Author Archives: James Scott Bell

About James Scott Bell

International Thriller Writers Award winner, #1 bestselling author of THRILLERS and BOOKS ON WRITING. Subscribe to JSB's NEWSLETTER.

Fear Not the Tsunami of Manure

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by James Scott Bell

Entertainment news this week has been dominated by the blockbuster success of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. “Boffo BO,” as industry wags put it (also Matt Damon’s costumer).

Of course, it has generated some online heat, because what doesn’t these days? But there is also substantive discussion among Classics scholars, some of whom say that whatever the movie’s merits, it’s not Homer. (Reminds me of the line from a college essay years ago: “The Odyssey was not actually written by Homer, but by another man of the same name.”) Others have no problem with a “re-imagining” of an ancient epic.

I have no opinion either way, for I have not seen it. But I do extend a laurel and hearty handshake to Nolan for a couple of reasons. This is the first feature film shot entirely with IMAX cameras. IMAX is almost always used for loud set pieces, because the cameras themselves make a lot of noise. They are not good for quiet, intimate scenes.

But Nolan, working with his cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, designed a soundproof housing, called a “blimp,” to cover the camera. It suppressed the noise and allowed them to film soft exchanges.

But that created another problem. The blimp casing was so large that two actors couldn’t look at each other eye to eye, which is essential for emotional connection. So Nolan came up with the idea of using mirrors to let the actors see each other’s faces. Love it.

What I appreciate most is that Nolan eschewed all AI (and most CGI) in order to capture the traditional look of classic “cast of thousands” movies. That’s worth championing. Nolan believes, and the anecdotal evidence suggests, that young audiences are quick to reject AI slop. He says:

“They [Gen Z] see it for what it is very quickly – and it’s much easier for them to identify it, because it grew out of an online world they know really well,” he explained. “And while that doesn’t mean that every aspect of the technology is useless or meaningless, in filmmaking it’s hitting at exactly the wrong time. After years of driving towards heavily virtual environments, we’re seeing a renewed interest in more tactile, more real forms of storytelling.”

I think what Nolan says applies to AI-slop books. Yes, they can be churned out, but readers are rejecting them. There are a millions of slop books on Amazon with zero reviews. Because they suck. Oh, they’re made out of competent sentences, because that’s what LLMs do. But they’re missing a human soul. It’s just so obvious. For want of a better phrase, they “ring hollow.”

Here’s the opening of a slop novel on sale now:

The city doesn’t sleep. It just changes tempo.

You learn that if you stay up late enough.

There’s a moment—somewhere between two and three in the morning—when the traffic thins, when the noise drops from a constant roar to something more honest. Tires on wet asphalt. A distant shout that might be laughter or might not. The hum of streetlights that have been buzzing longer than anyone remembers.

That’s when I work.

That third paragraph is a hoot. What’s dishonest about a constant roar? Is it hiding something? How are tires on wet asphalt more honest than tires on dry asphalt? In what language is a shout the same as laughter? When was the last time you heard a streetlight buzz? How about never?

What’s happened here is an AI word salad, only it’s made out of the poop lettuce that’s been in the news of late. This is why people churning out 300 “novels” a year are just wasting their time on earth. Maybe some of them make a little Starbucks money, but what kind of existence is that?

My conclusion is that we who actually write (not prompt) fiction don’t have to fear the tsunami of manure being shoveled up to Amazon on a daily basis. That stuff goes nowhere. Write with your soul and that alone will set you apart from the stink pile.

Your comments are most welcome.

Is This the End of Reading?

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by James Scott Bell

The earliest stories and myths were passed along orally. There were no books or libraries. Most people couldn’t read. That was left to the scholars and monks, who wrote enough down to preserve our developing world (see Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization). The Visigoths weren’t into reading.

Then a guy named Gutenberg invented movable type, and the book business began. The Renaissance bloomed. It was also a bloody time, but as Harry Lime explains in the classic film The Third Man:

Orson Welles as Harry Lime

“Don’t be so gloomy. After all it’s not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

All that to say, we paid a price for literacy, but it was worth it. The United States was born by way of a single-page written document (for you kids playing at home, identify the document without Googling or Grokking). We became a land of readers, voraciously gobbling the printed word, set down in everything from cheap wood-pulp magazines to beautifully bound volumes with gilt-edged pages.

