by Isaac Asimov
First, let me make it clear what I mean by “writers.” I don’t want to confine the word only to those who are successful, who have published bestselling books, or who crank out reams of published material every year (if not every day), or who make a lavish living out of their pens, typewriters, or word processors, or who have gained fame and adulation.
I also mean those writers who just sell an occasional item, who make only a bit of pin money to eke out incomes earned mainly in other fashions, whose names are not household words, and who are not recognized in the street.
In fact, let me go farther and say I even mean those writers who never sell anything, who are writers only in the sense that they work doggedly at it, sending out story after story, and living in a hope that is not yet fulfilled.
We can’t dismiss this last classification as “failures” and not “real” writers. For one thing, they are not necessarily failures forever. Almost every writer, before he becomes a success, even a runaway supernova success, goes through an apprentice period when he’s a “failure.”
Secondly, even if a writer is destined always to be a failure, and even if he is never going to sell, he remains a human being for whom all the difficulties and frustration of a writer’s life exist and, in fact, exist without the palliation of even an occasional and minor triumph.
If we go to the other extreme and consider the writer whose every product is an apparently sure sale, we find that the difficulties and frustrations have not disappeared. For one thing, no number of triumphs, no amount of approval, seem to have any carrying power at the crucial moment.
When even the most successful writer sits down before a blank piece of paper, he is bound to feel that he is starting from scratch and, indeed, that the Damoclean sword of rejection hangs over him. (By the way, when I say “he” and “him,” I mean to add “she” and “her” every time.)
If I may use myself as an example, I always wince a little when anyone, however sincerely and honestly, assumes that I am never rejected. I admit that I am rarely rejected, but between “rarely” and “never” is a vast gulf. Even though I no longer work on spec and write only when a particular item is requested, I still run the risk. The year doesn’t pass without at least one failure. It was only a couple of months ago that Esquire ordered a specific article from me. I duly delivered it; and they, just as duly, handed it back.
That is the possibility all of us live with. We sit there alone, pounding out the words, with our heart pounding in time. Each sentence brings with it a sickening sensation of not being right. Each page keeps us wondering if we are moving in the wrong direction.
Even if, for some reason, we feel we are getting it right and that the whole thing is singing with operatic clarity, we are going to come back to it the next day and reread it and hear only a duck’s quacking.
It’s torture for everyone of us.
Then comes the matter of rewriting and polishing; of removing obvious flaws (at least, they seem obvious, but are they really?) and replacing them with improvements (or are we just making things worse?). There’s simply no way of telling if the story is being made better or is just being pushed deeper into the muck until the time finally comes when we either tear it up as hopeless, or risk the humiliation of rejection by sending it off to an editor.
Once the story is sent off, no amount of steeling one’s self, no amount of telling one’s self over and over that it is sure to be rejected, can prevent one from harboring that one wan little spark of hope. Maybe-Maybe
The period of waiting is refined torture in itself. Is the editor simply not getting round to it, or has he read it and is he suspended in uncertainty? Is he going to read it again and maybe decide to use it, or has it been lost, or has it been tossed aside to be mailed back at some convenient time and been forgotten?
How long do you wait before you write a query letter? And if you do write a letter, is it subservient enough? Sycophantic enough? Groveling enough? After all, you don’t want to offend him. He might be just on the point of accepting; and if an offensive letter from you comes along, he may snarl and rip your manuscript in two, sending you the halves.
And when the day comes that the manila envelope appears in the mail, all your mumbling to yourself that it is sure to come will not avail you. The sun will go into eclipse.
It’s been over forty years since I’ve gone through all this in its full hellishness, but I remember it with undiminished clarity.
And then even if you make a sale, you have to withstand the editor’s suggestions which, at the very least, mean you have to turn back to the manuscript, work again, add or change or subtract material, and perhaps produce a finished product that will be so much worse than what had gone before that you lose the sale you thought you had made. At the worst, the changes requested are so misbegotten from your standpoint that they ruin the whole story in your eyes; and yet you may be in a position where you dare not refuse, so that you must maim your brainchild rather than see it die. (Or ought you to take back the story haughtily and try another editor? And will the first editor then blacklist you?)
