Shorter one this week, as it is the Thanksgiving holiday.
To be a cliche, I should start this with something like “I am thankful for beta readers” and since I am, I suppose we can add cliched to the list of reasons I am a failed writer. But I’m writing on this topic because I am seeing Heinlein’s Rules come up again for some reason, and I just find them terribly odd.
Heinlein’s Rules are supposedly a list of rules that the sci-fi writer tossed out to the world. They are
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You must write
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You must finish what you write
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You must never re-write except to editorial order
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You must put the work on the market
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You must keep the work on the market until it sells
I think must people can see the issue with the rules. They are mostly banal stuff — yes if you want to write, you should write. Yes, you probably should finish what you write. But here, even at the second rule, I run into issues. I started a serious historical fiction novel and never got anywhere with it. The research was simply too patchy for me to feel that I had a good enough understanding of the specific time period and location to write a successful historical novel. I spent a ton of time on the story that simply wasn’t going anywhere, banging my head against the idea that I needed to finish everything I started. When I finally put it away, unfinished, I moved onto something that I did finish.
Point three is, of course, the most contentious. And here I have to confess some biases. I do not like Heinlein in the same way that healthy people do not like the plague. I think his writing is vastly overrated and the intellectual and moral content of his stories range from “meh” to abominable. Second, I come from an IT background, where iteration is the general rule. I may have been forged by twenty plus years in my field to believe that reworking material is good, because in that world, it very often is. With that out of the way, I think rule three is absolute poppycock.
Having more eyes on a work is usually helpful, in my experience. Beta readers — readers who you can trust to give you an honest opinion about the work — very often see things that the creator cannot, because they are too close to the piece. If you pay attention to those opinions, you can usually make the work better. No, it does not mean making the specific changes that the readers suggest. But having someone point out flaws is always helpful. If their solutions are not, that is no matter — they gave you a map to the problems in your story that you can use to navigate your way to a better piece.
Now, some people might claim that the idea of fixing your work is implicit in the “finish your work rule.” Maybe, but taking all the rules together, it seems pretty clear that Heinlein did not think much of the idea of iterating your work based on feedback. If that wasn’t his position, I think that a professional writer could have made that clear.
Some people will claim that their writing is so unique that listening to other people’s opinions is useless or actively harmful to the writer’s vision. But good readers will pick up on the story you are trying to tell and react to how well you told it, regardless of the vision behind it. All stories that reach an audience speak to something emotionally or intellectually (usually both) in that audience. If you are such a special snowflake that your vision can be comprehended by you and you alone well, friend, I suspect you will never get that work in front of other people. And if you do, if it is comprehensible to only yourself, it won’t speak to anyone else, will it? So why bother trying to put it in front of people?
The final argument for Heinlein’s way of looking at the world is that he is considered a grandmaster of the genre, and I am some dude who’s never been paid to publish fiction. Fair cop — it does say “Failed” on the door, after all. All I can say to that is following rules laid down in a much different market environment from a much different time seems limiting in a self-explanatory manner. Further, I do not intend this piece to be about hating on Heinlein (though I will never turn down that opportunity, to be fair) but rather about the collaborative nature of good art.
Yes, the writer when writing is writing alone, most of the time. But good stories, good art, are about talking to other people, even if the message is as simple as “trees are pretty”. You may write a story that is compelling to yourself easily enough. In fact, if it wasn’t compelling to you, I doubt you would go through the effort of writing in the first place. But that does not mean that the story is compelling to other people in the same way, or that you have been successful in conveying to other people the story in your head. Beta readers and iterations led by their input can and do help stories become the best version of themselves. Because while writing may be solitary, the point of a story is to be heard, appreciated, and understood by other people.
Art is collaboration — even if that collaboration is just between the art and the audience. Bringing in an audience early can help ensure that the piece is truly what the artists intends.
I guess that wasn’t short at all. One day I will figure out why I struggle to get to 80k words in a novel yet constantly ramble like a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving in these pieces.
Weekly Word Count
Not much — I have been editing two pieces — the clockmaker wife script and the A and R AI short story. The script will likely never see the light of day. I know where to go to get my hopes and dreams crushed with prose, but no idea how one goes about having other crush their spirit with a script. The A and R story, though, will liekly get sent out after this or maybe one more round of edits.
Have a great weekend, everyone, and if you are in the US, I hope that you had a lovely Thanksgiving and a safe holiday weekend.
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