Before They Became Blockbusters, These People Struggled Too

Originally published on Medium

Some of the best advice I’ve ever come across was from a book, Writing the Breakout Novel. Anybody who is an aspiring author needs to read it. In that book, it says the key to writing the breakout novel is to tell a good story in such a captivating way that it cannot be ignored.

This advice can translate to anything that you do, anything that you’re passionate about that you want to share with the world:

Be so good that people can’t ignore you.

Be so good that it’s a no-brainer for that publisher to accept your work, or that label to offer you a contract, or that production company to buy your script.

If you create your best work, people will eventually take notice. But in the meantime, continue diligently working to improve your craft.

Here are some examples of people who took a while to break out and get noticed by the public, but when they did, they did it in a big way.

Brandon Sanderson, epic fantasy and science fiction author

Everybody is pretty familiar with the story of J.K. Rowling and how Harry Potter was rejected many times. So let’s take a look at a different author.

Before Brandon Sanderson became a well-known bestseller in his own right, and who was then asked to complete Robert Jordan’s famed Wheel of Time series, he worked a night shift at a hotel.

He wrote 13 full manuscripts and didn’t sell a single one of them. He racked up quite the pile of rejection letters, with editors telling him to be more like George R. R. Martin. But that wasn’t the kind of writing he wanted to do. He stuck to his guns and continued writing in his own style.

As someone who has read Sanderson’s work, I was shocked by the fact he received so many rejections — his work is spectacular. But sadly, this backstory is not unique — so many authors have to trudge through rejection after rejection before finally finding a publisher.

The difference between a published author and one who isn’t? The published author never gave up.

Neither did Sanderson. He persevered through rejection. He kept writing and submitting anyway. He attended conventions and networked within the industry. Until finally, 18 months after he submitted his manuscript for Elantris, Tor published it.

As Sanderson said in an interview with The Guardian:

“Everyone collects rejection letters, but not everyone is so stubborn as to keep doing it after that many.”

I can’t guarantee that you’ll be a bestseller like Sanderson, but I can guarantee that you won’t be if you stop trying.

Keep writing, even through the rejection.

Scott Frank and The Queen’s Gambit

The Queen’s Gambit is one of the newest Netflix showstoppers. It’s a series based on a book published in 1983 about an orphaned girl, prodigious at chess, as she struggles with addiction and her rising fame.

When it first premiered, it held the number one spot on the streaming service in 63 countries. But The Queen’s Gambit was decades in the making for writer and director Scott Frank.

Originally a book, many directors over the years had toyed with the idea of turning The Queen’s Gambit into a movie, but nobody had made it happen — including Frank.

After completing Godless with Netflix, he pitched The Queen’s Gambit as a mini-series. He wanted to create a show that went beyond the sport of chess and explored the emotional cost of genius — in doing so, he stayed closer to the original story in the book.

The executives at Netflix went for it — but he received half the budget of what he had for Godless. They expected it to have a smaller, niche audience. They poked fun and jokingly called it Frank’s “little chess show.”

Boy, did those executives turn out to be wrong.

Don’t give up on the projects you care about — even if people make fun of you, or say others won’t be interested in it. If it matters to you, it matters. It might take time for others to see it and appreciate it in the same way you do.

Kip Thorne and Interstellar

Kip Thorne and his friend Lynda Obst had the idea to create a movie that was scientifically plausible — where the plot was driven by science and nothing violated the established laws of physics.

Thorne is a rock star of the theoretical physics world and a close friend of Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan. With his movie, Thorne wanted to bring these big scientific concepts into the lives of everyday Americans and make physics more accessible.

But arriving at the final product of the astounding visual experience that is Interstellar was not a smooth road.

In 2006, Thorne’s movie project attracted Steven Spielberg, who eventually dropped out. Jonathan Nolan came on-and-off board as a screenwriter for several months at a time. For two and a half years, the project sat in limbo without a director.

After years of uncertainty, in 2012, it attracted another director — Christopher Nolan, the director of blockbuster films such as The Dark Knight and Inception.

Thorne helped to create the visuals of the black hole Gargantua and assure that it was an accurate representation of how it would look if it were a real black hole occurring in nature. Because of his painstaking efforts and calculations, we now have a movie where most elements are scientifically plausible. We can see what a massive black hole would actually look like.

Thorne went on to write a book, The Science of Interstellar, that explains each of the plot points and goes into detail about the science and why it works.

As Thorne says in an interview with Scientific American:

“To a great extent, my motivation here was to try to use the movie as a lure to get people who might otherwise not have much interest in science curious about it, by exposing them to strange, exotic phenomena like wormholes.

The film is the bait, and the book is the hook I want to use to draw them in even further, to get them to dig in and learn something new.”

It took years of effort, research, and calculations. The road to Interstellar was fraught with setback after setback. But Thorne never gave up on the project because he believed in it and in its importance. He stayed the course, and continued working and waiting, advocating for his movie whenever he could.

Until finally, somebody listened.

***

If it’s important to you, it’s important.

Think of how many discoveries and works of art the world would be lacking if their creators had just given up.

We’d have no light bulbs, no Harry Potter, no telephones, no Netflix, no Star Wars — the list goes on.

Whatever thing you’re working on that you’re passionate about — the world needs it.

Keep working on it. Stay the course. We all can’t wait to see what you create.