Lawrence Grobel has been a freelance writer for thirty years, Playboy calls him "the interviewer's interviewer."
Lawrence: How did you deal with early rejection?
Ray Bradbury: "You have to feel the editors are idiots or misconceived. We all do that. It's wrong, but it's a way of surviving. I try to teach young writers to do the same thing. You sit down at the typewriter again and do more work and try to get a body of work done so you can look at it and become your own teacher. If you do fifty-two short stories it's better than doing three, because you can't judge anything from three stories. It's hard to write fifty-two stories in a row and have them all be bad. Almost impossible. The psychological benefits from my first sale, which I got no money for, had to last me for a year before I made my next sale. That year I sold two more stories and had a little extra residue of belief. But it wasn't until I was twenty-two I began to sell quite a few short stories, and most of those were at fifteen dollars apiece. When I was twenty-four I sold about forty short stories in one year to the various pulp magazines. I got thirty or forty dollars apiece, finally a halfway decent income. Must have made twelve hundred dollars that year. I thought I was rich."
Endangered Species, Writers Talk About Their Craft, Their Visions, Their Lives
by Lawrence Grobel
Published by DA CAPO Press(c)2001
page 4
