I’ve heard a lot of different opinions on the subject of revision over the years. The one that has stuck with me was the opinion of, I think it was Heinlein. This author wrote one draft, dropped it in the mail, and never looked back. I don’t know what his reasons for this were, but I know what a modern writer’s reasons would be, especially when it comes to short fiction.
It’s all about time management and cost/benefit analysis. Because stories are purchased not based on the time it took to write them but how many words they contain, the actual hourly wage you make varies depending on how much time you spend on a story. And the more time you spend, the less money you’re making.
For example, I generally write first drafts at a speed of 1000–2000 words an hour. At a moderately decent payrate of 5 cents a word, that puts me at $50 an hour, if I were to sell my first draft. That’s a very nice hourly wage. Each draft you do, and each hour you spend reworking your draft, is reducing your potential hourly income. Spend as much time revising as you did writing the story, and now you’ve cut your hourly in half. Spend three times as long revising the story as you did writing it and now we’re talking working at McDonalds wages. I guess it’s better than digging ditches.
However, I personally am not a writer who can churn out a sellable first draft. I find the story in revision, much like Pixar does. Partly this is because I often start writing a story before the idea has fully fermented. Partly this is because I write so fast when I am on the first draft that I miss good opportunities. It’s only in subsequent drafts that I can tweak the machinery of story into a form that actually runs.
When I first started out writing, I was with Heinlein all the way. One draft, and be done with it. And I sold a couple. I also never sold dozens. When you think about it, was that really making me any more money as a writer? Almost certainly not. It’s probably a wash, if I sat down to figure it out.
These days, I not only redraft and redraft, I also sit on stories for months or years. Yesterday, I broke out a story that I wrote almost 2 years ago and began revising. It’s probably now on draft 5 or 6. And it’s most likely still not there.
These days, I’m much more concerned with making money from my writing than I was before. That’s because I have no regular source of income. So I’m looking at the Heinlein way again. It’s wishful thinking though. I’m not a first draft writer, and that’s okay. Even if my hourly wage works out to be something akin to minimum wage, it’s still better work than just about any job that actually pays minimum wage. Unless that job has health insurance.
What’s your approach to revising? What’s the longest you’ve ever tinkered with a piece before sending it out?
Interesting points, there. My input would be that it’s a different market to the one of Heinlein’s day in many ways, and that the more you write the less you may find you need to revise; if the process is anything like the way I learn things as I do them more, you’ll internalise a lot of the revision process into the development and first draft.
Even so, good food for thought, especially for muggins here who has yet to complete a short story worth sending anywhere… :)
“Authorwerx,” which appeared on Escape Pod, went through too many revisions for me to count. I wrote it, revised it, took it to a workshop, revised it, sent it off to F&SF, got a revision request and revised it, got rejected by F&SF, revised it, revised it again, sent it off to Amazing Stories (during a brief window when there *was* an Amazing Stories), sold it. Stopped revising it. If I broke it down to an hourly wage, I probably owe somebody some money.
I think Jonathan Coulton has a good analogy for the way his music career works that applies to short fiction. He doesn’t track his income by looking at sales for any particular song. Instead, he sees music as a big cow. Music goes in its mouth, money comes out its ass. But what happens inside remains something of a mystery. Somebody might hear a song of his for free and then buy a different song, or a t-shirt, or his concert DVD, or a ticket to a show. It’s all about having a big conglomerated thing called Music that people will buy in different quantities, formats, and in different amounts.
Like, I had that flash piece, “Taco,” run on Escape Pod last week. I wrote it and posted it on my blog for free, then Steve Eley bought it, along with five other flash pieces, at a rate of $30 for all six pieces. (This was way back in 2005 before Steve raised his rates.) But you guys posted it right when I had a novel come out. So, maybe someone heard the story and went and bought the book. Wil Wheaton linked to the story on his blog and told people about my novel. Maybe some of those people went and bought the book.
In any case, I earned way, way less than minimum wage for “Taco,” but now it’s there inside the cow, maybe doing mysterious but beneficial things for me.
Good points, Greg.
I want a cow now.
Probably it’s best to not look at ficton as the money maker. There are other types of writing that reliably give good ROI. Marketing copy, for instance, and definitely non-fiction. Especially the former, which is what I’d be doing on the side if it weren’t for the non-compete of my job.
Greg has a really great point, that you have to look at the macro scale when you’re freelancing in the arts. There are so many connections that get made, but can’t be tracked.
I’ve struggled with this myself. From an economic perspective, blogging is a waste of time. I earn about $10/month from ads, and spend 30–40 hours a month writing and maintaining it.
However, I’ve gotten several writing gigs based on the strength of my blog posts, and made hundreds of contacts over the years. How to quantify that with a dollar value? It’s impossible. But it’s definitely a significant number.
