Dear all,

I found the following tips in the 1988 edition of The Writer's Handbook and
thought I share it with you.

1.  Be talented.

     This, of course, is the killer.  What is talent?  I can hear someone
shouting, and here we are, ready to get into a discussion right up there with
"What is the meaning of life?" for weighty pronouncements and total
uselessness.  For the purposes of the beginning writer, talent may be as well
defined as eventual success -- publication and money.  If you wrote something
for which oneone 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.
     Now some of you are really hollering.  Some of you are calling me one
crass money-fixated creep.  And some of you are calling me bad names.  Are
you calling Harold Robbins talented? someone in one of the Great English
Departments of America is screeching.  V.C. Andrews?  Theodore Dreiser?  Or
what are you, you dyslexic moron?
     Nonsense.  Worse than nonsense, off the subject.  We're not talking
about good or bad here.  I'm interested in telling you how to get your stuff
published, not in critical judgments of who's good or bad.  As a rule the
critical judgments come after the check's been spent anyway.  I have my own
opinions, but most times I keep them to myself.  People who are published
steadily and are paid for what they are writing may be either saints or
trollops, but they are clearly reaching a great many someones who want what
they have.  Ergo, they are communicating.  Ergo, they are talented.  The
biggest part of writing successfully is being talented, and in the context of
marketing, the only bad writer is one who doesn't get paid.  If you're not
talented, you won't succeed.  And if you're not succeeding, you should know
when to quit.
     When is that?  I don't know.  It's different for each writer.  Not after
six rejection slips, certainly, nor after sixty.  But after six hundred?
Maybe.  After six thousand?  My friend, after six thousand pinks, it's time
you tried painting or possibly computer programming.
     Further, almost every aspiring writer knows when he is getting warmer --
you start getting little jotted notes on your rejection slips, or personal
letters...maybe a commiserating phone call.  It's lonely out there in the
cold, but there are encouraging voices...unless there is nothing in your
words which warrants encouragement.  I think you owe it to yourself to skip
as much of the self-illusion as possible.  If your eyes are open, you'll know
which way to go...or when to turn back.

2.  Be neat.

     Type.  Double-space.  Use a nice heavy white paper, never that erasable
onion-skin stuff.  If you've marked up your manuscript a lot, do another
draft.

3.  Be self-critical.

     If you haven't marked up your manuscript a lot, you did a lazy job.
Only God gets things right the first time.  Don't be a slob.

4.  Remove every extraneous word.

     You want to get up on a soapbox and preach?  Fine.  get one and try your
local park.  You want to write for money?  Get to the point.  And if you
remove all the excess garbage and discover you can't find the point, tear up
what you wrote and start all over again...or try something new.

5.  Never look at a reference book while doing a first draft.

     You want to write a story?  Fine.  Put away your dictionary, your
encyclopedias, your World Almanac, and your thesaurus.  Better yet, throw
your thesaurus into the wastebasket.  The only things creepier than a
thesaurus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the
assigned novels buy around exam time.  Any word you have to hunt for in a
thesaurus is the wrong word.  There are no exceptions to this rule.  You
think you might have misspelled a word?  O.K., so here is your choice:
either look it up in the dictionary, thereby making sure you have it right --
and breaking your train of thought and the writer's trance in the bargain --
or just spell it phonetically and correct it later.  Why not?  Did you think
it was going to go somewhere?  And if you need to know the largest city in
Brazil and you find you don't have it in your head, why not write in Miami,
or Cleveland?  You can check it...but later.  When you sit down to write,
write.  Don't do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if
it absolutely cannot be put off.

6.  Know the markets.

     Only a dimwit would send a story about giant vampire bats surrounding a
high school to McCall's.  Only a dimwit would send a tender story about a
mother and daughter making up their differences on Christmas Eve to
Playboy....but people do it all the time.  I'm not exaggerating; I have seen
such stories in the slush piles of the actual magazines.  If you write a good
story, why send it out in an ignorant fashion?  Would you send your kid out
in a snowstorm dressed in Bermuda shorts and a tank top?  If you like science
fiction, read the magazines.  If you want to write confessions stories, read
the magazines.  And so on.  It isn't just a matter of knowing what's right
for the present story; you can begin to catch on, after awhile, to overall
rhythms, editorial likes and dislikes, a magazine's entire slant.  Sometimes
your reading can influence the next story, and create a sale.

7.  Write to entertain.

     Does this mean you can't write "serious fiction"?  It does not.
Somewhere along the line pernicious critics have invested the American
reading and writing public with the idea that entertaining fiction and
serious ideas do not overlap.  This would have surprised Charles Dickens, not
to mention Jane Austen, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Bernard Malamud,
and hundreds of others.  But your serious ideas must always serve your story,
not the other way around.  I repeat: if you want to preach, get a soapbox.

8.  Ask yourself frequently, "Am I having fun?"

     The answer needn't always be yes.  But if it's always no, it's time for
a new project or a new career.

9.  How to evaluate criticism.

     Show your piece to a number of people -- ten, let us say.  Listen
carefully to what they tell you.  Smile and nod a lot.  Then review what was
said very carefully.  If your critics are all telling you the same thing
about some facet of your story -- a plot twist that doesn't work, a character
who rings false, stilted narrative, or half a dozen other possibilities --
change that facet.  It doesn't matter if you really liked that twist or that
character; if a lot of people are telling you something is wrong with your
piece, it is.  If seven or eight of them are hitting on that same thing, I'd
still suggest changing it.  But if everyone -- or even most everyone -- is
criticizing something different, you can safely disregard what all of them
say.

10.  An agent?  Forget it.  For now.

     Agents get 10% of monies earned by their clients.  10% of nothing is
nothing.  Agents also have to pay the rent.  Beginning writers do not
contribute to that or any other necessity of life.  Flog your stories around
yourself.  If you've done a novel, send around query letters to publishers,
one by one, and follow up with sample chapters and/or the manuscript
complete.  and remember Stephen King's First Rule of Writer's and Agents,
learned by bitter personal experience; you don't need one until you're making
enough for someone to steal....and if you're making that much, you'll be able
to take your pick of good agents.

12.  If it's bad, kill it.

     When it comes to people, mercy killing is against the law.  When it
comes to fiction, it is the law.