The single best one my work ever evoked came from an agent employed by a west coast firm, now very long gone, the agent and the firm. The entirety of his communication to me read "Wooden, foolish, a little bit trite... But, thanks!"

Two-thirds of the manuscripts published in any given year by major companies are represented by literary agents, and when you look at the submissions guidelines for most publishers, they say that they will not consider "unagented" work. So that seems pretty open and shut. You need an agent. Thus you go swimming — because you must — in the moat, an experience that, if you do not have a ribald, very well-oiled sense of confident humor, will drive you nuts.

Dealing with the publishers themselves is much easier because you have a goal, they are demonstrably interested and they know who you are. It's just you and your editor, and you have a common wish.

There is a second problem with the Hemingway ideal, a problem spelled out succinctly by Richard Steele. If you write to be famous, the quality of your work will almost certainly be damaged by the anxiety with which you're writing. You have the memory of all those great books, written by writers you admire tremendously, and there comes the time — often — when you worry that what you do will never come up to the level of what they did. You finish writing a paragraph or two, then you recall Joseph Conrad writing about something similar, or Joyce or Greene or Ellison or Dickens or Austin, Eliot, Nabakov, Baldwin, Faulkner... You stop writing. Or you continue on, the shades of all these standing behind you, dark, celebrated, bookish shades brimming with talent, now long gone except for their great fame, watching what you're doing.

It doesn't work, and you won't make it.

When I finally understood this and backed off, my writing improved and I started getting published. Right away. It was a simple, one-to-one relationship. Now I pay occasional attention to the idea of fame, but I never allow such a thing to affect what I'm doing. Fame is something others bestow upon you. Good writing is what you bestow upon yourself, your own most faithful, loving, and observant fan. If you don't write for the emotional benefit of that reader, I believe your chances for fame will vanish.