Completely agree. The fiction of mine I thought was poor has typically been the stuff that was a pain to write, that I fretted over, or thought too much about. Fortunately I found Heinlein's Rules - write, minor edit, publish (put to market and keep it there till it sells), repeat. Combined with SubStack that's what I've done. Two short stories or chapters of a novella a week for close to a year now.
Improvement comes from repetition. Sure, editing and critical feedback help but fiction writing isn't engineering. It's art. The feel of a thing is far more important than the technical aspects. Yes get your grammar and spelling right, yes use the correct words, but those things are quite malleable and to gain a unique 'voice' you're going to need to bend them a little.
I work on getting a story to 80% in terms of potential quality. The last 20% will take weeks of agonising but by then the idea will have grown mould and became difficult to work with. (This is different to novels and some short stories will feel timeless even to the writer where they could re-work them forever. This can be a dangerous path akin to cooking a meal for the instagram photo.)
Write lots, write different stories, write different genres, use different styles and you will improve without noticing.
May 18, 2023·edited May 18, 2023Liked by Frank Theodat
Funny how the timing works on these things. I polished off a short book of Bradbury's final interviews last week, and started on Ellison's biography just last night.
And then of all things, I read through this interview transcript with Lawrence Block and Robert Silverberg. They both mention that as beginning writers, i) they wrote a ton of books in a crazy short time frame -- 220 page novels in 5-6 days with zero revisions -- and ii) these were all sent out and published. They didn't spend months or years polishing that perfect draft. They wrote it and shipped it and got paid.
Even today, it doesn't sound like either one of them writes with much pre-planning or post-writing revision. It's funny that the more I read into this, the more authors, big name published authors, write this way. But we still keep hearing from the novices, agents, and crit-circle groupies that we "have to" outline and revise and get feedback before we think of publishing.
I've done this twice now--never managed 52 directly in a row, but it was still a very rewarding experience. It gets me out of my comfort zone--the very first story I wrote with this challenge was set in a WWI trench, which I never would have done before. I think the most liberating thing was putting them up without worrying too much about quality--as long as it had clarity, it was ready.
It's actually where I got the name for my Substack. At first, I used improv prompts from can-i-get-a.com for ideas, but after a while I ran dry, so I took some further inspiration from Ray Bradbury by using word association exercises. I like to start with a random kanji, get its translation, and go from there.
(When I started reading this post, I wondered if you were familiar with Dean Wesley Smith, and then, right there in the last paragraph...)
I feel like you need a mix. You need to finish stories and get them out there to improve. But sometimes you have to stop and puzzle out something really difficult, like, “how can I make these stories 10x more memorable?”
You might be interested to know that the id software people like john carmack and john Romero started off making a ton of games really fast too. Romero did one game per letter of the alphabet; and when they started working together, it was one game released per month to subscribers at the company they worked for. Later, the pace slowed down dramatically; but those were the early days. They talk about it somewhere from 2:30 to 3 hours into that lex Friedman podcast episode with carmack
I agree! I wrote and published 22 short stories and novellas under a pen name from April 2020 to April 2021. My writing improved immensely and by the time I published the last story of that year, two of my novellas became Amazon bestsellers and earned me over 4.7 thousand new readers/subscribers! The downside, however, is that I completely burned myself out from writing and am only just now starting to write again. The good news is that I am a way better storyteller because of that year of writing dedication and I also learned the writing process that works best for me! I also returned to voice acting and playing video games during my writing down time, which are joys I had been neglecting for years. So all in all, a fabulous experiment!
Now that I'm emerging from burnout, I want to ensure I don't go too hard like before. Writing so rapidly in the past taught me to JUST WRITE IT and don't think so hard. As storytellers, we know what makes a great story and we know how to execute. We've got this!
I needed to read this today. I've been staring at my notebook, trying to get a single story finished for months. I love thinking and working like a craftsman, but sometimes you just have to get stuff done. Thank you for sharing your point of view.
Hi Frank, this is certainly one of the great writing debates: quantity vs. quality. If I tie this back to the ideas of mastery and deliberate practice, I think there's something to be said for churning out a lot of work in a short period of time. However... without feedback or a critical eye at some point in the process (including revision and editing), will the writer improve? Or does that even matter as long as they get comfortable with churning out first drafts, knowing that revision and editing are always available? Great food for thought.
