In July 2013, I served as the “editor-in-residence” for the Codex Writing Group, which meant basically I was asking a month-long AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) interview. With Codex’s permission, I’m re-posting the Q&As here on my blog. The questions were all provided by members of Codex.

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How useful do you think Heinlein’s Rules are for writers?

Well, rules 1 and 2 seem pretty on point and obvious. Yes, you have to write. Yes, you have to finish what you write. Obviously! I think the other three are a little more questionable.

Rule 3: I mean, hey, maybe if you’re Robert Heinlein and you churn out sterling first drafts, that’s great–you’re brilliant and are sure to be a success and a future grandmaster. But most people need to revise, and it seems pretty ridiculous to suggest otherwise. Robert J. Sawyer’s slight revision to that rule–“Don’t tinker with your story endlessly”–is much more on point, and may have been what Heinlein meant, but, I mean, come on, dude–PHRASING. But getting to your other question–sure: how much a writer needs to revise will depend where they are in their career, and what kind of writer they are. Some writers produce very good first drafts; other writers produce gibberish first drafts that can only be made into stories after careful pruning and cultivating.

Rule 4: You MUST put your story to market? Well, yes, if you want to sell it, but maybe you wrote a terrible story. If you have reason to believe you wrote a terrible story–say your writer’s group is telling you so–you don’t necessarily want to put that to market. I mean, as I said elsewhere in this thread, editors aren’t going to give up on a writer because they submitted a bunch of bad stories (or I won’t anyway), but you basically get one shot to submit each story to a market, so if you burn up your chance to submit your story to Asimov’s when it was in some terrible proto-stage of its development, then boom–your chance to send that story to Asimov’s is gone forever. (Well, probably.) But see what I mean?

Rule 5: You must keep your story on the market until it is sold. Well, I don’t necessarily agree with that either. Some stories should be trunked, plain and simple; because the worst thing in the world is not that your trunk-worthy story gets rejected by every editor in the field–it’s that your trunk-worthy story GETS PUBLISHED, and there’s a non-zero chance that will happen if you keep it on the market forever.

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