Dean Wesley Smith (author of more than ninety novels, including both original Men in Black books) loves these rules:
1. You must write.
2. You must finnish what you write.
3. You must not rewrite unless to editorial demand.
4. You must mail your story to an editor who will pay you money.
5. You must keep it in the mail until someone buys it.
On his blog (go read it!), he writes that these rules scare most beginning writers, because they challenge a bunch of self-destructive writing myths.
Such as: rewriting makes a book better.
Yeah, I have the most trouble with number three. 1. Because I write in a scatter-shot, non-chronological way, and I (think I) need to go back over my stories to get them to fit together. 2. because I don't self-edit AT ALL while or right after I write. I just try and type everything down as fast as I can. And I can't believe that the first, random way something comes out on the page is the best I can do.
But apparently that's a rule A LOT of beginners have trouble following, so he gave a few examples of people liking the fresh, thoughtless pieces people knocked off better than the ones they'd made into precious pieces of art.
And I thought about my own most successful pieces- meaning, the pieces people liked the best. And actually, most of them WERE things I just scribbled down and got in. Not just poems or short stories; the essays I got A+s on in college were generally the ones I'd only spent a night on, blasting away.
So screw editing for now. I'm going on. And after yesterday's recharge time, I've got a fabulous outline for the thriller, so it'll be that much easier :)
I can't promise that after this draft I'll put the story in the mail... like I said, I haven't been writing chronologically, so there are a lot of expos. things I'll need to clean up, plus things like spelling/grammar mistakes, consistency in how the various characters talk, and changing vocab. a little so I won't repeat the same word OVER and OVER and OVER.
But maybe I shouldn't fret so much, and should trust my instincts more. Maybe this stuff is easier than I thought :)
"3. You must not rewrite unless to editorial demand."
ReplyDeleteIt's taken for granted that everyone rewrites. So if you hand a script in that's crap, everyone will think "Whoa, that's really crap and must have been rewritten", rather than "Well it's crap, but probably only a first draft, so it's ok".
Why would anyone hand in a script that isn't all it can be. I highly doubt any first draft made it to screen exactly. Sylvestre Stallone claims that RAMBO was written in 3 days. He's very proud of that. So what? I've written a first draft in less time! His first draft was definately not the film that got to screen.
However...I do believe that some things start off so well that very little changes story-wise. An interesting rule that blog suggests and one that would undoubtadly get a lot of aspiring writers into trouble.
Good post, thanks!