Completely agree. The fiction of mine I thought was poor has typically been the stuff that was a pain to write, that I fretted over, or thought too much about. Fortunately I found Heinlein's Rules - write, minor edit, publish (put to market and keep it there till it sells), repeat. Combined with SubStack that's what I've done. Two short stories or chapters of a novella a week for close to a year now.
Improvement comes from repetition. Sure, editing and critical feedback help but fiction writing isn't engineering. It's art. The feel of a thing is far more important than the technical aspects. Yes get your grammar and spelling right, yes use the correct words, but those things are quite malleable and to gain a unique 'voice' you're going to need to bend them a little.
I work on getting a story to 80% in terms of potential quality. The last 20% will take weeks of agonising but by then the idea will have grown mould and became difficult to work with. (This is different to novels and some short stories will feel timeless even to the writer where they could re-work them forever. This can be a dangerous path akin to cooking a meal for the instagram photo.)
Write lots, write different stories, write different genres, use different styles and you will improve without noticing.
Couldn't agree more Frank!
Funny how the timing works on these things. I polished off a short book of Bradbury's final interviews last week, and started on Ellison's biography just last night.
And then of all things, I read through this interview transcript with Lawrence Block and Robert Silverberg. They both mention that as beginning writers, i) they wrote a ton of books in a crazy short time frame -- 220 page novels in 5-6 days with zero revisions -- and ii) these were all sent out and published. They didn't spend months or years polishing that perfect draft. They wrote it and shipped it and got paid.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220903040334/https://www.mulhollandbooks.com/books/a-conversation-between-lawrence-block-and-robert-silverberg/
Even today, it doesn't sound like either one of them writes with much pre-planning or post-writing revision. It's funny that the more I read into this, the more authors, big name published authors, write this way. But we still keep hearing from the novices, agents, and crit-circle groupies that we "have to" outline and revise and get feedback before we think of publishing.
I've done this twice now--never managed 52 directly in a row, but it was still a very rewarding experience. It gets me out of my comfort zone--the very first story I wrote with this challenge was set in a WWI trench, which I never would have done before. I think the most liberating thing was putting them up without worrying too much about quality--as long as it had clarity, it was ready.
It's actually where I got the name for my Substack. At first, I used improv prompts from can-i-get-a.com for ideas, but after a while I ran dry, so I took some further inspiration from Ray Bradbury by using word association exercises. I like to start with a random kanji, get its translation, and go from there.
(When I started reading this post, I wondered if you were familiar with Dean Wesley Smith, and then, right there in the last paragraph...)
I feel like you need a mix. You need to finish stories and get them out there to improve. But sometimes you have to stop and puzzle out something really difficult, like, “how can I make these stories 10x more memorable?”
You might be interested to know that the id software people like john carmack and john Romero started off making a ton of games really fast too. Romero did one game per letter of the alphabet; and when they started working together, it was one game released per month to subscribers at the company they worked for. Later, the pace slowed down dramatically; but those were the early days. They talk about it somewhere from 2:30 to 3 hours into that lex Friedman podcast episode with carmack
Great post, Frank, and thanks for the (unnecessary) nod.
I agree! I wrote and published 22 short stories and novellas under a pen name from April 2020 to April 2021. My writing improved immensely and by the time I published the last story of that year, two of my novellas became Amazon bestsellers and earned me over 4.7 thousand new readers/subscribers! The downside, however, is that I completely burned myself out from writing and am only just now starting to write again. The good news is that I am a way better storyteller because of that year of writing dedication and I also learned the writing process that works best for me! I also returned to voice acting and playing video games during my writing down time, which are joys I had been neglecting for years. So all in all, a fabulous experiment!
Now that I'm emerging from burnout, I want to ensure I don't go too hard like before. Writing so rapidly in the past taught me to JUST WRITE IT and don't think so hard. As storytellers, we know what makes a great story and we know how to execute. We've got this!
I'm going to ask my local U3A creative writing group if we can rename ourselves "The Bradbury Challenge Circle".
I needed to read this today. I've been staring at my notebook, trying to get a single story finished for months. I love thinking and working like a craftsman, but sometimes you just have to get stuff done. Thank you for sharing your point of view.
Hi Frank, this is certainly one of the great writing debates: quantity vs. quality. If I tie this back to the ideas of mastery and deliberate practice, I think there's something to be said for churning out a lot of work in a short period of time. However... without feedback or a critical eye at some point in the process (including revision and editing), will the writer improve? Or does that even matter as long as they get comfortable with churning out first drafts, knowing that revision and editing are always available? Great food for thought.