to learn his chops. I rewrote it and on a whim resubmitted it to F& SF. This time they bought it. One thing I’ve noticed is that when you’ve had a little success, magazines are a lot less apt to use that phrase, “Not for us.”
-Stephen King, On Writing
