Tag: heinlein’s rules

Think of this as “Mathieu’s errata to Heinlein’s rules.”

With a couple of exceptions, I hate looking over my old work. The patch-job of an exposition, the research errors, the way society has changed since the story was written…they all make me cringe.

And that’s a wonderful thing.

Because it means I got better in the meantime.

I’m the sort of man who’s only happy in motion. As long as I did better today than yesterday, and will do better tomorrow than today, I’m satisfied. If I’m stuck or idle, it doesn’t matter how much I’m making or how secure I am, I hate life.

Heinlein’s five Rules only apply to the life-cycle of one story, but any cartoonist will tell you that what happens between the panels is as important than what happens inside them. It is absolutely vital that you learn and grow as a writer and a human being from story to story.

This is where Jack London, as much as I admire the man, fell down. From White Fang forward he wrote the same few stories about the Arctic, manly men, seafaring life, boxing, Glen Ellen, Socialism, and the inherent superiority of the white man*. Robert Heinlein, on the other hand, is exemplary in this – yes, Heinlein always writes himself into his books, but it’s never the same man twice.

What do I mean by ‘learning and growing as a writer’? For one, new techniques. I used to be absolutely terrible at writing action sequences and sex scenes. But I learned how to block out the movements of my characters during action sequences, so I knew where and how fast everyone was going. And I learned to focus on the single emotional theme for each sex scene, so they don’t descend into passionless IKEA erotica. I still have issues with exposition…but I’m getting better. Because I’m studying how other writers have handled it (both well and badly) and trying new approaches. Fan-fiction and short stories are wonderful for this kind of thing.

I also mean stretching your limits – I wrote No Time partly because I’d never written a mystery before. Now, when I want to work in some of the things I learned writing a mystery (such as how to conceal or withhold information from the reader) into a romance or a fantasy piece, I have those tools. This is part of why I do write in so many genres – that, and because it’s fun.

I also mean writing characters and situations you find troublesome. I applaud Eliazar Yudkowsky for “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality,” insofar as he tried to write Voldemort as reasonable…from Voldemort’s point of view. Voldemort’s criticism of liberal philosophy and democracy as a whole is extremely troubling, partly because it sounds like he’s making legitimate points. That required Yudkowsky to climb inside the head of an avowed authoritarian – no easy task for someone who grew up in a liberal democratic republic!

My addendum to Heinlein’s rules is very simple. Rule #6 is “write a better story today than you did yesterday.”

Keep that up, and not only will your fiction get better with time…you’ll get happier.

Now go and lay down a couple thousand words. I want to see your story on my desk by Monday. 😀

—

*with some exceptions like The Iron Heel, People of the Abyss, Star Rover, The Sea-Wolf, John Barleycorn and Martin Eden. The point still stands.

Remember last week when I talked about the 98% rejection rate?

Yeah, get used to that.

Frank Herbert famously tried to get his weird desert-planet novel published at every publishing house that then existed. He started with the usual science fiction publishers, like Ace, and moved up to other publishers, like Random House, after each genre publisher turned him down. Even conventional publishers didn’t want anything to do with it and its freaky mysticism and drugs and sex and ecology crap. Finally, he sent the manuscript to Chilton, whom you may know better for printing automotive manuals.

Chilton decided to go with it, which is how we got Dune.

PICTURED: Not an automotive manual.

“The Remedy,” as I mentioned, was rejected by Asimov’s (and two other markets) before I submitted it to the Ray Bradbury Contest and won  third. “Gods of War” garnered six rejections before it won awards and got on MindFlights. I have others with even higher rejection counts. Some are still counting.

Blood on the Floor is an anthology entirely about how writers deal with rejection. Because we deal with it a lot. How you respond to it tells you what kind of writer you are.

I’ve gotten to a place in my career where I enjoy each rejection. They delight me. Because it means I’m one step closer to finding the right market for that story, whether it’s the Amazon list or someone’s anthology project or some professional editor’s hands. It means I can move forward with that story, and moving forward is the important thing.

