No rewriting on fiction

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More on Dean Wesley Smith. I just find the story of this guy very interesting. You can read it on his blog. To sum up, he started writing and had an initial success, so he decided to go seriously into writing and started to read and learn about writing. Along this path, he took in a lot of myths about the writing process that really harmed him. The outcome: seven years of not being able to write or to write very little (like two short stories a year rather than a short story a week). He even took therapy for four years to overcome his mental obstacles.


One day Smith read about Heinlein's rules on the business of writing and everything clicked. The business habits are:

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

Smith develops each point in his blog (and wrote a non-fiction book about it later). The habit that shocks me the most is number 3, because, indeed, I was always told that I had to rewrite. That my text would never be good without a rewrite. I also got the advice that I should write a first draft and then I should rewrite it multiple times.


This is not what Smith does. For him, there is only one draft: the first version that he produces. He produces in one go a clean version. Can you believe that? With the education that I received this falls short of being magic. At the same, I believe it. I believe it because I experienced this in short stories. If I was "on flow" (which means that the story was coming out of my head without me "thinking"), then the first draft was basically it. I would still make multiple changes (I was trained to do that), but, bottom line, all those changes were basically cosmetic.
Now, achieving this with a full novel does sound magical. The key seems to be:

  • having the right mindset: you are producing only one draft so you cannot allow yourself to be sloppy (or rewrite);
  • doing cycling: when getting stuck, going back, adding small modifications and corrections here and there, sometimes jumping to other parts of the novel;
  • writing only with the creative side of the brain - i.e., the one that is positive and is always moving you forward.

What I find more difficult is the last point. It requires a lot of awareness and faith: every time you hear a mental thought that is stopping you and slowing you down, you have to just push it to a corner of your mind so that the creative side can emerge. You must have faith that what that critical voice is saying is not true. You must have faith that the creative side is the one that is leading you toward the right path.
That really sounds difficult.
I think nothing illustrates that better than what Smith says on his blog: "To this day, when I hand a story or a novel to Kris, I believe it is crap. I have learned my critical judgment means nothing when it comes to my own work." Can you believe that after so much experience he still believes his novels are crap? Well, that is what the critical side of the brain does. It is its job. When it comes to the creative process, the critical side is not useful, though.


I put here some links to Dean Wesley Smith
Intro to Heinlein's rules


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