It’s no accident that they neglect to ask that question. These stories seek to feed our fantasies that we, too, might be an undiscovered genius. The last thing they want to do is give the impression that art-making is a humbling, collaborative process.
Especially in stories that focus on great authors and their rejection slips, the implication is always that the rejecters were abject fools who failed to see the author’s inherent brilliance, but the author “stuck to his guns” and “refused to listen to the naysayers.” Finally, one brave agent and/or publisher saw the value that everybody else missed, proving that the author had been right all along.
But isn’t there another possibility? I know that if I had a novel rejected by 10 agents, much less 54, I would start listening eagerly to the naysayers, pumping them for notes and rewriting my text to fit what they had to say. And I assume that that’s just what Mr. King did. What if agent number 55 didn’t prove the previous 54 wrong? What if he proved them right? I’d bet that their rejections were the kick in the pants that King needed to fix his manuscript.
Of course, you can’t listen to every note, but they quickly form a critical concensus. As Bob Gale says on the Back to the Future commentary: “If we got a note from only one person, we would assure each other that that was the only person who felt that way. But as soon as we got the same note from two people, we knew that there would be millions who felt that way.”
Okay, I’m running out of space so I’ll pick up there tomorrow. Next week, I’ll watch some real movies, I so swear!
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