This year, the Jamaican writer Marlon James won the 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for his novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings. In the aftermath of his win, much was made of how the manuscript of his first novel, John Crow’s Devil, was rejected almost 80 times before finally being accepted by a publisher and printed in 2005.
James himself has said that, in face of such overwhelming rejection, he actually stopped writing and destroyed his own work:
“There was a time I actually thought I was writing the kind of stories people didn’t want to read. I actually destroyed the manuscript, I even went on my friends’ computers and erased it.”
While social media seized on this and encouraged writers “not to give up” and to “keep going”, while posting various motivational pictures and GIFs and quotes, it also cast light on the thoughts and…
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