Sterling Terrell

smart ideas from books (mostly)

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You are here: Home / Potpourri / Writing Success, Starts To Add Up

Writing Success, Starts To Add Up

Writing Success, Starts To Add Up

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

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Filed Under: PotpourriTagged With: #Success, #Writing

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