Perhaps the height of our reading prolificacy was in the 1950s and its robust market of “middlebrow” fiction, exemplified by the Book-of-the-Month Club. This was a vast realm between mass market and high literary. The books were more “challenging” than the former, and more accessible than the latter. Every middle-class home had a bookshelf. The one in my parents’ house was stocked with hardbacks, one of which was a book called Ulysses (that no one seemed to have finished).

But there was one called Gone With the Wind which I picked up one summer in junior high and was, as they say, transported. I can still feel myself lying on the front-room sofa getting truly “lost in a book.” It was a transformative moment. (Tarzan of the Apes was another such experience.) I had become a dedicated reader of books.

Now, I fear, such transformation may be going the way of the Dodo. A chilling article in The Atlantic has been the subject of much online discussion. Get this:

According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.) Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.

The decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels. Even the demographics that traditionally read the most—retirees, women, and college graduates—have seen a collapse.

And this:

In 2024, in a national test, just 35 percent of high-school seniors were “proficient” at skills such as analyzing complex fictional themes and evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument. About the same number scored below “basic,” meaning that they may struggle to draw conclusions from concepts explicitly included in a text, or to use context clues to determine the meaning of an unknown word. Adult-literacy scores have also dropped: Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20 percent.

More:

Things are about to get worse, and fast. The next generation reads much less than today’s adults did when they were kids. Kindergarten teachers say that many of their students don’t know nursery rhymes or fairy tales, Benjamin Powers, the director of Yale and the University of Connecticut’s Haskins Global Literacy Hub, told me. (In the study of 236,000 American adults, only 2 percent read to a child on a given day.) From 1984 to 2025, the percentage of 13-year-olds who said they rarely or never read for fun rose from 8 to 29 percent. Every year older a child gets, the less they like to read. Robert Townsend, a program director at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recently ran focus groups asking high-school students how they felt about reading for pleasure. He told me that most thought of it as an alien practice.

Now, with AI taking over all life forms and media, my head spins like Linda Blair’s (can you kids identify this reference without Googling or Grokking?) Every day on X or TikTok or Instagram there is a flood of visually stunning videos created by 13-year-olds in a bedroom without books.

I have no conclusions. I only have a keyboard, and each day I type words for the creation of books. But my back feels like it’s pressed against the gates of Rome circa 410 A.D.

What’s a writer to do? I ask you.

[Note: I’m on the road today, and don’t know when I can check in, but I will. Meanwhile, have a robust discussion amongst yourselves!]

The Wow Factor

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by James Scott Bell

In a 1948 booklet, Pulp Fiction, Robert Turner gave straight-dope advice on what it took to break into the pulp market. In one section he explains what happens to a manuscript when it comes in to an editorial office. What he says here has, I shall in a moment contend, application to writers in the age of AI-slop.

There are, says Turner, two piles in the office. One pile is for authors whose names are “known.” However—

If your name is not known—which makes your stuff an unknown quantity—the script is put at the bottom of the other pile, which is often huge. This is called the “slush” pile. It consists, I’m sorry to say, of about 98 percent junk. This is the fault of the writers, please understand, not the editors. It is also an advantage to you, if you have anything on the ball, because your script will then stand out like a rose on a garbage dump and the editor will make happy little noises.

This is true today, as it has always been true in this game. Most writing is junk. That is an advantage to writers who want to step up their game (which is why TKZ exists!)

The busy editor, says Turner, will always go to the “professional pile” first, as the odds of finding a good story are greater than with the slush. But he adds this note about the pro pile:

The casualties here are often heavier than you would expect them to be. Nearly all of these stories are “useable.” That is, they are professional pieces of work, with not too many outstanding flaws. But the editor doesn’t want merely “useable” stories. He wants damned good ones. He wants to get hold of a yarn that hits him so hard while he is reading it that he can hardly sit still. When he finishes reading he wants to be able to say: “Here’s a hell of a good Smithers story!” This does not happen very often. It takes a wow of a story to get an editor excited. He’s seen them all.

