Michael Swanwick's Ten Rules For New Writers

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Michael Swanwick's Ten Rules for New Writers

1. Read everything. Read voraciously. Read so much that people who love you are concerned.

2. Write badly. Every day. Write prose so bad that writers whose work you loathe would spit on it. Then repeat. Repeat again. Repeat until you're sick of it. Then repeat.

3. Finish a story. You'll know it's done when every attempt to improve it makes it worse. You'll hate it. Send it out anyway.

4. Be rejected. Despise the editor as an idiot. Never entertain the notion that the editor might be right. The editor is an idiot.

5. Have your story accepted. Celebrate. Drink to excess. Do things you didn't intend. Use a condom.

6. Wait. You will be horrified to discover how long it can take for a work to see print. Go to the bookstore or the Web, depending, every day to see if it's out yet.

7. Exult. Your story/novel has been published at last. Now you can breathe.

8. Repeat all previous steps over and over. Repeat, repeat, repeat, for the rest of your life.

9. Die.

10. Spend eternity in Writers' Heaven, telling lies about how successful you were.

11/30/20

Above: Photo copyright 2023 by Marianne C. Porter. The text of Michael Swanwick's Ten Rules for Unpublished Writers is not copyrighted. Use it as you will. Have fun.

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