"Don't kill or kidnap editors and agents who turn down your book."

Perhaps the most unbearable sight for a to-be writer is the slim envelope that s/he all too well knows can contain only one thing. And it invariably does.

Rejection slips simply convey a decision. They are impersonal, and the aspiring artist has no idea how wide the writing is of the mark. A letter might be better. It is more personal, and in many cases it bears undeniable evidence that the text indeed has been read. What it contains about a work is mostly true, but in most of the cases will not answer the questions burning inside the aspiring person of letters: Was it the style? The storyline? The length? The format? The subject, the theme, the paper, or the ink? Is everything I write really that bad? How should I improve my writing? Is there a more suitable forum for the kind of writing I do? And, most importantly: Why? It might be better to receive a rejection slip and have a glimmer of hope left that the work has not been actually read at all. Or just "save yourself the heartache: don't be a writer."

The quoted pieces of advice are from David Armstrong's How Not to Write a Novel: Confessions of a Midlist Author, parts of which have been made accessible on-line by writersservices.com here. It is a depressing account which shows that after the tiring process of writing (and it doesn't matter whether it is a novel, a play, or a short story) and the soul-destroying process of having the product read and even published, which might take even more time than the writing itself, what usually happens is, by and large, nothing. So it's really not worth the pain.

Still, reading Armstrong is encouraging. You can get to know how many publishers turned down Harry Potter. You can get a handful of advice (most of which you already knew). But most importantly, you can have a sense of not being alone in all this. (And then there's this post which also shows the same :-)