: Re: What keeps most authors writing after receiving multiple rejections? Last year, I completed a heavily researched 95,000-word novel about an emerging pandemic that targets primarily children. I am

@Steve161

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What keeps writers writing is the utter impossibility of not writing. Tolkien had no hope of ever publishing The Silmarillion, yet he kept writing and rewriting and editing and re-editing it throughout his life. Keats was receiving negative reviews, yet he didn't quit writing and turn to medicine, though he had the education for it. Writing is a fire in one's bones - it cannot be resisted. You write because you write.

Jim Butcher, a successful modern writer with three book series to his name. He recounts how he wrote three novels, all of them not good enough. Then he wrote the one that was good enough, and spent three years sending it to agents, chasing agents, etc. Some rejected him. Some just ignored him. Then, finally, he got it published. That became the first novel of the Dresden Files series. (Source)

That is a normal process. You get rejected, again and again. It's extremely rare for an author to have their first novel published. It takes time before you acquire the skill to write a story that's really good. Then, when you've written that story, that is objectively not bad, it takes a combination of skill, luck, and a bit of chutzpah to attract the attention of an agent.

The only thing that can keep one going through all that is a passion for writing so strong, that it drowns out the disappointments, a passion that's stronger than all the rejections. You keep creating because you must create.

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