Page:The Craftsmanship of Writing.djvu/35

THE INBORN TALENT the cost of preparation, and that he had not yet learned that his rejected manuscripts were also part of that same preparation—and by far the more important part.

"The worst of all evils, for a beginner," says Zola, in the above-mentioned essay, "is to arrive and to succeed too soon. He ought to know that behind every solid reputation there lie at least twenty years of effort and of labour."

What each man or woman learns from a rejection depends, of course, upon the circumstances of the individual case. It may teach nothing more than the unwisdom of submitting a certain type of story or article to one particular magazine; or again, it may bring a salutary awakening to the fact that what the author fondly believed to be a masterpiece is, after all, a rather tawdry and banal performance. But in any case, a [ 21 ]