A very long time ago I wrote a book and nobody had ever read it. I had a good friend named Robert Heinlein. I asked him if he would read the book for me and tell me if he thought it was any good. That is about the biggest favor any writer can ask another writer to do. Because as Robert once said, most writers don’t want criticism, they want praise. But he read it, he tore it apart, he showed me places he thought I should rewrite and when I finished it, he sent it to his agent, and it sold. And I’ve been writing books ever since, and I’ve also had the same agent ever since.
Some years later I was talking to Robert and I said I don’t know how I’m going to repay you for all the help you’ve given me. He said, “You can’t. There isn’t any way you’re going to, so you pay it forward.”
So I’ll repeat Mr. Heinlein’s advice to writers, because if you pay attention to his dictums, you don’t need to know much else. And if you want to be a writer, you’ve got to do several things.
The first one is you have to write. You have to actually put your tail in a chair and your fingers on a typewriter or keyboard. You have to write.
You have to finish it. You can’t just keep writing things and starting them and carrying them around and hauling them out of your briefcase and reading them to your friends in bars. You have to finish what you write.
And having finished it, you have to stop mucking with it. And get it done and send it to somebody who actually has money to buy it with and presses to print it on. It does you no good to have your best friend read your story or the geek down the street or even your high school teacher. They’re not going to buy it from you. The only opinion that counts about your story is whether or not somebody will pay you money for it. And the only reason to rewrite it, as Mr. Heinlein said, is if somebody says, “I like that, but it needs this and this, and if you do that, I’ll buy it.” Then it’s worth it. Otherwise write a new story. Your words are not so precious that you can’t just set them aside when it didn’t work and start over.
I was talking to a young man tonight and he told me about two novels he’s trying to sell. I listened to the ideas and they were both on subjects about which he didn’t know very much, but he thought would be interesting. And yet he works in a profession in which there are dozens of darn good stories.
He thinks what he does is dull. Fine, but think about what might happen and it might not be dull. There he knows the details, he knows what’s going on.
And don’t try to keep working with the stuff already done. Don’t try to go back and fix it. Just set it aside and go write a new story.
And if you do that, if you write, you finish what you write, you get it out to people who can buy it, and if you don’t sit around endlessly rewriting, then at some point you’ll learn to write.
Now in my experience, it takes somewhere around half a million to a million words before you get to the point where you are no longer thinking about what you’re writing, and the technique of how you’re doing it, and where to put your fingers on the keyboard, and all of the other mechanics of writing and grammar and style. After enough practice, you begin thinking about the story and you tell the story without thinking “I’m writing!” You’re just writing it. When you get to that point, then you’ve got a chance. And until you get to that point, maybe you do, but you probably don’t. Because you were building it brick by brick. And building brick by brick usually doesn’t make for a very good building—especially if you didn’t know what it was going to be, when you keep adding bricks hoping that eventually it is going to look like something you want.
The other advice I would give new writers, is advice Mr. Heinlein gave me a long time ago that has served me well: if you’re going to choose grammars and styles, choose good standard grammatical English and what we used to call “high grammatical style.” Don’t experiment. Don’t write with experimental spellings. Don’t try to write phonetic spellings. Don’t, in other words, try to improve the English language. Use it as correctly as possible.
The reason for that is simple: The number of people who will be irritated by your writing with good standard grammar is very low. The number of people who will simply not want to read it because you wrote with some nonstandard experimental grammar is very high. For example, there are people who think that it would be politically a good thing to change the impersonal pronoun in English from he to she. Sounds like a good idea, but it makes dreadful reading. It’s very hard to read stories that use little gimmicks like that. Just regular high style and good grammar.
And if you don’t know good grammar, go learn it. Get a good spell-checking program. Get a good grammatical checking program. Try to fool the grammar program. It will tell you things you know are bad advice. Fine, try to fool it into thinking it’s good. And when you get to the point where you can write by all the rules and you can follow all the rules, even though they don’t lead you to anything you like, now you are permitted to go play around with the rules and break them and do things to make your work more dramatic and more effective. But if you don’t know what the rules are in the first place, how do you know whether what you’re doing is a good thing or not?
So Mr. Heinlein essentially made that speech to me forty years ago and I’m paying it forward here.