Brutal honesty to a young writer

In this edition of the Week in Writing, Jack London tells a young writer exactly what he thinks of the man’s work, and there’s now a rejection generator to help you cushion the blow.

Also, the American Copy Editors Society names its headline winners, three good books on writing, and the grammar errors that startups can’t afford to make.

Jack London’s brutal honesty to a young writer. In the age of paper correspondence and postage, it must have been a thrill to receive a written critique of your work from a famous author. Long before email and Twitter changed all of that, Jack London responded to a manuscript sent to him by an aspiring 20 year-old author. But maybe the 20 year-old wishes he hadn’t. Letters of Note featured London’s humbling response, which in part read, “Had you made any sort of study of what is published in the magazines you would have found that your short story was of the sort that never was published in the magazines.” Read the letter here.