Spite is your friend

Bestselling author Ellen Potter's recent interview in The Baltimore Sun featured this gem:

[Encouragement] is important in this field, right?

Oh, yes. One professor in college told me flat-out I wasn't good enough to enter the creative writing program. I saved that letter and promised myself I would send it back to her when my first book came out. And [early on], I got so many rejections. I just submitted and submitted. I did not stop. It was just sheer bulldoggedness.

Boy do I hope she sent that letter back to that professor.

Either way, I admire anyone who is driven by spite, and even better, who is willing to admit to it.