That is true of readers, too. They want a wow story, which is the rarest kind. Add to that all the AI-slop, which is competent. But is it ever wow? Is it ever unforgettable?

Our job is to become the rose in the garbage dump. May I suggest doing a “wow check” at every stage of a project, starting with—

Idea

I have a large file of ideas, things I’ve written down over the years when I’m sparked. I know you get these, too. Don’t ignore them, record them. Revisit them from time to time, seeing what still excites you.

I used to have a box for newspaper and magazine clippings. When something jumped out at me, I’d clip it and toss it in the box. Every now and then I’d go through them, seeing what still had a spark. One of them was a story about cops in L.A. stopping a driver of a convertible. He was a 6’4” guy, had an open container of Jose Cuervo Gold, and was dressed only in a Santa Claus hat and a G-string. This I clipped and threw in the box. Later it became the opening of my Ty Buchanan legal thriller Try Fear.

Development

Idea in hand, I’ll proceed (like a movie studio) to development. My favorite technique is that suggested by the great writing teacher Dwight Swain. I call it “the white-hot document.” It’s a free-form letter to myself, writing down as many plot and character and scene ideas as come to mind, following random threads and rabbit trails. I write without stopping in ten-minute chunks. I rest my brain, then come back to the document the next day.  I highlight the things I like best, and write some more. I do this for three or four days. If I’m still feeling the wow, I move on to—

Structure

I’m a plot and structure guy, so I lay out my “signpost scene cards” in Scrivener, including the “mirror moment.” The mirror moment is, for me, the key to it all. When I nail that—when I feel it—I know what the through-line of the whole book is.

Beginning

Then the day comes when I start writing. The first leg of the journey! This is fun, the scenery is new and fresh. I whistle a tune behind the wheel. But I know at some point I will probably hit—

The Wall

I’ve written before about hitting a “wall” at around the 30k mark. Other writers I know report the same thing. I usually pause here and review my first act, making sure it’s got the death stakes solid and the first Doorway of No Return clear. I make sure my heart still feels the wow factor so I can push on to the finish.

Editing

And then there’s the editing process. I do a read-through in hard copy, make changes, give it to my exacting editor (Mrs. B), incorporate her notes, then off to a beta reader, more changes, a proofreader, then my final polish. What keeps me going at this stage is the opportunity to put in more heart. I know my story now, see the big picture, know the characters, and I look for ways to increase the emotional impact of the whole thing.

So why go through all that when I can just prompt Chat or Claude to do the heavy lifting? Because I need to feel the wow, for myself as a writer and for my readers. Because, as Robert Turner says in Pulp Fiction, “to entertain a reader—in other words, to write a good story—is to play upon emotions, through the things that you make happen to your story characters.”

You don’t get that from a machine, in my (mostly) humble opinion.

Comments welcome.

Quotable

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[Note: had a double Quotable a couple of weeks ago. I’m running this one again for comments. Do you relate? Can you ever “take a vacation” from your writing?]

“Writing is a full-time job, it really is, and you never really take a vacation from it. I could go through a whole day and show you how every conscious moment—and the unconscious ones as well—were part of the business of being a writer. I could, but I won’t….I’ve got work to do.” – Lawrence Block

That Old-Time Omniscient

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by James Scott Bell

We all know about the “rules violation” known as “head hopping.” This is where we get the thoughts (inside the head) of one character, then suddenly “hop” into another character’s head within the same scene.

Technically, however, this isn’t a sin. It’s Omniscient POV (though it usually happens by mistake).

POV is broken down into First, Second (rare!), Third, and Omniscient (though some label Omni a type of Third, but let’s not confuse things right now). The main deal with Omni is that it can float above the action and dip into any character’s head. The Omni voice can be “objective”  (straight description) or “editorial” (the author offers opinions or insights).

Omni POV is not so much in fashion these days (just don’t tell that to Delia Owens, author of Where the Crawdads Sing.) But it was the default choice of most fiction prior to the twentieth century. Here is a clip from Jane Austen’s Emma, where she hops into three different heads in the same scene:

“Emma,” said Mr. Knightley presently, “I have a piece of news for you. You like news—and I heard an article in my way hither that I think will interest you.”

