1. You must read as much as possible so that you will learn what writing all about.
2. You must write as much as possible because you need the practice.
3. You must finish every story you begin.
4. You must rewrite.
5. You must put it on the market.
6. You must keep it on the market until sold.
7. Cultivate a very thick skin so that you will survive the disappointment and frustration you will undoubtedly have to cope with.

Here are a couple of quotes I also find helpful.

ISAAC ASIMOV: “Even if a new writer is copiously talented, talent is not enough. One also has to have technique and judgment, and such things come only with experience. Writing well takes time.”

ROBERT A. HEINLEIN: “The above rules have more to do with writing than anything else that could be said. But they are amazingly hard to follow--which is why there are so few professional writers and so many aspirants, and which is why I am not afraid to give away the racket!”

STEPHEN KING: “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no other way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut. If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time (or tools) to write. Simple as that. Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life. The real importance of reading is that it creates an ease and intimacy with the process of writing; one comes to the country of the writer with one’s papers and identification pretty much in order. Constant reading will pull you into a place (a mind-set, if you like the phrase) where you can write eagerly and without self-consciousness.”

JOHN D. MacDONALD (in his Introduction to King's Night Shift): "Stephen King always wanted to write and he writes. So he wrote Carrie and Salem's Lot and The Shinning, and the good short stories you can read in this book, and a stupendous number of other stories and books and fragments and poems and essays and other unclassifiable things, most of them too wretched to ever publish. Because that is the way [writing] is done."

There you have it. Follow their advise, and I would forget about finding a Forrester.

Good luck.

Augustine, I'm much in agreement with you on most of these points. However, I would disagree with you on a few of them:

- "You must rewrite": If your story needs to be written, by all means. But (my interpretation) OSC cautions against writing things to death, or going through and tweaking them until you lose all sense of the story and get lost in trying to make it sound pretty, or rewriting as a way of avoiding sending them out
- "You must finish every story you begin": By all means don't keep starting and never finish, but sometimes you get to a certain point and you say to yourself either "Aha, this story is no good, and I see why now." or "You know what? I'm not really interested in this story any more." If you're not interested in the story when you write it, how can you expect the reader to be?
- About putting it on the market and keeping it there until sold: OSC (and I keep referring to him because first, I agree with him, and second, it lends some weight to what I'm saying) talks about there being a point when you've sent the story to all the appropriate markets and it's time for The Drawer. Of course you have other stories going out all the time, though, so you don't worry much about it. Then some day down the line you've published a few stories and someone says, "Hey, I'm doing an anthology. Got anything for me?" Then you take the story out, dust it off, and with your improved credentials, sell it. I have one that has a very limited market that came back from it's second rejection today. It went in the Drawer, but I've got four more out there at markets and I'm working on others, so the work goes on.

I'm very much in agreement with the lots of writing and lots of reading ideas. OSC suggests that everybody has a certain amount of lousy writing in them, and the more you write, the faster you get it out and into the good stuff.

I really recommend both of the OSC books, and Stephen King's book on writing, _On Writing_.

About mentors: Sometimes you can be lucky enough to go to a class with a writer who is really worth hearing. OSC gave one of these this past summer, and I dragged my butt down to North Carolina and came out of it all jazzed up to write and with a MUCH clearer idea of what I'm doing. However, I believe OSC is really unusual in that he is not only a really effective writer, but also passionate about (and capable about) teaching other people. I don't entirely understand it, but I'm grateful for it.

Clarion and the Writers of the Future workshops are ones I've also heard highly recommended. If OSC does Uncle Orson's Writing Camp and Literary Boot Camp again next year, I recommend them in the highest possible terms to anyone who is willing to work very hard to get their writing where they want it.

Other than that, I'm solidly in Augustine's camp: Unless your mentor is a published writer whose work you really enjoy and a good teacher to boot, there's a good chance you'll just get bogged down in the mentor's idea of what good writing is supposed to be about.

Thanks for you comments. I agree with most of them. Re-writing should make the story better, not worse; not every story is not going to get finished; and, it's probably a waste of time and money to send a SF story to a literary journal. The problem is that I wanted to create a concise list. Seven axioms, not seven chapters.

The only point I would disagree with is that you should stop a story because you're no longer interested in it. I think what separates a professional writer from an amateur is that the profession works when he or she isn't interested in working.

In my own experience, I was writing a simple S+S quest story that I was beginning to loose interest in. But I forced myself to finish it. And you know what, the ending took a twist I hadn't anticipated. The ending injected juice into the story, and I went back re-worked the story and sent it out yesterday. That's why you finish every story--you never know what's going to happen until you write it.

I can only think of one reason to stop a story: because the story's taking a direction that you don't want to follow. For example, let's say a person thinks that horror stories are morally disgusting. He or she begins a story thinking it will be fantasy, but it takes wild turn and ends up becoming horror. That writer should stop writing and move on to something else, not because the story's bad (it may be their best to date), but because the story goes against what they believe.

[This message has been edited by Augustine (edited October 20, 2001).]