Heinlein’s rules for the business of fiction are also a central part of Dean Wesley Smith’s approach to writing, and now mine. Robert A. Heinlein was a legendary sci-fi author and he wrote down his rules in 1947. Like writing into the dark, they’re very simple. Let’s see how I do recalling them from memory:
- You must write.
- You must finish what you write.
- You must not revise what you write (except to editorial demand).
- You must submit what you write for publication.
- You must keep what you write on the market until it is accepted and published.
All of these taken together really just mean, “Keep going and don’t look back.” That was how authors made a living in 1947. They didn’t get paid to edit. Besides, someone would accept the story eventually, so it was best just to keep submitting it to various places.
DWS says that each successive rule wipes out 90% of aspiring writers because they don’t follow it, even if they followed the preceding ones. So let’s math that out and start with 1,000,000 writers.
Well, 900,000 of those people don’t actually sit down to produce text. They just browse Reddit. So they’re gone. They’re not our competition. That leaves 100,000.
90,000 of those 100,000 will get caught up in the critical voice about whether their story is turning out any good. They’ll be stuck after Chapter 1, or maybe at the dreaded one-third point. Now we’re down to 10,000 out of 1,000,000 who actually finish stories. I get it, man. This is probably the hardest step for me.
9,000 out of those 10,000 will fuss and fret over making the story perfect now that it’s done. They think that one story defines their career, their legacy, their fulfillment of their potential. So it just has to be good or else. Only 1,000 writers trust their authentic artistic voice and recognize that the story is probably good enough.
It gets a little fuzzy at the next steps because publishing is different 80 years after Heinlein wrote about his rules. You don’t have to submit anything to anyone if you don’t want to. You can just do it yourself. But I guess some people don’t get around to putting their work out there either way. So that’s 10 out of the 1,000 that actually do. 10 out of 1,000,000 follow all the rules. I suppose that makes it less scary to think about finding some success as a writer. As popular as the activity of writing appears to be, you are only really competing with the people who follow every single rule, not necessarily with the people posting on Reddit, no matter how confident they may happen to sound.