I sent The World Well Lost to one editor who rejected it on sight, and then wrote a letter to every other editor in the field warning them against the story, and urging them to reject it on sight without reading it.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the challenges authors face with rejection and the power of opinion in the publishing industry.
The quote by Theodore Sturgeon illustrates the harsh realities of a writer's experience with rejection, emphasizing how one editor's negative assessment can impact an entire community of publishers. It speaks to the fear and influence of criticism within creative fields, where an individual's opinion may prematurely shape perceptions and opportunities for work that could otherwise be valued.
In practice
In a workshop on writing resilience, this quote can illustrate how writers can face critiques and still persevere.
I repeat Sturgeon's Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of it is crud.
Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. You can go not only into the future, but into that wonderful place called other, which is simply another universe, another planet, another species.
A good science fiction story is a story with a human problem, and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its science content.
There are people who have tremendously important things to say, but they say it so poorly that nobody would ever want to read it.
Love's a different sort of thing, hot enough to make you flow into something, interflow, cool and anneal and be a weld stronger than what you started with.
Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.
So many Indian novels, quite unfairly, do not get the prominence they should because they have been written in a language other than English.
I don't know the literary world; I was scared of being confronted with famous names, not knowing what they had written. It was occupied territory I was entering.
Only in the mystery novel are we delivered final and unquestionable solutions. The joke to me is that fiction gives you a truth that reality can't deliver.
The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.
Sometimes, there can be a slightly condescending assumption that anything unlikable about a female character is a mistake, as if they're a contestant in a beauty pageant and have to seem charming and upbeat all the time.
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