3.5 Ideas from Stephen Marche on Embracing Rejection, the Value of Quality Writing, and Why the Struggle Never Ends (2 min read)
3 min readMay 15, 2025
“You have to understand that the struggle is the cost of admission. It is the price of doing business.” — Stephen Marche
Stephen Marche is a writer from Toronto, Canada whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times.
Stephen is the author of “On Writing and Failure,” , “The Next Civil War,” and “The Last Election” a novel co-written with Andrew Yang.
What makes Marche’s perspective so valuable is his unflinching honesty about the writing life. Rather than offering empty encouragements or promising eventual recognition, he talks the harsh realities of creative work while affirming why the pursuit remains worthwhile despite inevitable disappointments.
3.5 Ideas from Stephen Marche:
1) Great Work Often Goes Unrecognized and Unappreciated
- “Herman Melville lost money on ‘The Confidence Man.’ Moby Dick sold under 400 copies in his lifetime. He quit writing and worked as a customs officer, and his masterpiece ‘Billy Budd’ waited 37 years to be published.”
- “Cormac McCarthy never sold more than 5,000 copies until he was 60. Blood Meridian, one of the great novels ever written, did not sell out its print run of a thousand copies.”
- “The best thing I ever wrote was a novel called ‘Love in the Mess We’re In,’ published by a small press in Nova Scotia that maybe 2,000 people have read. And then things that I’ve written in an hour will be read by tens of millions of people for a newspaper.”
2) Success Is Temporary, But Quality Writing Transcends Time
- “What we’re out here hunting is insight in language — those powerful moments of connection over time and distance that only writing can provide. That search for connection is the only thing that really matters.”
- “The quality of your writing has very little effect on the success of your career, but it’s the only thing that matters. If you’re looking for money or fame, there’s a million better ways to get it than writing.”
- “There’s a huge gap between your action and its consequences. That’s not anybody’s fault or a bad system, that’s just the very nature of this enterprise.”
3) Writing Requires Treating Failure and Rejection as Normal
- “The first job of a writer is to write. The second is to persevere.”
- “Anne Frank’s diary was rejected 15 times by publishers. Gone with the Wind got rejected 35 times, and when it sold, it sold tens of millions of copies.”
- “No one knows anything. That’s why kid writers need to know this is not exceptional — this is the norm. This is how things are for everyone.”
- “In writing, you’re throwing out 90% of what you’ve written. You’re cutting your material so much that you kind of know that everything you write is probably temporary.”
3.5) What’s ONE LESSON Everyone Should Take Away?
- “Results are the teachers of fools. You have to ignore the results of things.”
- “You need to kind of find a way to stay focused on what really matters while trying to play this game, trying to survive in this game, and not losing yourself in the process.”
- “If you are writing, failing, submitting, and persevering, it’s the only thing anyone can ask of even yourself.”
