I’d better start talking about Robert A. Heinlein’s 5 rules after mentioning them before as a guiding light for me and the guy who helped me get writing again, Dean Wesley Smith. Heinlein was an important 20th-century science fiction author; if you’ve never heard of him, you may have heard of the movie Starship Troopers which is based upon his book of the same title, though the movie has a very different point from the book.
(I read my first Heinlein book (among other things) during my vacation a couple months ago. It was called Double Star and it was pretty cool, although after reading it I am surprised it won the 1956 Hugo for Best Novel because the sci-fi elements seem secondary. (Apparently real nerds call the genre “SF,” not “sci-fi,” so I call it “sci-fi” to indicate my lack of pedigree and because it rhymes.))
Anyway in 1947, at which point in his career Heinlein was churning stories out pulpily, he wrote a nonfiction essay that included his 5 rules for the business of writing fiction, as well as his observation that the inability to follow the rules is why there are so many wannabe writers in the world. Here are the rules:
- You must write.
- You must finish what you start.
- You must refrain from rewriting (except to editorial demand).
- You must put it on the market.
- You must keep it on the market until sold.
DWS says that each successive rule kills off about 90% of aspiring writers. That is, they are wannabes and not real deals because they got eliminated by one rule or another that they don’t obey, even if they were obeying the previous one(s). Let’s math that out, shall we?
Start with 1,000,000 aspiring writers. 90% of them barely start writing at all, which you can quickly validate if you look at a community such as r/Writing on Reddit. Perhaps they are too busy worldbuilding or having artwork of their original characters commissioned. 900,000 of them are wiped out right there, so only 100,000 people remain who are actually putting pen to paper.
Only 10,000 of those actually finish stories. 90,000 actual writers get bogged down some sludgy percentage of the way through and stop their stories because they think they suck. Maybe some better idea will come around if they just wait longer. One time on Reddit I saw a guy who showed us all his Google Docs folder of what must have been like 50 unfinished stories. He asked what was wrong with him. What was wrong with him was that he wasn’t finishing stories.
Now for the 10,000 that have finished, 9,000 of them buy into what DWS considers the “lie” from the literary fiction, creative writing workshop complex about the utter importance of revision, which can be succinctly phrased as something like “(half of) writing is rewriting.” So now people who have actually pulled off the significant achievement of writing a story from beginning to end are going back through it, rewriting huge sections of it, trying to make it good instead of bad, as if it came out wrong. 1,000 remain.
Now the rules kind of disintegrate a little with the world of indie publishing; you have to imagine Heinlein sitting at his typewriter bashing away at the keys with a stack of envelopes nearby as well as a stack of rejection slips like ironic trophies. It was a whirlwind world that I sometimes fantasize about being a part of, though I may not have had the constitution for it. Only 100 of the 1,000 story-finishers actually get to the part where they show their writing to someone else who can pay them for it. (I have heard some successful writers say that this is the hardest step for them because they just love the activity of writing so much!) Then, because rejection is common, a bunch of those 100 stories will not be accepted on their first submission, and 90 of those stories’ writers will give up. Only 10 will send it somewhere else, wisely recognizing, if based on nothing more than their experience in reading published writing, that someone will probably eventually buy their shit, because there are always magazines that need stories.
10 out of 1,000,000. DWS assures us that what looks like the hard part of writing can be mostly taken care of just by being one of the 10 out of 1,000,000 that follows those 5 simple rules.