For obviously horny reasons I wanted to be like Modigliani [...] and paint lambent, naked women.

MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM: My third novel, Flesh and Blood, received a withering, truly venomous review from Michiko Kakucani in the daily New York Times. It was, in a sense, my worst fear come true: a devastating review that was read by millions of people. I'm not prone to vomiting, as Hellman was, though I had a hard time with that review, not because I worried that it might be true, but because I felt so publicly humiliated. Most of the writers I respect live continually on the edge of various convictions that they are not very good at what they do, that they have simply fooled enough of the people enough of the time, and that sooner or later they will be exposed as hacks or frauds. It is, to me at least, an inconvenient but necessary attitude-too much confidence, too much conviction about one's own virtuosity, seems dangerous (though of course too little is dangerous too). I survived that review, I kept writing, and in so doing seem to have crossed a line I'll never have to cross again. There's a perverse son of relief in seeing your own worse fears realized, at least if it doesn't do you in. You understand, after that, that they can hurt you bur they can't kill you. You're not as timid ever again. You go on.

KlM EDWARDS: I did my graduate work in Iowa City. When l finished, my husband and I left for teaching jobs on the rural east coast of Malaysia, worlds away. Against the dazzling backdrop of the South China Sea, life seemed very quiet-no talk of writing, no other writers, no visible ways in which books mattered. Still, I kept writing stories and sending them out hopefully over oceans, one last, tenuous connection with my old life, with what I still believed was my writing life. The mails were slow, erratic. One day I came home to find not one, but two, rejection letters waiting. They were simple form letters, neither kind nor unkind. Still, in that silence I allowed them enormous weight. For days I was depressed, glum. At last my husband got fed up. “If you love to write then do it,” he finally said, exasperated. “Do it for that reason and that alone. But if you only want to get published, give it up.”

RICHARD FORD : I don't usually like stories about other people's early failures and rejections. They all sound so much the dreary same, and of course they weren’t successful failures or we wouldn't be hearing much about them. Bur I do love my own. I like to think back from a point of present calm to moments of consuming rage, bitter, gnawing betrayal, glimpses of disaster, hopelessness and defeat. Why I like to think about these is not to gloat. Certainly not. They' II all come around again with conspicuously different outcomes. It's just that I like the lingering notion that I've enjoyed a vigorous, exciting and robust life up to now-vigorous, robust enough to have been consumed by rage, et cetera about something. And second, I like it that no matter how I once felt-scalded, damaged, done in-I didn't go on feeling that way very long. That bad day got over. Another day started. I found other, better things to do. It can seem (almost) funny-all that fuming and raging and the creaking open of the abyss. It's good to remember this cycle of feelings in anticipation of the next round of assaults, due any day. Hard to choose the right rejection-they seem so plentiful and various. Once, Jay McInerney was quoted in a Canadian newspaper as saying that instead of his early meteoric success as a writer he now thought it might've been better for him to have been like Richard Ford, and to have labored for years in obscurity. Those years of obscurity, of course. were the years when I persisted in spite of one or another sort of rejection, slight, betrayal, rage, demeanment, demoralization. Odd to think these should seem salubrious to another. However, I'd be only too happy for Jay to have gotten his wish. I would simply want a trade: my obscurity for his early meteoric success. I believe we'd each be better for it now.

ALEKSANDAR HEMON: I used to write a lot for magazines and radio in Sarajevo, which taught me that writing is evanescent: magazines are thrown away, and radio moments exist briefly and then they perish. That experience gave me a different take on rejection, inasmuch as it prevented me from taking myself too seriously, which obviously makes rejection less painful. Anyone who thinks that writing can make him or her immortal is a damn fool. Writing is inherently a symptom of mortality—t lives and dies with or without you, regardless of acceptance or rejection. Furthermore, I think that a writer should know when something is good-being able to recognize what works and what doesn't is a pare of the job-which means that the acceptance-rejection thing only pertains to the career aspect of the writing, and that never depends on the writer anyway. If you start waiting for the reviews to tell you whether your book is good, it's time to do something else.