When Dean Wesley Smith talks about writing into the dark he implies some points that I think ought to be made explicit. Well, actually, some of these he does come out and say, but I think I need them said very plainly. Let’s start with the ones that he does say.
One point is that being prolific is good and not being prolific is bad, especially because of how the independent and electronic publishing worlds work. The magic number for “discoverability,” when book vendor sites actually start showing your work reliably to potential readers, is 20. 20 goddamn published books. I think a lot of people would consider this nearly unfathomable. Jane Austen only wrote 6, though she had some stuff going on like dying young. A lot of traditionally published authors that have written 20 books took a very long time to do it. Decades. DWS advocates for the pulp writer approach of blistering output. If you write 1,000 words an hour for 1 hour a day, taking weekends off, you would have a 40,000-word novel after just 2 months. That would be 6 books a year (actually slightly more), and you would reach discoverability in a little over 3 years. 20 books written in less time than a college degree with what is honestly not a huge commitment. Play around with the numbers and see how attainable it really is. (My goal this year is to write 12 books, which coincidentally gets me to discoverability since I published 8 last year, but also is a nice clean rate of 1 book per month. However, I know that I can write a novella in 2 weeks, so I could theoretically, at my current level, put out 26 books a year. Maybe for 2027.)
Another key point is the claim that writing a new story is better for your writing skill than revision. This compounds the advantage of following Heinlein’s Rules over fretting over one’s sparse body of work like, say, some of my college writing professors. You’ll become a better writer, so goes the claim, if you write 3 stories in 3 weeks rather than writing a story in 1 week, revising the first draft in 1 week, and revising the second draft in 1 week. And you’ll have more work anyway. And because revision is at best unhelpful and at worst harmful, there’s no reason you wouldn’t rather just have the 3 stories.