Heinlein’s Five Rules for Writers
You Don’t Need to Make Endless Revisions or Pay for Multiple Editors
Are you caught in the endless loop of revision for your novel? Do you feel it needs to be perfect before unleashing it on the world? If you follow Robert A. Heinlein’s five rules for writers, you will find yourself liberated from the dreariness of writing the same story over and over.
If you’re an indie author, then you’re more than familiar with the process you must go through to get your work published. First, you write your first draft. Then you hand that over to Beta Readers. Make some edits. Then hire an editor, possibly a developmental editor, and then make more revisions based on their recommendations. Afterward, you may send that out for a copy edit and/or a proofread.
To many writers looking to publish their novels, this is the process one must go through. There’s just no other way. That is pure bullshit. You don’t have to toil with draft after draft. With finding beta readers and hassling them to finish your manuscript. Spending thousands of dollars on a developmental editor is not a requirement either. After all, whose story is it? Theirs or yours?
Now, I will make one caveat. If you’re working on your first novel, this might be an enjoyable process to follow. It will show you the ins and outs of writing a story and you will also get lots of feedback as to what works for your readers and what doesn’t.
However, if you have a book or two under your belt, you can throw that process away. No more beta readers. No ARC readers. No developmental or copy edits. And finally, you only need to write ONE draft. That’s right. You heard me correctly. You write one draft and move on to the next story.
This isn’t a new concept, and I certainly am not the originator of these ideas. Rather, they stem from a rather famous set of rules as stated by the late author Robert A. Heinlein. In addition to Heinlein, Dean Wesley Smith has taken Heinlein’s rules and applied them to the modern day Indie Author. If you want a thorough analysis into the how and why of this process, go check out Dean’s website.
For this post, however, I will lay out Heinlein’s rules below.
Heinlein’s Five Rules for Writers:
1. You Must Write
This is the most obvious rule a writer should follow, but it’s also the most difficult. Most writers will fill endless hours watching YouTube videos, or reading books or blog posts about writing, instead of writing.
This rule is the foundation upon which all the other rules are built. If you want to be a writer, you must write. No excuses. Period.
2. Finish What You Start
Now we come to my Achilles heel on the list. How many novels and short stories have I started over the years, never to have finished? I’ve gone back to a lot of them and wished I stuck it out and finished them.
The reason this rule is so important is because you will never learn things such as plot, character arcs, or how to build suspense without a completed story. The only way to write better is to make mistakes. And the best way to make the most productive mistakes is to complete what you started.
3. You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order
This is the big one. The game changer. At least for me. Write one draft, give it to your trusted reader (spouse, significant other) to make sure the story makes sense. Then make some needed edits if your reader deemed it so. Have it proofread for spelling/grammar errors, then you’re done.
But David, I can hear you ask. First drafts are supposed to be brain dumps. They’re supposed to be creative. Real writing comes during rewriting. To this I say, hogwash!. Why would you want to give something your creative brain toiled over for hours to something as dull and lackluster as your critical brain? The part of your brain that tells you that you’re no good. That your writing is trash.
What you do while writing that first draft is something Dean Wesley Smith calls “Cycling.” You write 500 or more words, and then you circle back to what you just wrote and add some color, change dialog, etc. In other words, give it a polish. This can be done however you want to do it. I personally wait for the next day to cycle back to what I wrote the day before. This gets me up to speed to continue the story.
If you follow this cycling technique, by the time you finished your first draft, you’re done. You have a clean copy that is untouched by your nasty, evil critical brain. If you were to send this off to a developmental editor, then they would mold the story toward how they want it to be told. And then it becomes their story. Not yours.
4. You Must Put Your Story on the Market
Once you’ve finished a novel or short story, and it’s been through the process mentioned in rule #3, then it’s time to put it out there. That’s right. Put it up for sale on Amazon, Draft2Digital, etc. Let the world see your story, otherwise, what’s the point in even writing?
5. You Must Keep it on the Market until it has Sold
Don’t take your book down if no one’s buying it. Keep it up. Let it add the pile of stories you keep putting out to market. Eventually, someone may like one of your later books and will want to check out your other work.
Heinlein had stated that he had no compunction about sharing these rules with whoever would listen, because he said they were so hard to follow that almost no one would do it. And he’s right. They fly in the face of the modern day dogma of requiring multiple editors, and endless rounds of revisions, and the need for beta readers. It forces writers to be what they claim they want to be: writers.
