Critique_This_WIP

Fifteen years ago I determined I would write and I would publish. So I set about learning the tricks of the trade and cultivated my craft. I was lucky to go to NYC for a writer’s seminar with SMU along with a dozen other local writers. When I met with agents, I was told my work was too real, people want to be taken somewhere else in fiction, no one wants to read about their own life.

So I put my half finished manuscript into a drawer to gather dust.

Then I started over from scratch, plotted what I thought was a story I would be interested in; I’m quite an avid reader. I wrote every day for six months and completed a 400 page manuscript. I did this all on my own with no critique partners. Then, once finished, I sent off query letters and checked my mailbox daily. I was so naïve.

Each responder was very sorry but they were not taking on new writers. I suppose this was either true, or a gentle way of telling me my work was not up to par. So I put my work on old fashioned disks and bound them with a rubber band and put them in a drawer. My computer doesn’t even read those disks anymore.

I put my work away and got busy with life, jobs, kids, soccer, books, the Soprano’s, Lost, Veronica Mars, 24, Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and I’m embarrassed to say I TiVo’d Judge Mathis and Judge Judy.

More importantly, I broke HEILEIN’S Rules for Writing. Robert Heinlein was a renowned American science fiction writer and his rules are well known (many Google results):

1. You must write.
2. You must finish what you write.
3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
4. You must put the work on the market.
5. You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.

These rules appeared in the 1947 essay "On the Writing of Speculative Fiction."

1. You must write. I stopped writing for over ten years. What a doofus I am. Imagine how many novels I could have completed. What if one of them had been “the one”? Sheez.

2. You must finish what you write. So I have half a manuscript, likely recycled into clean paper and turned into a technical manual.

3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order. Well, I never had an editorial order (I wish). Perhaps my completed manuscript may have sold had I opened it up to criticism before submission. Perhaps I “should have” revised more. The trick here is to know when to stop rewriting. When you start changing something good into something mediocre, that would be the signal to put your red pen away, I think.

4. You must put the work on the market. I did this. Woo hoo! I pulled my little book out and ini mini miny moe’d a dozen agents to send my work to. I had to save on stamps, after all.

5. You must keep the work on the market until it is sold. I gave up, I got my feelings hurt and felt small and I let those feelings get in the way of my writing.
I don’t know if my work will ever be blockbuster material.

But I do know one thing.

I will never break these rules again.
Write on!