Posted by Leslie on July 25th, 2007 | No Comments

This is a wonderful essay written by Jodi Picoult on what it took her to get published and be considered a success. Like Stephen King and J.K. Rowling (and many others), very few authors are “overnight sucesses.”

For some reason, reporters often call me an overnight success. But if that’s true, it’s been a 15-year-long night. My career, like those of most writers, has been one of slow, incremental growth, a mixture of both successes and failures. And here’s the thing that’s really remarkable: The failures you face as a writer are more important, because they’re what make you work harder, do better and build up the rhinoceros-hide-thick skin you need to survive in the publishing world.