Sep 06 2008
Heinlein’s Rules Once Again
Follow Heinlein’s Rules every week. His rules are simple.
1) You must write.
2) You must finish what you write.
3) You must not rewrite unless to editorial demand.
4) You must mail your story to an editor who will pay you money.
5) You must keep it in the mail until someone buys it.
Simple rules, very simple rules. Yet I get a ton of comments about how the writer making the comment knows more than Heinlein about writing and needs to change these rules for themselves. And these comments always come from newer writers, mostly unsold writers.
What these writers are saying to me simply is this: My belief system does not allow me to follow Heinlein’s Rules.
Belief Systems. I call them “Myths.” They are very, very powerful things in all of us, especially when it comes to writing and the process around writing and even more the mailing and marketing of stories to editors.
Some of these simple, but wrong belief systems are:
“I need more practice. My work isn’t good enough yet to send to editors.”
“I need to polish my work before I dare send it out.”
“An editor will hate me if I write a bad story.”
…and so on and so on. Plug in your own personal myth or belief system into this discussion. But every one of them, without fail, are designed to make sure you don’t succeed, don’t write, rewrite to excess, and then don’t mail your work to editors.
Heinlein told you simply how to do it. Most long-term professional writers I know follow those rules and did follow those rules almost from the beginning. There are exceptions in short term professional writers with five or six books out, but none that I know of in long term careers.
So why are the five simple rules so difficult to follow. Easy answer. They all fly into the face of myths around publishing.
1) You must write. (Myth that this rule jumps right into the face of is the myth of being creative, being hit by the stroke of genius from the creative fairy. I must STRUGGLE for my art, make every story perfect, only write a page or maybe two per day to keep myself clean and pure and fresh. Crap, all crap. Long term professional writers sit down and write, when they feel bad, when they can’t think of a thing, when the process hurts, when they would rather be out in the sun. This is a job, a great job, but still a job.)
2) You must finish what you write. (This rule hits in just about every story when the brain switches over in the middle of the story to “I’m writing crap, what’s the point, I should just stop this pile of crap and move to something new and better. This will never sell. It’s just stupid.” Well, professional writers have learned to just power through the mind issue, which never goes away and is with us all every project. We finish what we write because that’s what we do.)
3) You must never rewrite unless to editorial demand. (This smacks right into the biggest myth of all. Long term professional writers do a clean-up run-through of a manuscript to fix details and such, do a spelling draft and mail it. Understanding how the creative side of your brain works vs. the critical side of your brain helps with getting past this myth. But every beginning writer I know rewrites their manuscripts to death and never sell. Agents take young writers and force them to rewrite a manuscript until the voice is gone. Workshops tell you how to “fix” a story so that you end up writing to group think and we all know how that kills anything original, dangerous, and voice-filled, which is what editors are looking for. I could write a hundred posts about this myth and you beginning writers would still never believe me. Your fifth grade English teacher is just too deep in there, along with your college profs. But another way to get around this is to find out how long it took a favorite writer of old, before this myth gained hold, to write something. For example, Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol overnight to hit a magazine deadline. Learning stuff like that helps.)
4) You must mail what you write to an editor who will buy it. (Not an agent, agents don’t write checks. And this rule hits the fear myth the hardest. I wrote crap, I didn’t even “polish” it, how could I send this out to an editor? The editor will hate me. I will ruin my career (when you don’t have a career because you never mail anything) and so on. If you follow #3 on the rules, this one really hits home hard into the myth world and stops some great writers.
5) You must keep your story in the mail until someone buys it. (This hits the “rejection myth” really hard. Some editor bounced my story, so it must be flawed and I had better look at it and rewrite it to “fix” it. No, never look back. If you follow Heinlein’s Rules, you are not going to rewrite it anyhow, so why look at it again. Just mail it to another editor. Fantastically hard to do at times because it hits the “what’s the point” button in all of us after five or six rejections. Following Heinlein’s Rules and never looking back or rewriting, I sold a story on the 34th time out in the middle 1980’s and got 10 cents per word for it.
So, one more post on Heinlein’s Rules because of a few private e-mails and a workshop coming up this week with Sheila Williams of Asimov’s. She and Kris and I are going to be going over stories together for this workshop, helping authors with craft issues and so on. But what I am noticing so far is that some of the stories have been rewritten into mush. It’s always easy to tell when all voice just has vanished from a manuscript.
Voice is something you can’t see as an author and what you get rid of in rewriting.
