When Theodore Geisel wrote the manuscript for his first book in 1937, it was rejected by publishers at least 27 times. And Geisel himself got so frustrated with his lack of success that after Rejection Letter #27, he was on his way to chuck it into an incinerator and just forget the whole being a writer thing. On the way to the incinerator on Madison Ave., he ran into his friend Mike McClintock, who had just landed a job as a children's book editor for Vanguard Press. McClintock convinced Geisel not to burn the manuscript, and instead told him he would personally take a chance and publish it.
That manuscript was And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street! And yes, the man who nearly burned his own work because he was that sick of rejection was none other than Dr. Seuss, who would go on to write the books that defined childhood for generations of children worldwide.
When Stephen King wrote his fourth unpublished novel in 1973, he was so disgusted with his own work that he threw all but the first three pages in the trash. At the time, he was teaching English at Hampden Academy, and was so broke he'd disconnected his phone service. His wife, Tabitha, would've been more than justified in telling him to work on resumés instead of horror novels.
But she didn't.
Tabitha King instead dug the manuscript out of the trash and convinced her husband to finish it and submit it to a publisher. Because he had no phone, Doubleday had to contact him by telegram to say that the novel, Carrie, had been selected for publication with a $2,500 advance (1n 1974 $USD; accounting for inflation, that would be an $11,850 advance today). King would go on from there to write a body of work that redefined horror and mystery as genres, and taught us exactly how a book can scare the daylights out of us.
There's more than just a theme here of not giving up. The tale of these two authors is the tale of every artist who thinks they can't art. Musicians, dancers, writers, fine artists... Because as artists, we're told by society from the day we're capable of reasoning that we can't feel proud of our work unless other people like it, and sometimes not even then. We must reject compliments with a blush and a handwave because otherwise, we're proud and therefore sinful.
For every "believe in yourself" story, we're told not to praise our own work, to accept it when what we produce is awful, and to not let praise go to our heads. While "don't toot your own horn" isn't necessarily bad advice -- arrogance is not becoming on anybody -- the problem is that we aren't taught to listen when other people toot it, either. We're given conflicting messages and no way to resolve them. No balance point. No clear boundary between "sin" and "confidence." And so we grow up into our own harshest, most terrible critics because we're taught to believe that confidence is a sin.
That was the lesson that these two men learned, and had it not been for two extraordinary people -- a longtime friend with connections and a nose for risk, and a supportive wife who believed in her husband -- we would be missing out on some brilliant work, and the world would be a much sadder place.
Whenever you feel as an artist that you can't art and you'd be better off throwing all your work on a bonfire and salting the earth, remember these two guys, and the hundreds of other men and women just like them who thought they couldn't art, and ended up transforming the world because someone else thought otherwise.
It's okay to look at your work and think "damn, I'm good." Listen to the people who believe in you. Listen to the people who tell you that your work is worthwhile. It's okay to agree with them. Because like Mike McClintock and Tabitha King, they're more often right than wrong.
