Overcoming Literary Rejection

I was trying to get my work published, first with poetry, then with articles and stories. But they got nowhere at all. There was a steady flow of rejection slips. Once in awhile, a handwritten word, "Sorry, thanks, try us again." The stories, two-hundred and fifty of them a week, were, with one exception, amazingly bad. But I thought, these people have made this effort. You can really only judge a writer by his best work. Maybe these are all just lapses. I wrote, "Sorry, try us again," on all of them. I had to stop writing the notes.

Louis L'Amour