The writers coming don’t have problems with finishing manuscripts, and they are all great professional level writers who are putting their work on the line to learn. It’s going to be an interesting week. And a fun one, that’s for sure.
Cheers, Dean
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Another great post. I don’t really have a comment, except to say that I’m still working on this, but I’m getting closer to this mind set everyday. Internal editior, BE GONE!!
I really just wanted to drop you a line to let you know that I check back here for a new post almost everyday. I don’t comment very often, but I’m still here
^JR^
Belief System #2 (”more polish needed”). That’s *my* belief system. Mine! All mine!
I have questions, but instead of “ask and Dean shall answer” I’m going to try going into Donald Rumsfield Mode and answer my own questions. Let me know how I do
Q: One could read Rule #3 as also saying “Don’t go to workshops, because they promote group-think stories”. Yet Dean is hosting a workshop next week. What’s up with that?
A: The purpose of the workshop is not to tell writers how to fix the stories submitted to the workshop. The purpose is to highlight craft issues in the submitted stories (what works and what doesn’t) so that the lessons can be applied to the *next* stories. The stories for the workshop? They’re done. Send em out. Move on. But at the workshop writers will pay attention, learn, and as a result their next stories will be better.
Q: So what’s the purpose of critique groups and workshops, anyway?
A: Again, to highlight what did or didn’t work in a given story. Not to tell you how to rewrite a given story. Because you’re not going to rewrite it. And remember a rule of critiques: take only what works, what rings true to you. Make sure to go with an open mind, just not so open that you bend to the will of the critique and lose your voice. The purpose of the critique is to make the writer a better writer, not the story a better story.
Q: Oh sure, *Dean* can say to write it once and send it out. Dean’s written a bazillion stories and a gazillion books. He *can* write something once and it’s pretty danged good. Not me. I need a rewrite before it’s even acceptable for human consumption.
A: See “belief systems” above. You have a choice: you can rewrite the story multiple times and then send it out, or write multiple stories and send them *all* out. Multiple stories out increases the possibility of a sale and of becoming a professional writer. What do you want?
Ok, I’m done. How’d I do???
- yeff
You got them all. On the second question, another use for workshops, and one I use, is as a quick audience. I want/think a story should work one way, so I want to hear if I made it or not, not to rewrite or fix the story, but to do better on the next one.
Always the next story. But, of course, that bumps solidly into the belief systems of #4 and #5.
And note, I never once said just “crank out a story” without doing your best. Every story I write is the best darned thing I can do at that moment in my career. I work damned hard on every story. I just trust that I did it better the first time than I could the second or third time, that’s all.
One thing I love about beginning writers telling me how they NEED to rewrite is this: They have been readers their entire lives, their subconscious knows what to do because it has taken in stories for years and years. So the beginning writer cranks out a story from that place that knows what it is doing, then because an English teacher someone told them to rewrite everything, or the writer’s own fears are on high, they rewrite from a critical voice, from a place that has no skills and doesn’t have a clue, thus making the story much, much worse.
I wrote a story last week that when I was finished I thought was crap. I told Kris that when I handed it to her to read. She finished it and handed it back, then said, “What’s the one thing we tell students about judging their own work?” I said, “A writer is the worst judge of their own work.” She said, “And you are no exception. Mail it, it’s great.”
Ninety novels published and hundreds and hundreds of short stories and with my own work I still don’t have a clue what works and what doesn’t. I can tell you with another’s work, or Kris’s work, but not with my own. I HATE not being an exception to the rule. I just follow Heinlein’s Rules and write and release and let others decide.
Cheers
Dean
I like to think of Heinlein’s Rules like a BASIC programming loop:
10 WRITE
20 END WRITE
30 PRINT
40 MAIL
50 IF REJECTED THEN GOTO 120
60 IF ASKED TO REVISE THEN GOTO 80
75 IF SALE MADE THEN GOTO 140
70 IF WAITING THEN GOTO 150
80 REVISE PER EDITOR
90 RE-SUBMIT PER EDITOR
100 GOTO 150
120 RE-PRINT
125 RE-MAIL
130 GOTO 150
140 CELEBRATION
150 WRITE NEW
160 GOTO 20
And yes, it’s been awhile since I did any BASIC, but I think everyone gets the idea. Notice that nowhere in the “program” does it say FRET ENDLESSLY or PROCRASTINATE or WRITE TO PLEASE THE GROUP. These would be GOSUB that lack RETURN statements and therefore take you out of the program and stick you into a productionless subroutine that takes you nowhere.
And then, of course, it’s time to reboot! (he he he, anyone remember the Apple II?)
