The Importance of Persistence for a Writer

Sometimes a writer becomes so popular, so suddenly, that you wonder how it happened. In the late 1980s, the fiction writer Ann Beattie was on fire. All her stories were appearing in The New Yorker. A novel was in the works, there were rumors of a movie contract.

Ann Beattie

I was a fan of Ann Beattie’s—I still am. Her short story “La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans” in Secrets and Surprises is among my favorites. But I have to admit that I was furiously jealous of Ann Beattie. She’s only five years older than I am, and she was the most popular young writer in the United States at the time she first came to prominence in the late 1970s.

In 1978 I went to hear Ann Beattie read at the Sheridan Square Bookstore in New York. The room was packed—I had to sit on the floor because there were no more chairs. Ann Beattie gave a terrific reading, but a part of me was holding back from really appreciating it, because I couldn’t stop envying her.

After the reading there was a Q&A, and someone blurted out the question we all had in mind: “How did you first get published in The New Yorker?” I probably wasn’t the only person in the audience who was thinking She probably slept with an editor or had a friend who edited stories there.

Ann Beattie took a deep breath. Maybe she had heard this question many times before and she was controlling her temper. If she was, she was doing a good job. “Well, the first nineteen stories I sent to The New Yorker, they rejected. I went back and worked on my writing. The twentieth story, they accepted.”

All right, I thought, if that’s how Ann Beattie got published in The New Yorker, more power to her. 

How many of us have that persistence? Not just to keep sending our work out when most of the responses are rejections, but to keep refining and correcting our drafts. Sometimes, it takes the kind of persistence involved in sending your work twenty times to the same magazine, improving it each time.
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Zack’s memoir about his writer dad, Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry