A Quote by Ken Liu
Like pretty much every short story writer, I submitted to every market under the sun and hoped for the best. The rejection letters I've collected over the years can probably make a book of their own.
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For over a year I continued to submit mss, and have them rejected - the last few with rejection letters indicated the story was pretty good, but I was American.
If you listen to Too Short over the years, that's me - I'm not hitting every key or every drum or singing every track - but that's me telling everybody what to do. I like to work with creative people. But when it all comes back, and we're mixing down Too Short songs, I'm right there.
I have this huge dossier on sports that I had collected over 10 years. Every human interest story has been cut out and filed away.
Unfortunately, the author of a book pretty much gives up control of the story when the producers take over a book to make it into a movie.
I sent in tons of submissions and proposals, and I collected my share of form rejection letters. Eventually, I found myself working at a comic book shop, where I met my future collaborator Brian Hurtt.
Every time I start off a book or a story I feel like I'm developing a new style or approach for that individual story alone, and it sometimes feels as if readers are looking for the same style/approach from the same writer over and over again, which hasn't helped me in the publishing biz.
You can make something out of every unfinished story and every rejection if you work at it.
Perhaps there's another, much larger story behind the printed one, a story that changes just as our own world does. And the letters on the page tell us only as much as we'd see peering through a keyhole. Perhaps the story in the book is just the lid on a pan: It always stays the same, but underneath there's a whole world that goes on - developing and changing like our own world.
There's always a villain in every book, in every movie. In every story you have the hero and what he wants, and that is the MacGuffin. The whole thing is about who's gonna get the MacGuffin. This piece that this Ace of Spades blog wrote is that's how the media covers [Barack] Obama, and I have observed this in different ways over the years.
In a free market and in the absence of planning, developers will flatten every hillside, fill every canyon, obliterate every endangered species, and pave over every wetland they think they can make a buck on.
I've bought pretty much every book ever written about the Alamo, and I talk to my friends that I've made over the past 15, 20 years. It's just a constant learning and fascinating thing for me.
I once wrote a short story called 'The Best Blues Singer in the World,' and it went like this: 'The streets that Balboa walked were his own private ocean, and Balboa was drowning.' End of story. That says it all. Nothing else to say. I've been rewriting that same story over and over again. All my plays are rewriting that same story.
By the time I get through writing a score, I know the book better than the book writer does, because I've examined every word, and questioned the book writer on every word.
To aspiring writers, I would tell them that we live in a wonderful time where you're able to make your work visible, easily. If you think about it, even ten years ago or twenty years ago, there was a middle man, there was a publisher, there were studios, there was this world of rejection letters. Now, we're in a place where we have the technology and the ability to go shoot our own movies or to put stuff on YouTube or a blog, if you're a writer, or self-publish.
What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book - a key part of our planet's cultural legacy.
In this story, the sun moves. In this story, every night meets a dawn and burns away in the bright morning. In this story, Winter can never hold back the Spring... He is the best of all possible audiences, the only Audience to see every scene, the Author who became a Character and heaped every shadow on Himself. The Greeks were right. Live in fear of a grinding end and a dank hereafter. Unless you know a bigger God, or better yet, are related to Him by blood.
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