The Way of the Creative Fool

Madeleine L’Engle received two years’ worth of rejections from twenty-six publishers (including her own) for the young adult classicA Wrinkle in Time. Toward the end of that demoralizing period, L’Engle covered her typewriter and decided to quit — not only A Wrinkle in Time but writing.

Her resolution was short-lived. On her way from typewriter to kitchen, inspiration struck: an idea for a novel about failure. In a flash, she was back at the typewriter.

“That night,” she explained three decades later in a PBS documentary, “I wrote in my journal, ‘I’m a writer. That’s who I am. That’s what I am. That’s what I have to do — even if I’m never, ever published again.’ And I had to take seriously the fact that I might never, ever be published again.”

Of course, Madeleine L’Engle was published again: Farrar, Straus and Giroux picked up A Wrinkle in Time in 1962.

The following year, Wrinkle won the coveted Newbery Medal for children’s literature, and by 1989 L’Engle had added four equally popular sequels to what then became The Time Quintet. In the decades since, Wrinkle has been translated into more than fifteen languages and adapted for the stage multiple times.

“It’s easy to say I’m a writer now,” L’Engle added, “but I said it when it was hard to say. And I meant it.”