When writing, I try to revise to the 85th or 90th percentile. I revise until it’s better than “good enough,” but not quite to “really outstanding.” I find that’s the point of diminishing returns, for the time/earnings equation.
Maybe I’m too much of a purist but I think that writing the story until it’s the best it can be is a good way to go. Then again, I don’t write for a living, it’s in addition to a regular full time job that pays all the bills (and supplies health care, to your point above.)
Also, when I read Erika’s remarks, I’m not surprised to find that in 2005 six pieces of flash fiction earned a total of $30. I don’t think that short story writing is something that generates a lot of cash.
If anything, it’s closer to what Greg said above about the cow. You write short stories and get them published and it becomes part of the Literature collective. It helps you build your name and reputation. By being published it shows that there are editors out there that believe in your work, which can influence publishers of novels — should you be interested in publishing a novel.
So to conclude, I think stories should be the best they can be because they represent you. Making $50 or $100 bucks on a story isn’t worth it if it creates an impression of you as an author that isn’t accurate, in terms of your “real” abilities.
This post is just like an L. Ron Hubbard essay I read in one of the WOTF volumes, where he decided which genre to focus on. If I remember right, we lost.
The problem, I think, is looking to make money from short fiction, but I understand the need for money. If you do the analysis right, you should be writing non-fiction articles for magazines that pay more like $1 a word.
Fiction, especially short fiction, should be done for the art (Hemingway did over 200 drafts of Old Man and the Sea, and not for the money) and to promote things that make more money (e.g. novels, future novels). Asking how to make money with short fiction is accepting a bad premise, I think.
L. Ron reached that conclusion, too, a few years after his essay. He figured out that writing religious doctrine paid better than all the magazines combined, and then some.
On Heinlein:
For a long time I thought I’d read Heinlein’s rule three wrong.
“3) You must refrain from rewriting except to editorial order.“
’Sure,’ I thought, ‘but you need to take several passes over the thing before sending it out, surely? Doesn’t this mean not rewriting once it attains a certain level of quality?’
So when you posted this, I tried to find the original essay. I failed, but I did find this entry from Darrell Schweitzer:
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/revision.htm
It’s a great essay — please check it out — and it contains this quote from Heinlein:
“This is very difficult for a great many beginners to believe. A myth has grown up that writing, in order to be publishable, must be rewritten at least twice. Not true. It’s utterly false. The way to write efficiently is the way to do any other job whatsoever. Do it right the first time. This myth is based on the assumption that you’re smarter today than you were yesterday. But you’re not. Oh you may have learned something today that you use the rest of your life, but you’re no smarter. Consider a man who makes custom-made furniture. If he thinks of a new design for a chair, he doesn’t tear up the chair he made yesterday. He puts that on the display floor and tries to sell it, and he makes a new chair by the new design that he thought of. This is the no-rewriting rule.”
This is pretty much the same advice as Norman Mailer gives in his book on writing, where he says writing is easy as long as you’re a genius, so just be a genius (be Norman Mailer) and you’re OK. This isn’t advice, it’s just showing you what an ass the author is. (Yes, I just called Norman Mailer an ass. Yes, he’s one of my major influences. I think he’d be OK with this)
If you’re just going to write one draft and send it out, you’ll get rejected — if you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky, some editor will publish it. Every piece of fiction you release is another point in the argument ‘why you should read my stuff’. If someone reads a first-draft wonder, decides it’s crap and never comes back, you’ve lost them forever. Theoretically, the more you write, the stronger your first drafts will become, although that’s not been true for me — the number of drafts I require before I’m satisfied with the result depends on how ambitious my goals are for that story. I’ve sold exactly one story on second draft — most go to about eight before I can even bear to look at them.
Again, quoting from Schweitzer’s essay:
“But Heinlein also quipped, in his 1947 essay: ‘you will somewhere find some editor somewhere, sometime, so unwary or so desperate for copy as to buy the worst old dog you, I, or anybody else can throw at him.’”
Heinlein thought his time was more valuable than the time of all those editors and readers consuming his ‘old dogs’.
Heinlein was a dick.
On making short fiction pay:
Ain’t gonna happen.
At least, if you consider writing short fiction as an activity separate from writing novels, blogging, podcasting and everything else you do. Writing short fiction alone just isn’t going to pay the bills. But every time you write a great story and it’s published, it increases the overall value of your authorial portfolio. Scalzi (and Doctorow) built audiences from blogging first and I think you could do that easily.
But there’s another option — selling stories directly to paying customers. Bruce Holland Rogers does this for short stories and I’d be interested in knowing how well it works.
Good points from Greg and Grant.
I’ve been feeding my cow grass all this time. No wonder all that comes out of its ass is shit. I think Heinlein fed his cow a lot of writing and a lot of grass, because he wound up with a lot of money and a lot of shit.
