Talent isn’t enough. Knowing your craft is crucial, but also not enough. I’ve worked with plenty of writers who have a great story to tell and can write well, who have a confident voice and a sense of what they want to say – and still, they don’t get their work across the line. Usually this is because they’ve run out of steam. They might not have been willing to take on more feedback, or do yet another draft. Often they can’t see an end in sight to the revisions and have reached the point where they’ve had enough. They are no longer enjoying the process or getting enough out of it for themselves.
I get it. That’s okay. By no means do I think these writers have ‘failed’ in any way. They have put in years of work, made steps to learn their craft and practise it, and, most importantly, spent months and years committing to making sense of the world they are writing about – real or imagined. That is, in my view, important and valuable work, even if their story doesn’t end up on the bookshop shelves.
The writers who end up being successfully published keep going against the odds. They show great stamina and resolve. They persevere.
Perseverance doesn’t necessarily mean reworking the one manuscript endlessly, especially if you get a mountain of rejections. It may mean setting a work-in-progress aside to begin a new project. In reality, debut books are often not the first manuscript the author has written. Most successful writers – those who are driven to write as a form of expression, as opposed to writing one particular story – have a number of unpublished manuscripts lurking in the metaphorical bottom draw.
Sometimes those early manuscripts do find a publisher, as was the case with Siang Lu’s Miles Ghost Cities (2024). Ghost Cities had been rejected more than 200 times both in Australia and overseas, and Lu had let it languish in a drawer for almost ten years. He kept writing and worked on other manuscripts. He persevered.
In 2022 his novel The Whitewash, won an unpublished manuscript award and was published later that year. It went on to be shortlisted at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, the Queensland Literary Awards, and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. The success of The Whitewash led Lu to have another go with Ghost Cities, which went on to win Australia’s most prestigious fiction prize, the Mile Frankline Literary Award in 2025
And sometimes those early manuscripts don’t find a publisher. Virginia Evans had completed seven manuscripts over a twenty year period before The Correspondent was published in 2025. It won the Women’s Prize in 2025 and has since become an international bestseller. “It is my debut,” she said in an interview in The Guardian, “But it doesn’t feel like the first baby, it feels like the eighth baby. It feels as if I’ve always done this.”
Over the years Evans had sent out hundreds of submissions to agents in the US, UK and Canada. “It just felt like rejection and ultimately failure was my thing. And it was for a long time – until it wasn’t.” Somehow she never gave up, seeing each rejection as a stimulus to keep honing her craft. “I felt, ‘OK, I can do better and I have to do better,’” she said. “If you’re a writer, you just can’t not write.”
Now that’s what I call perseverance.
See also my blogs on surviving rejection and building resilience as a writer.