Why are certain agents (and other minions of the old school) so fond of those lists?
You know the ones. Rudyard Kipling was told by the San Francisco Examiner that he didn’t “know how to use the English language.” Someone said of Anne Frank’s Diary of Anne Frank that she didn’t “have a special perception or feeling that would lift the book above the ‘curiosity’ level.” William Goulding’s Lord of the Flies was rejected twenty times. The lists go on and on. A Wrinkle in Time, A Time to Kill, Gone With the Wind….
We get it, yes, thank you – the system has failed millions of times.
But why do they keep quoting these statistics as though they were something other than an indication that the system needs to be replaced?
