Writing a novel

I had been writing my columns and blogs for almost five years when the urge came over me to try and write a novel. I was excited as I delved into this new adventure. Once I finished its first draft I sent it to five of my most devoted readers for their comments. The response was overwhelming and a trifle confusing. One said it was "a tour de force", another that she had found it so engrossing that she had finished it in one setting, another advised me to have it shown for a possible movie, a third advised me to read historical novels, while yet another wanted to make sure my characters came to life. By the end of it, I despaired over ever finding a publisher for my novel.

But then I chanced upon this article which traced the travails of famous writers when they submitted their first manuscripts to the established publishers of their time. After all it was only after nine years of rejection from publishers that Eimear McBride's debut, "A Girl is a Half Formed Thing" was published and went on to win the 2014 Bailey's Prize. And she was not the only one to have the last laugh on those publishing houses who would not take a punt on an experimental or challenging novel. From Gertude Stein and William Burroughs to recent rags-to-riches writers such as JK Rowling and Cassandra Clare, all received brutal rejection letters from publishers. Here are some of them to warm the cockles of hearts of any first time novelist:

•  "Overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian...the whole thing is an unsure cross between hideous reality and improbable fantasy. It often becomes a wild neurotic daydream… I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years."

Thankfully, for both Vladimir Nabokov and literature as a whole, Lolita wasn't buried, but published in France after two years of rejections by New York publishers such as Viking, Simon & Schuster, New Directions, Farrar, Straus, and Doubleday. When Graham Greene got hold of it, shortly after its French publication, he reviewed it in The Sunday Times, describing it as "one of the three best books of 1955".

• "The girl doesn't, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the 'curiosity' level."

One of the 15 publishers who didn't think The Diary of Anne Frank was worth reading.

• "First, we must ask, does it have to be a whale?"

"While this is a rather delightful, if somewhat esoteric, plot device, we recommend an antagonist with a more popular visage among the younger readers. For instance, could not the Captain be struggling with a depravity towards young, perhaps voluptuous, maidens?" Herman Melville's leviathan novel was rejected, as above, by Peter J Bentley. However, his "Young, voluptuous maidens" never made the final edit.

•  "For your own sake, do not publish this book."

One publisher turned down DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, first published in 1928. Perhaps they had predicted the furore that was unleashed when the full novel did hit the British bookshelves in 1960.

•  "Do you realise, young woman, that you're the first American writer ever to poke fun at sex"

This was what Anita Loos received before her novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, was successfully published in 1925. It was part of a rejection note, although by today's standards it sounds quite the accolade.

•  "Miss Play has a way with words and a sharp eye for unusual and vivid detail. But maybe now that this book is out of her system she will use her talent more effectively next time. I doubt if anyone over here will pick this novel up, so we might well have a second chance."

An editor at Knopf in 1963 rejected Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar when it was submitted under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. After realising it had been written by Plath, who had already published a couple of poetry collections, the same editor read and rejected it again – and managed to spell her real name three different incorrect ways in the process. His assertion that "she will use her talent more effectively next time" is poignant, as Plath had committed suicide six weeks earlier.

• "You’re welcome to le Carré – he hasn’t got any future."

A fantastically incorrect prediction by one publisher, sent to his colleague, upon turning down The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

•  "Your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm—in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed, (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs."

The poet TS Eliot, editor of Faber & Faber, was one of the many publishers, including George Orwell's own, Victor Gollancz, who rejected Animal Farm. 

•  "We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell."

Stephen King received this letter about Carrie. His first published novel was rejected so many times that King collected the accompanying notes on a spike in his bedroom. It was finally published in 1974 with a print run of 30,000 copies. When the paperback version was released a year later, it sold over a million copies in 12 months.

• "If I may be frank, Mr. Hemingway — you certainly are in your prose — I found your efforts to be both tedious and offensive. You really are a man’s man, aren’t you? I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that you had penned this entire story locked up at the club, ink in one hand, brandy in the other."

Mrs Moberley Luger, of Peacock & Peacock, didn't realise how accurate she was in her 1925 rejection letter of Ernest Heminway's The Sun Also Rises.

Encouraged by this history of famous writers rejection letters, I intend to continue to follow my muse. So I am now working on my second novel.