HEINLEIN’S RULES Five Simple Business Rules for Writing   CHAPTER EIGHT  On to the fifth rule. Rule #5: You Must Keep It On the Market Until Sold. “It” in the rule refers to your story or novel. In 1947, when Heinlein wrote this rule, for the most part the only markets were pulp magazines. Paperbacks were just gaining strength and hardback publishers were very, very selective. So all short stories and most novels were sold to pulp magazines, and the few digest magazines that were starting up, and maybe to the slick magazines such as Saturday Evening Post, if you were good and well-known as a writer. But as with…

HEINLEIN’S RULES Five Simple Business Rules for Writing   CHAPTER SEVEN On to the fourth rule. Rule #4: You Must Put It On the Market. “It” in the rule refers to your finished and not rewritten story or novel. On the surface, this rule is very, very basic. And yet it was this rule that I had the most problem with over the years. This and Rule #5.   Old Traditional Publishing World What Heinlein meant when he wrote this business rule in 1947 was that you had to send your story to some market that would buy it, publish it, and pay you money. When I started with these rules…

HEINLEIN’S RULES Five Simple Business Rules for Writing   CHAPTER SIX  Continuing with the third rule. Rule #3: You Must Refrain From Rewriting Unless to Editorial Order. I wanted to go at this rule one more time to make sure I’ve been clear. Most of the time, in this modern world, rewriting is when you do a sloppy first draft with the intent of “letting it sit” (dumbest thing I have ever heard) and then “fix it” later. That assumes, of course, that your story is broken. And that you have suddenly gained a vast amount of new skills since doing the story the first time. I will often get comments…

HEINLEIN’S RULES Five Simple Business Rules for Writing   CHAPTER FIVE Moving now to the third rule. Rule #3: You Must Refrain From Rewriting Unless to Editorial Order. So this is the rule that gets all the attention here in the modern world, even though it is the first two rules that stop most want-to-be writers. And the fourth rule also stops writers who can finish something from becoming professional writers. Everybody in this modern world looks for ways and reasons around this rule. That’s how ingrained the modern myth of rewriting is in our culture. One good thing right off about this rule. If you don’t rewrite, just get it…

HEINLEIN’S RULES Five Simple Business Rules for Writing   CHAPTER FOUR Moving now to the second rule. Rule #2: You Must Finish What You Write. Say 9 out of 10 people who claim they want to write are wiped out by Rule #1 because they “just can’t find the time.” If that is the case, then my guess is that another half of the remaining writers are stopped cold by Rule #2. Now, I have to be honest, I never had an issue with this rule, so I mostly just ignored it. I always finished what I wrote. Part of that was the early challenge to mail a story per week,…

HEINLEIN’S RULES Five Simple Business Rules for Writing   CHAPTER THREE Still working on rule number one. Rule #1: You Must Write. Back in 1982, when I climbed onto my challenge to use Heinlein’s Rules and write a story per week and mail each story every week, I had one major issue that I fought. Fear. No idea what I was afraid of, but the fear was real. On December 31st, 1981, my thinking was that every story had to be perfect, had to be worked over and over and before I dared send it out. And it had to be written slowly and carefully to be good. I believed…

HEINLEIN’S RULES Five Simple Business Rules for Writing   CHAPTER ONE For lack of a better way of putting it, Heinlein’s Rules allow you to get to the fun of being a writer. They also help us all remember we are entertainers. About a decade or so ago, I was asked by a professor of English at the University of Oregon to come talk to one of his advanced creative writing classes about the reality of being a full-time fiction writer. I had a hunch I was going to not do nice things to their brains. And I looked on that possibility as my sacred job description. But it turned…

HEINLEIN’S RULES Five Simple Business Rules for Writing   Introduction In almost 150 published novels (over one hundred with traditional publishers), I have always followed Heinlein’s Business Rules. And in hundreds and hundreds of short stories, I have followed the five rules as well. For well over thirty years now, actually, I have done my best to stay on Heinlein’s Rules. I must admit, I slipped at times, but I’ll explain why later on in the book. And how I climbed back on. So how did I get to these rules? A little about my personal story first. I started writing at the age of 24 in 1974. I had…