“News! Oh! yes, I always like news. What is it?—why do you smile so?—where did you hear it?—at Randalls?”

He had time only to say, “No, not at Randalls; I have not been near Randalls,” when the door was thrown open, and Miss Bates and Miss Fairfax walked into the room. Full of thanks, and full of news, Miss Bates knew not which to give quickest. Mr. Knightley soon saw that he had lost his moment, and that not another syllable of communication could rest with him.

“Oh! my dear sir, how are you this morning? My dear Miss Woodhouse—I come quite over-powered. Such a beautiful hind-quarter of pork! You are too bountiful! Have you heard the news? Mr. Elton is going to be married.”

Emma had not had time even to think of Mr. Elton, and she was so completely surprised that she could not avoid a little start, and a little blush, at the sound.

The above is an example of objective omniscient. There’s no author voice “intrusion.” With editorial omniscient we are more aware of the voice. Here is one of the most famous editorial-omniscient openings:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. (Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities)

That is, of course, Dickens giving us his opinion on matters. Compare that to Margaret Mitchell’s objective-omniscient opening for Gone With the Wind, limiting herself to description:

Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin—that skin so prized by Southern women and so carefully guarded with bonnets, veils and mittens against hot Georgia suns.

The knock against Omni POV is that it removes immediacy and intimacy. When the narrator is “telling” the story, the action is slowed, and when it “hops” the reader is distanced from any one character.

I think both notions are wrong. In the hands of good writer, Omini can actually increase intimacy and connection. That’s what makes Theodore Dreiser a great novelist despite being a clunky stylist (“The world’s worst great writer” some wag wrote).

Let’s look at a bit of Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt. Jennie is a poor working girl employed by an older man, a U.S. Senator. He becomes infatuated with her, and one day draws her to him and gives her a kiss on the cheek.

“Oh!” she cried, straightening up, at once startled and frightened.

It was a new note in their relationship. The senatorial quality vanished in an instant. She recognized in him something that she had not felt before. He seemed younger, too. She was a woman to him, and he was playing the part of a lover. She hesitated, but not knowing just what to do, did nothing at all.

“Well,” he said, “did I frighten you?”

She looked at him, but moved by her underlying respect for this great man, she said, with a smile, “Yes, you did.”

“I did it because I like you so much.”

She meditated upon this a moment, and then said, “I think I’d better be going.”

“Now then,” he pleaded, “are you going to run away because of that?”

“No,” she said, moved by a curious feeling of ingratitude; “but I ought to be going. They’ll be wondering where I am.”

“You’re sure you’re not angry about it?”

“No,” she replied, and with more of a womanly air than she had ever shown before. It was a novel experience to be in so authoritative a position. It was so remarkable that it was somewhat confusing to both of them.

“You’re my girl, anyhow,” the Senator said, rising. “I’m going to take care of you in the future.”

Jennie heard this, and it pleased her. He was so well fitted, she thought, to do wondrous things; he was nothing less than a veritable magician. She looked about her and the thought of coming into such a life and such an atmosphere was heavenly. Not that she fully understood his meaning, however. He meant to be good and generous, and to give her fine things. Naturally she was happy. She took up the package that she had come for, not seeing or feeling the incongruity of her position…

Dreiser then “hops” into the Senator mid-sentence:

…while he felt it as a direct reproof.

“She ought not to carry that,” he thought. A great wave of sympathy swept over him. He took her cheeks between his hands, this time in a superior and more generous way. “Never mind, little girl,” he said. “You won’t have to do this always. I’ll see what I can do.”

Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (a whopping 900 pages) is, for me, unforgettable (as is the movie version A Place in the Sun with Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor). He takes us deep into Clyde’s head and heart, step by step tracing the choices he makes that take him down, down, down. It’s like watching a terrible traffic accident in slow motion, starting with the first wrong turn.

One final note. An intrusive Omniscient POV is perfect for an author with a singular and humorous voice (e.g., Douglas Adams, Tom Robbins, Kurt Vonnegut). But that kind of voice is the hardest of all to pull off.

All that to say, I wonder if classic Omniscient POV could make a comeback. It requires a writer of great skill and intention…and readers with an attention span longer than seven seconds. In this age of apps that’s quite a challenge.

