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.
All literature, is, finally autobiographical.
For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.
It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down.
You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.
The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become
Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind...The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.
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