One has to make one’s own life. In the end one has only one’s self to answer to. I have to go for quality. I may end up with a lot of shitty stories, but I’m shooting for quality.
Of course, here’s an option: Write loads of one draft stories, but only send out the good ones.
I have spent years on some stories, but I’m an ADD freak. If I do any writing tonight, it will probably consist of sprinkling some words over a half dozen stories. When I’m not worked up about something and have no exciting ideas, that’s what I do because nothing holds my interest. Just to get some words down and push a few stories a tiny bit closer to completion.
If I write a piece of flash fiction and I think it has potential, I usually just write a second draft and then send it out.
I have this little glimmer of faith in the ideal of making a living as a short story writer. I don’t think I’ll ever do it, but I think someone else could. It just requires an enormous amount of time and work. The big literary mags will throw down five grand on a good story. I have my faith.
Here’s something else I wanted to say and since I can’t do a rewrite of my first post, I’ll have to settle for an addendum.
There are many times that I don’t even know what my story might be about until after my first draft. I don’t mean the plot, I mean the deeper, human stuff, the chord-striking stuff. The first rewrite I do is about getting all of that first draft in line with what I discovered the story is really about.
I hate revising but my best stories have had lots of revisions.
A couple of years ago I took the “Jay Lake” approach and wrote a story every week for a year. The result was interesting, lots of stories, many of them underdeveloped, some of them good, some of them bad, many of them repetitive. Did any of them need revising? Yes, probably all of them except the flash stories. I’m still working through many of them.
Since then I decided to try and focus on quality, and I’m not sure its worked! So maybe I should go back to blasting out the stories first draft style?
Don’t know. The more I write the harder it seems to get.
Greg makes some great points. When we look at only the strict monetary value of anything connected to writing, we often miss the point. Well, first of all, the reason to write fiction in the first place, which should be for the pleasure and art of it most or all of the time. But also because of those hidden benefits and those hidden opportunities. This year, I sold a story to Conjunctions, a major literary magazine. They only paid $125 for a 4,000-word story. But it put me in front of a different readership, and I’m still reaping benefits from that. And Conjunctions as a pub credit will help open the door to other opportunities as well. In addition to the stuff that falls into your lap, I see it as *consciously* thinking about the subsidiary benefits of where and how you sell a story, and trying, like a chess player, to extrapolate several moves ahead.
I personally don’t believe in the story a week thing. It’s a good way to turn out competent but not great fiction, and very few writers get away with it to any degree.
Ultimately, we’re on this what, what? Maybe 75 or 80 years. Of that time, maybe 40 years is prime writing time in terms of energy and desire. After that point, we’re all dust anyway. So, why not make it count as much as possible.
Which I guess is another way of saying I always think of income from short stories as a kind of bonus–something unexpected. I never figure it into my budget.
JeffV
Er, “on this planet,” that should read.
Huh.
The world has changed since Heinlein sold unrevised stuff. And I doubt that his apocryphal chairmaker would have tried to sell something that hadn’t been sanded, stained, and varnished. I blush at the idea of writing a story and assuming it would be good enough to send it straight to JJA without revision, much less to Van Gelder. Crazy talk.
I also think that the reality is that nobody makes a living on short fiction. At Clarion we were told that someone — I think it was Swanwick — decided to go for a year making a living only with short fiction. He ended up clearing around ten thousand dollars, if I recall correctly. Hard to call 800 bucks a month a living, and that was a Name.
So while I like the cow image, it seems to me that short fiction is done for love / reputation / self-marketing. And that it is revised before it is sent out…
I think the story a week deadline was a great way to jolt me out of a rut of not finishing anything, and to make me believe that I would always be able to find a new idea to write about. Previous to that I’d written a story I loved and then got hung up trying to match it.
Ultimately I’m always trying to write the best story I can, it just I don’t know how to do that yet!
You don’t necessarily sell a story just once, either. The life cycle for one of my stories generally involves the first sale, some number of reprints from zero to a lot (to foreign markets, reprint anthologies, whatever), often a sale to a podcast magazine, and eventual appearance in a collection; I get paid for every one of those steps.
Dean Wesley Smith told another writer (who was sitting next to me, so he may have been addressing both of us) the way to win WotF was to wait until 24 hours before the deadline, write a story, spell check it, and toss it in the mail.
I think the general idea is to get to the 1-million-word mark. Submitting during this period is up to the author, and for some success comes early. For others (like my, sadly) success is delayed until I write through my “garbage period.”
This has been a really interesting discussion! To address your original economic perspective, what I’m seeing in the comments is that short fiction serves the purpose of a loss leader. Just like the $10.00 dvds for sale at Best Buy, the purpose of short fiction is to entice people to support your bigger, more profitable forms of writing.
I think this is also what the cow analogy was getting at. Albeit in a looser, more liberal arts fashion. (I say that with love, having a liberal arts degree myself.)