Like all great ideas, the seed of this project was planted by IMDB. Reading Lawrence Kasdan’s trivia page I stumbled across the astonishing fact that The Bodyguard had been passed over a hundred times before the writer was hired for The Empire Strikes Back.1
This blew me away. One of the greatest scripts of all time2 was written after a period of uninterrupted failure. If a talent like Kasdan experienced so much rejection, how much more might a normie expect?
Several thimblefuls more, at least.
To my thinking, it’s like this: if I give up on querying before my hundred rejections…well, that’s like saying I think I’m better than Larry. That I’m better than one of the greats.
And I don’t. I’m good (I guess), but possibly not best-fantasy-movie-of-all-time good. Considering the volume of pablum published every year, there ought to be room for the merely good. I just…can’t give up too early.
So I’m going for the Kasdan.3
- 1.This is all apocryphal. The nearest corroborating evidence I’ve found is Kasdan’s Wikipedia page, which notes he received sixty-seven rejections for his first script. Still, “one hundred” is a much nicer number than “sixty-seven.”↩
- 2.Fight me.↩
- 3.Kas·dan. Noun. Unit of declination equivalent to one hundred rejections.↩