I think most of us newbies and wannabes wind up getting stuck in an endless number of subroutines that have nothing at all to do with the program, and pretty soon we get so tired of rebooting we just turn the computer off and sigh and go do something else….. Until six months later, and we’re berating ourselves for giving up, so we turn the computer back on, start at line 10, and try it again.
Or, at least, that’s been my experience.
=^)
Now that brought back memories, some not so pleasant. I am sure anyone under 40 is just saying “Huh?”
But I think you are right, getting lost in the subroutines is just about a perfect way to think of it.
Thanks,
Dean
Right now I’m lost in the GOSUB that points to READ ABOUT GETTING PUBLISHED WITHOUT ACTUALLY WRITING TO GET PUBLISHED.
I am sure others know this subroutine as well as I do.
A link over at the Analog SF forum took me to a massive 750+ page Adobe file that serial thriller writer J.A. Konrath put together at his web site. It appears to be a compilation of all his blog posts that pertained to the writing biz: from novice status right up through working professional status. Anecdotes. Advice. Suggestions. Warnings. It’s been an excellent and entertaining info-dump. And I’ve not enjoyed reading a bulk text about writing, this much, since I read Stephen King’s, “On Writing” a few years ago.
Alas, I’ve let myself fall back into spending all my “writing” time reading that .pdf file, and reading the handful of blogs and web sites that I frequent and that pertrain to writing; and I’m not doing any new production. Frustrating!! Mostly because I know what I am doing when I am doing it, and then the few hours I have managed to set aside each week to write are gone, and it’s another week wasted.
I intend to break the pattern this week. I’m almost done with the J.A. Konrath document and it really has given me some much-needed perspective on several things, and kicked me in the head as a reminder about several other items too.
I recently went back and added up all the fiction writing I’ve ever done since I first started trying to put my fiction up for an audience (in one format or another) and I guesstimate I’ve written 770,000 words, give or take 50,000 for documents lost, deliberately or accidentally erased, etc. If your average novice needs 1,000,000 words to get to a publishable state, I need to really ramp up and make these last 230,000 words worthwhile. And given the fact my yearly production until now has averaged 45,000 per annum, I don’t want to still be tinkering and fretting the way I’ve been for a few years now. I want to be significantly moved on from where I sit at this point!
I just had a flashback to my AppleIIe and Commodore64 with a tape drive which took 30 minutes to load castle wolfenstein.
Ha! Castle Wolfentstein!
BASIC!
I use to write BASIC programs on my Atari 800XL!
Ah, memories.
Dean,
That is great advice. I know it is and yet it is so hard to follow. I plan on “reforming” and giving up what I view as an addiction to workshopping everything I write. When I look at what I workshopped, I suspect you’re right that not only is it not better, it is all too frequently not as good as when it started. And all of that time used when I could have been writing something new!
Jeanne
Dean, since we’re covering The Basics, could you post an explanation of the Race Rules? You talked about this from time to time back on your BBS, and I was hoping you could go over it again. I have a feeling this is going to be a very productive Autumn for me, and I want to see how well I can do on the Race chart.
Whoops, neverminds, I found it in your archive!
http://deanwesleysmith.com/mt/archives/cat_blog.html#000178
I only recently stumbled upon your website, but I wanted to thank you for this terrific post. It hurdled me right past a bunch of self-generated obstacles that were keeping me from working.
Very inspiring! Thank you!
Ok, a question Dean. One of the things you mention (and one that I haven’t done) is to always submit to publications that pay pro rates.
Sounds reasonable to me. I’ve sold to lesser paying publications in the past, but we all make mistakes. So I think I’ll reform. I start making a list of publication that pay pro. I’m at a slight disadvantage in that I don’t write much science fiction and never write horror. So scratch the pure SF and horror publications. Still that should leave plenty right? *blinks*
Ack. Am I missing something here? I must be. There is no way I can get the number of submissions out that you talk about in The Race with the twenty-five or so publications I’ve come up with and many of those don’t accept multiple submissions–at least not from us peons–ermmm noobies that is.
I’ve seen you say there are plenty of publications out there and if we don’t find them we’re not looking hard enough. But I am looking hard. I must be going wrong somewhere.
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Robin, got it right. I think I talked about somewhere back in the archives here as well. And great work. It shows real drive and push when you can do it. And a great ability to learn when you start selling. Great work!
JR, great question and I think I’ll talk about it in a full blog post in the next day or so, as soon as I recover from the short story workshop with Sheila Williams this last weekend. Great fun.
Cheers
Dean