TWENTY YEARS OF REJECTED MANUSCRIPTS
“Mr. Riley,” I asked, “would you mind saying something about the obstacles over which you climbed to success?”
“I am afraid it would not be a very pleasant story,” he replied. “A friend came to me once, completely heartbroken, saying that his manuscripts were constantly returned, and that he was the most miserable wretch alive. I asked him how long he had been trying? ‘Three years,’ he said. ‘My dear man,’ I answered, laughing, ‘go on, keep on trying till you have spent as many years at it as I did.’ ‘As many as you did!’ he exclaimed. ‘Yes, as long as I did.’ ‘What, you struggled for years!’ ‘Yes, sir; through years, through sleepless nights, through almost hopeless days. For twenty years I tried to get into one magazine; back came my manuscripts eternally. I kept on. In the twentieth year, that magazine accepted one of my articles.’
“I was not a believer in the theory that one man does a thing much easier than any other man. Continuous, unflagging effort, persistence and determination will win. Let not the man be discouraged who has these.”
“What would you advise one to do with his constantly rejected manuscript?” I asked.
“Put it away awhile; then remodel it. Young writers make the mistake I made.”
“What mistake?” I asked.
“Hurrying a manuscript off before it was dry from my pen, as if the world were just waiting for that article and must have it. Now it can hardly be drawn from me with a pair of tweezers. Yes, lay it aside awhile. Reread. There is a rotten spot somewhere. Perhaps it is full of hackneyed phrases, or lacks in sparkle and originality. Search, examine, rewrite, simplify. Make it lucid. I am glad, now, that my manuscripts did come back. Presently I would discover this defect, then that. Perhaps three or four sleepless nights would show my failure to be in an unsymmetrical arrangement of the verses.
“See these books?” he said, rapping upon the book case with the back of his hand. “Classics! but of what do they tell? Of the things of their own day. Let us write the things of our day. Literary fields exhausted! Nonsense. If we write well enough, ours will be the classics of to-morrow. Our young Americans have, right at hand, the richest material any country ever offered. Let them be brave and work in earnest.”