This rule is both a psychology and an action. You have to get comfortable with the story coming back to you in the mail, and dusting it off and sending it right back out again. Paper your bathroom with the rejection slips. Burn them. Some of the editors will burn you (I have one response for my Asian gothic “White Man’s Burden” that turns the screen brown when I read it).

Whatever you gotta do to deal with it, and to keep on going, do that thing. Because each rejection gets you closer to that story’s first sale.

When it does…celebrate. Have a cup of jasmine tea. Somebody just paid you money for something you wrote. Nothing, nothing, comes close to that feeling – the firm and certain knowledge that someone else values your work.

Then, work on secondary sales. Once the check from the first sale clears, send it off to Escape Pod/Pseudo-Pod/PodCastle (as appropriate) and let them pay you again for the audio rights. Send the story to foreign markets (I like SF World out of Chengdu, China, but Iran has a surprisingly vibrant SF community too). Keep an eye open for reprint-friendly anthologies and contests, and send the story there. Put it up for sale yourself, if you haven’t already. I’ve made more money from “The Remedy” and “Gods of War” and “The Short, Strange Life of Comrade Lin” from self-published sales than I did on the initial sales (if any).

Before you do any of that, read the agreement with your first market carefully. Most of them want exclusive first-print English language rights in their appropriate markets followed by non-exclusive rights after one year. What that means is they want the right to publish the only copy of your story, in English, for one year after the publication date. Online markets tend to say “online” or “worldwide,” traditional magazines tend to limit it to one country (“American first-print rights”) or continent (“European first-print rights”). Each market will have its own way of handling the rights, double-check you’re not double-crossing them.

Make that story work. And if it has to go out again and again, that’s what it has to do.

And then write your next story…you still have to lay down your day’s workdcount, remember. But, most importantly…

In Bob Heinlein’s day, this was very literal. You would make a copy of the story and put it in a manila envelope with a Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope for the response and you would mail it with a cover letter to some editor or other at that magazine you read.

This system sucked like a black hole with a grudge. Entire fucking galaxies could form from cosmic background matter in the time it took them to respond, assuming you got a response at all.

The rule still holds, though – put it on the market.

I formed a publishing house and publish a lot of my own work, but not all of it. I design a cover, format the thing, and put it up on Amazon, Smashwords, Kobo and the Nook. This makes it available to buy, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s “in the mail.”

I don’t self-publish everything, though. Why not?

Partly it’s a latent need for validation – any writer who wants to see their work in print will know what I mean. Self-publishing brings in a little money, and sometimes fame, but being published by someone else makes you feel like a Real Writer. It’s a sign that your peers, the experts, the writers and editors, consider your work worthy. I’m not going to deny that’s part of it.

Partly it’s a matter of how you get paid – with a self-published story, it’s a few dollars here and there…for the next forty years. Send the same story to an SFWA-accredited market, and you’ll get a fat check to the order of five cents for every word. For a 5000-word short story, that’s a $250 check you can then use to pay your electricity bill. As Stephen King said, “If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn’t bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.”

For me, mostly, it’s about exposure. Dean Wesley Smith summarized it basically like this: “You can pay Asimov’s $250 for half a page to advertise your book, or you can send them a story that’s ten pages of advertising that they pay you for. It’s your call.”

Which is why it can sometimes take a year or so for stories I write (like “Hull Down” and “No More Final Frontiers”) to show up on my self-published lists, and why you’ll see my name pop up in the likes of anthologies like Blood on the Floor and I, Automaton. Because I still have to submit them to this market, then that market, then the other…

It still takes time. Except now I can cover six markets (including the occasional contest or anthology) in about nine months, instead of twenty-nine. And if it hits every editor on a bad day (and remember that most professional-paying markets have rejection rates somewhere around 98%) I can put it up for sale and let you people decide whether it’s good or not.

Sending a short story to markets is selling to experts. Putting it for sale on Amazon is selling it to everyone. Both are ways of selling, both can make you money, both can break your heart. They’re two roads to the same place.

As long as you keep it up.