On writing

July 18, 2024

ISLAMABAD – ONE of the best gifts an artist — in this case, a visual artist — gave me was to show me what she called her ‘rejection folder’. I had only begun to write, and I had been doing what writers are in the habit of doing — complaining about all the places that had rejected my writing. “Look at this folder,” she told me, “and I have several more.” She added, “If you want to be a writer, the hardest thing you must learn to endure is rejection. You have got to develop a thick skin and you have to conquer your ego, and keep trying and trying and trying.” She was, and is, a very successful artist, and I took her words seriously.

Many eminent authors have said the same thing. Stephen King, one of the most prolific authors writing today, tells the story of how he became an author. As a teenager, this famous author of books like Misery and The Shining had begun to write short stories. According to King, he began to type out these stories and send them to magazines to be published. Inevitably, the stories would be returned to him with rejection letters. The teenaged King, at this point, stuck a nail in the wall and hung his rejection letters on it. By the time he was 14, King had so many rejection letters on the nail that there was no room for more. At this point, he went and got a much bigger nail and fixed that to the wall. The key to becoming a writer, if you really want to be one, according to him, is simply to put a bigger nail in the wall. If you can be accepting of rejection — and indeed, writing for publishing is an exercise in just that; ie, a submerging of one’s ego — then you can be a writer.

Of course, this is not the only way to become an author. In terms of skill, the most important exercise is