What say you?

News: BookBub Deals, Anthropic Dough, and Audio Add-Ons

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by James Scott Bell

BookBub Introduces New in Kindle Unlimited Deals

 If you have books in Kindle Unlimited (KU), BookBub has added a promo called New in Kindle Unlimited. The benefits:

  • Drive revenue through increased page reads. Partners who ran early New in Kindle Unlimited promotions reported immediate spikes in page reads, and long tails of increased activity that continue to boost revenue well past the feature date.
  • Boost visibility across the Amazon store. New in Kindle Unlimited engagement drives improvements in rankings that maximize your book’s discoverability across the Kindle store, leading to organic visibility beyond BookBub subscribers.
  • Expand your readership. Reach hundreds of thousands of KU users in BookBub’s audience to hook new fans and increase engagement across your catalog.
  • Highlight a new release or revive a backlist title. Maximize your new book’s momentum in its critical early weeks after launch, or engage thousands of new readers when enrolling an existing title into KU.

You can read more about it here.

Anthropic Settlement Money on the Way

The Bartz v. Anthropic class action, filed August 2024, is just about at the payout stage. The $1.5 billion settlement was reached last year, reportedly the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history. Anthropic agreed to pay rights holders approximately $3,000 per qualifying title (i.e., pirated book). There’d be a 50/50 split with the publisher (assuming the publisher had actually registered the copyright, which they should have), unless the author got rights reverted, in which case they’d get the whole caboodle.

Initial settlement checks (or direct deposits) are expected to be disbursed in the next couple of months. 

Unless the author chose to opt-out of Bartz in order to hunt larger game, namely “statutory” damages of up to $150,000 per title. A few law firms offered to take these on a contingency basis. The ka-ching ka-ching sound is tempting, but in the real world of deep pockets and protracted litigation, the prospect of getting significant dough is, in non-legal terms, dicey.

Cinematic Audiobooks

Like the rise of the machines (see Terminator, The) there is apparently a move by major publishers toward more “immersive” audiobooks, as opposed to solo narration. That means adding things like music, sound effects, and different voices for each character. You know, more like a movie. We are such an audio-visual culture now that the move makes sense. Or does it:

Excessive sound effects or dramatic performances can distract from the writing, making the production feel artificial….Voice actors must understand their characters, the emotions they convey, and each relationship. One poor performance can ruin the experience, even if the rest excel.

Personally, I like a good solo narrator, which means they don’t try to “do” a voice for each character, or put their idea of method acting into the reading. This is one area where an AI Virtual Voice may fare better than a human, bad-actor voice.

Comments welcome.

Writing for Fun…and Kids

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by James Scott Bell

When I was 8, I asked my mom to buy me some tights. Green tights. No, I wasn’t looking to get into ballet or pose for a Jolly Green Giant ad as little Niblet. I was looking to be Errol Flynn.

I’d watched The Adventures of Robin Hood on TV and I wanted to be a dashing outlaw in the forest with a bow and arrow. I even had my mom get me a toy bow with one of those arrows with the rubber suction cups on the end so I could shoot at a window and make it stick. Mom stopped me from that, so I shot at rose bushes and a stuffed monkey instead. (How monkeys got into Sherwood Forest remains a mystery.)

Anyway, I was totally into adventure stories, pirates, knights, and all that.

I’m a bit older now and still love classic stories and movies about adventure, pirates, and knights.

I’ll give you a couple:

Morgan the Pirate starring Steve Reeves.

Prince Valiant starring Robert Wagner.

The Black Shield of Falworth starring Tony Curtis (no, he never said, “Yonda lies da castle of my fodda.”) This movie was based on Men of Iron, an 1897 novel by Howard Pyle. I loved the Classics Illustrated comic book version as a kid.

And now I have three grandsons who, thank God, love to read.

So I wrote them a book. And then decided to publish it, because in this digital-visual-artificial world of ours, I want to encourage reading among the young, especially boys.

This is my first venture into Middle Grade (8–12). It’s about a kid named Justin Brubaker who is sucked into a game app back to medieval England, where he is tasked with killing a fearful monster called the Brymwolf. Along with a Saxon lad named Cuthbert and his pet pig, Walter, the quest encounters all manner of strange creatures, and a forest outlaw who teaches Justin how to fight.

