I've been reading Dean Wesley Smith's posts on Heinlein's Rules for writing, and I was wondering, since the rules really are pretty straightforward, just what is it about them that makes them so "amazingly hard" to follow? Anyone can write a story, finish it, and send it off to an editor. Not rewriting should be even easier: just don't do it. So as I've thought about it all (and by default), I think the hardness really comes down to Rule #5: "You must keep it on the market until sold."
Assume that a fledgling writer is determined to follow Heinlein's Rules to the letter. So continuously writing -- let's assume short stories for simplicity -- and these short stories are completed at a constant rate and immediately put on the market. Think of a simple compartmental model, with two compartments, Submissions and Publications, where the former is, as one might expect, the number of submissions the writer has out at a given time, and the latter is the total number of acceptances from those submissions. A new story moves into the submissions compartment at rate alpha (α), is accepted at rate sigma (σ), and is rejected and thus immediately resubmitted to another market at rate gamma (γ).
The impossibility occurs as a result of the generally low acceptance rates at most markets, even for established authors, which, if the writer is holding fast to Heinlein's other rules, leads to an ever increasing pool of stories to submit. Imagine a new writer, albeit a talented one, who writes and submits α = 1 new story each week and consistently achieves a 5% acceptance rate (σ = 0.05), leaving 95% with rejections to resubmit (γ = 0.95). This writer writes stories that are appropriate for any and all markets, and takes only 15 minute to make any formatting changes and compose a cover letter for each submission. Assume the writer splits his or her time 50/50 between writing and submitting, spending 10 hours on each per week, and that each market responds after an average of 10 weeks. At that rate, the writer would run out of time to submit new stories within 10 months (and only have one or two publications to show for it).
At this point, there are only three possibilities. One, the writer stops or slows writing new stories until enough previously written stories are sold to allow time for new stories. This violates Heinlein's Rule #1 and perhaps Rule #2. Two, the writer "retires" some stories that have received multiple rejections to make room for newer, better stories. This I believe to be the most common response in actuality, but, alas, it violates Rule #5. Three, and this is the only possible way to consistently keep up with the first four rules while also obeying the fifth, the writer must increase his or her acceptance rate. Seeing how it should be assumed the writer is already doing everything in his or her power to write the best story possible and submit it to the most appropriate market, this also appears to be by far the least likely option for a writer. Further considering that the acceptance rate would have to be 100% to keep the number of submissions from spiraling out of control, it is easy to see why Heinlein would consider this "amazingly hard."
Other choices of α, σ, and γ will lead to the same results. So while Heinlein's Rules are certainly worth aspiring to, and the longer writers can hold to them, the higher the number of publications they can expect, at some point the goal must by mathematical necessity collapse. Heinlein may have considered them hard, but to any writer with a lower than 100% acceptance rate, they are ultimately impossible.
So don't get too down on yourself when you're struggling to keep up your submissions: take a break, maybe consider putting that last rejected story in the trunk for a while, or just make sure your next story is unrejectable.
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