Bradbury’s Advice to Snoopy

This just in…from 2004!

Thirty writers in Snoopy’s Guide to the Writing Life, edited by Barnaby Conrad and Monte Schulz (Writer’s Digest Books, 2004) react to one of the Peanuts comic strips with Snoopy at the typewriter.

Each essay focuses on how the strip presents an aspect of writing life — getting started, getting rejected, finding new ideas, and more — things writers deal with on a daily basis. The book’s line-up includes Ray Bradbury. Apparently Ray and Snoopy have spent a lot of time consoling each about editorial rejections of their work:

Snoopy has written me on many occasions from his miniature typewriter, asking me to explain what happened to me in the great blizzard of rejection slips of 1935. Then there was the snowstorm of rejection slips in ’37 and ’38 and an even worse winter snowstorm of rejections when I was twenty-one and twenty-two. That almost tells it, doesn’t it, that starting when I was fifteen I began to send short stories to magazines like Esquire, and they, very promptly, sent them back two days before they got them! I have several walls in several rooms of my house covered with the snowstorm of rejections, but they didn’t realize what a strong person I was; I persevered and wrote a thousand more dreadful short stories, which were rejected in turn. Then, during the late forties, I actually began to sell short stories and accomplished some sort of deliverance from snowstorms in my fourth decade.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for the story.]

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