I put in an Easter egg or two for adults, just for fun. Like a “boggard” (a shapeshifter from mythology) whom Justin names “Humphrey.”

Because fun is the best thing to have when you write. It shows up on the page. And goodness knows we need fun to sustain us through the inevitable rough patches of writing a whole book.

It is my hope that parents and grandparents might consider this as a gift for the kids in their lives. Thus:

The print edition can be ordered here.

The ebook can be ordered here.

You’re a writer. Are you having fun yet?

Quotable

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“It’s the whole getting started thing for me. I forget how to write a book. The first ten thousand words are like digging fossils from rocks.” – J. T. Ellison

Handling the Big R: Rejection

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

I saw her for the first time on the playground.

The sun was shining, and her hair, so blonde it was almost white, glistened in the light. She turned and looked at me with eyes as blue as the sky above the smog line in Los Angeles. And I felt something in my chest, a burning of some sort.

I was only in third grade, but I knew I was in love.

Now the question was what to do about it.

I did not get the impression Susan was at all interested in my amour. I was not adept at talking to girls, having only two older brothers. I did, however, know how to show off. I was a great kickball player, so I tried to impress her on the kickball diamond.

She was not impressed.

I walked to school, entering and exiting through the front gate. She also walked to school, but entered through the back gate. So I came up with a plan. After school one day, I waited for Susan to head out and strolled along so I met her—what a coincidence!—at the back gate.

We went out together, and I started walking with her. I made some sort of comment, though I can’t remember what it was. Maybe it was about the book our teacher was reading to us, a Henry Huggins book by Beverly Cleary.

Anyway, we were halfway down the block when she turned to me and said, “Just because I’m walking with you doesn’t mean you’re my boyfriend.” The way she said that last word was a killer. She was mocking me. She reached in my chest and pulled out my heart, and said, “You won’t be needing this anymore” and tossed it in the gutter.

“I know,” I said, in a bid to salvage a shred of dignity. I endured the whole walk to her house. Then began the lonely march back to the school, through the back gate, across the playground, through the front gate, and home. I drowned my sorrows with drink. Chocolate milk, I think it was.

I didn’t know it then, but I was being prepared for the life of a writer.

Rejection Has Always Been Part of this Business

Before the self-publishing era, all writers got rejection slips and letters from magazines, agents, editors. We got used to seeing lines like, This does not fit our current needs.

The Peanuts cartoon strip had a bunch of strips where Snoopy was trying to be a writer. In one, Snoopy is reading a letter he’d just received. “Dear contributor, thank you for submitting your story to our magazine. To save time, we are enclosing two rejection slips, one for this story and one for the next story you send us.”

Then self-publishing came along. Free from editorial rejection, many a writer put their book up on Amazon, and faced another kind of rejection—from the marketplace.

We all have to learn to deal with the Big R.

I knew of a writer who got one of those wild, big fat 1990s contracts. But his thriller failed to catch enough fire to make back most of the advance. Thus, the next book in the two-book contract received no support. The author was dropped, and could not get another contract from a major publisher. He was, in my opinion, a very good writer. He handled the Big R by turning to the bottle. But he battled out of that and last I saw he had done a few books with a small publisher. And good for him. 

What you have to do is accept that rejection is perpetual aspect of this business. It will happen to all of us. You must be ready to deal with it, and the best way to do that is by writing your way out.

When my son was first pitching Little League, he had a tendency to let a bad play or a home run upset him. So early on I made this rule. “You are allowed one ‘Dang it!’ And you can hit your glove as hard as you want. But that’s it. Then you go back to pitching to the next guy.”

That’s what he learned to do, and in fact won a championship game that way.

So you get a rejection. You can have one “Dang it!” (or its adult equivalent). I’ll let you feel it for fifteen minutes. But that’s it. Don’t hang onto it. Don’t go moaning all over the Internet. Don’t yell at your spouse or kick your dog.

Instead, turn that energy into action. Get back to your keyboard.

Any further advice on handling rejection?

And Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there!