Junot Diaz makes the case for persevering as a writer:
God bless perseverance. Because it’s not easy. A young person, or someone who’s writing in a different way — in some ways you could say, eventually someone will find them. Eventually someone will hear them. But it’s good a lot of young people persevere. Because sometimes you have to send something out a thousand times before anyone recognizes your value.
I think of myself — all the stories that I sent in that were rejected by publications, that people just dismissed with form letters, ended up being published later by the prestigious “glossies.” And what was the difference between the story a year before and a year after? Very little. It’s just that it was easy to dismiss it — it was just one story in a pile of million — and then eight months later, “this is the exemplar of a new voice.”
[HT: TEV]
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