Paul di Filippo: an exception

[anothersteve]

Hi Steve! (And everybody else!)

I'm starting the story-a-week challenge. I didn't think I could do it (it used to take me weeks or months to write a story), but I'm doing it! not only that, I seem to be improving. Rapidly!

You said, write a story a week, send them out, and at the end of the year you'll be published. You said (this is from memory), that you've never seen it fail.

Well, I just picked up a copy of the recent Paul di FIlippo collection, "The Emperor of Gondwanaland." In the intro to one of the stories he writes about how, "emboldened by Ray Bradbury's exhortation," he tried just that:


During the course of the year, I wrote nearly fifty stories, lovingly assigning a number to each one. I amassed over a quarter of a million words of fiction. I didn't sell a single story.



He does claim to have learned something from following Bradbury's advice, and of course he's written a lot of nifty stuff since then, but he does seem to make an exception to your "never."

I thought you'd like to know.

[Steven Barnes]

I didn't mean to imply that the method has never failed within fifty tries (although I don't personally know of a case where it did.) I meant the method itself: write a story a week, or every other week, put them in the mail, keep them in the mail until they sell, don't re-write except to editorial request. This is a combination of advice from Bradbury and Heinlein. Personally, I gave myself 100 stories until I'd let myself get frustrated, and started publishing at about 24. The reason you can't put a particular number on it is that you have to take the initial skill of the writer into account. For the average writer, I think that a year is "about" right, but all I've seen that I can guarantee is that the path itself is sound. How many steps it takes to get you publish can't be precisely predicted. and, of course, we're assuming that you are learning and growing the entire time of course!

Steve