![]() ![]() And I dug through the stories of the literary writers like Hemingway and others. And I studied the old pulp writers I admired. I started looking around at how the writers I admired did what they did.īradbury, Silverberg, Ellison, all wrote fast, one draft, and never rewrote past a few minor corrections. I believed in the myths and would defend them, by golly.īut after seven years, by the fall of 1981, I was very, very discouraged. The two stories I had not touched or rewritten and wrote fast had sold, but the reality was I was too stupid to understand that. I was convinced the editors were too stupid to see my brilliance. And I made it worse by sending each story out only once or twice. I heard I had to write slow to make it good, so I did, producing exactly two short stories a year for the next seven years.Īnd every story I thought was gold, a perfect masterpiece of fine art.Īll of them were form rejected. I heard I needed to rewrite at least three or four times, so I did, even though I hated to type. (Add bubbling sounds of a person going underwater for the last time.) So down I went into the myths of writing. I figured since I was having fun with writing stories, I should learn more about how to write stories, even though I had sold my first two. Spring of 1975 was when things went really wrong. So on my trusty electric typewriter, I banged out a 1,000-word story, and didn’t rewrite it, just sent it to a horror semi-pro magazine. Seemed major literary magazines liked commercial.Īnd along the way, I thought it would be a lark to write a short story. To say I was not popular in the English Department would be an understatement.īut I found writing poems fun and started mailing them out and selling them to top literary journals around the country. The professor had never had a student even get into the book, let alone win.Īnd I had just made more money than she had total with all of her poetry sales. One of my commercial poems won second place and paid me one hundred bucks. Then as an assignment, she had her entire class mail a poem to a major national college poetry competition. At that point, I had no idea what she was talking about, but it sounded insulting and I was getting a C in the class. My poems were pretty much hated and the professor called them commercial. I had hated writing up until that point, but I had to take some English credits to get my degree in architecture, so I took a poetry class for non-majors. I started writing at the age of 24 in 1974. So how did I get to these rules? A little about my personal story first. ![]() I must admit, I slipped at times, but I’ll explain why later on in the book. And in hundreds and hundreds of short stories, I have followed the five rules as well.įor well over thirty years now, actually, I have done my best to stay on Heinlein’s Rules. In almost 150 published novels (over one hundred with traditional publishers), I have always followed Heinlein’s Business Rules. ![]()
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