Even after the item is sold and paid for and published, the triumph is rarely unalloyed. The number of miseries that might still take place are countless. A book can be produced in a slipshod manner or it can have a repulsive book jacket, or include blurbs that give away the plot or clearly indicate that the blurb writer didn’t follow the plot.
A book can be nonpromoted, treated with indifference by the publisher and therefore found in no bookstores, and sell no more than a few hundred copies. Even if it begins to sell well, that can be aborted when it is reviewed unsympathetically or even viciously by someone with no particular talent or qualifications in criticism.
If you sell a story to a magazine you may feel it is incompetently illustrated, or dislike the blurb, or worry about misprints. You are even liable to face the unsympathetic comments of individual readers who will wax merry, sardonic, or contemptuous at your expense-and what are their qualifications for doing so?
You will bleed as a result. I never met a writer who didn’t bleed at the slightest unfavorable comment, and no number of favorable or even ecstatic remarks will serve as a styptic pencil.
In fact, even total success has its discomforts and inconveniences. There are, for instance:
People who send you books to autograph and return, but don’t bother sending postage or return envelopes, reducing you to impounding their books or (if you can’t bring yourself to do that) getting envelopes, making the package, expending stamps, and possibly even going to the post office.
People who send you manuscripts to read and criticize (Nothing much, just a page-by-page analysis, and if you think it’s all right, would you get it published with a generous advance, please? Thank you.).
People who dash off two dozen questions, starting with a simple one like: What in your opinion is the function of science fiction and in what ways does it contribute to the welfare of the world, illustrating your thesis with citations from the classic works of various authors. (Please use additional pages, if necessary.)
People who send you a form letter, with your name filled in (misspelled), asking for an autographed photograph, and with no envelope or postage supplied.
Teachers who flog a class of thirty into each sending you a letter telling you how they liked a story of yours, and sending you a sweet letter of her own asking you to send a nice answer to each one of the little dears.
And so on
Well, then, why write?
A seventeenth-century German chemist, Johann Joachim Becher, once wrote: “The chemists are a strange class of mortals, impelled by an almost insane impulse to seek their pleasure among smoke and vapor, soot and flame, poi sins and poverty; yet among all these evils I seem to live so sweetly, that may I die if I would change places with the Persian King.”
Well, what goes for chemistry, goes for writing. I know all the miseries, but somewhere among them is happiness. I can’t easily explai
n where it is or what it consists of, but it is there. I know the happiness and I experience it, and I will not stop writing while I live-and may I die if I would change places with the President of the United States.
Revisions
When it comes to writing, I am a “primitive.” I had had no instruction when I began to write, or even by the time I had begun to publish. I took no courses. I read no books on the subject.
This was not bravado on my part, or any sense of arrogance. I just didn’t know that there were courses or books on the subject. In all innocence, I just thought you sat down and wrote. Naturally, I have picked up a great deal about writing in the days since I began; but in certain important respects, my early habits imprinted me and I find I can’t change.
Some of these imprinted habits are trivial. For instance, I cannot leave a decent margin. Editors have tried begging and they have tried ordering, and my only response is a firm “Never! “
When I was a kid, you see, getting typewriting paper was a hard thing to do for it required m-o-n-e-y, of which I had none. Therefore what I had, I saved-single-spaced, both sides, and typing to the very edge of the page, all four edges. Well, I learned that one could not submit a manuscript unless it was double-spaced on one side of the page only; and I was forced, unwillingly, to adopt that wasteful procedure. I also learned about margins and established them-but not wide enough. Nor could I ever make them wide enough. My sense of economy had gone as far as it would go and it would go no farther.
More important was the fact that I had never learned about revisions. My routine was (and still is) to write a story in first draft as fast as I can. Then I go over it, and correct errors in spelling, grammar, and word order. Then I prepare my second draft, making minor changes as I go and as they occur to me. My second draft is my final draft. No more changes except under direct editorial order and then with rebellion in my heart.
I didn’t know there was anything wrong with this. I thought it was the way you were supposed to write. In fact when Bob Heinlein and I were working together at the Navy Yard in Philadelphia during World War II, Bob asked me how I went about writing a story and I told him. He said, “You type it twice?
Why don’t you type it correctly the first time?”
I felt bitterly ashamed; and the very next story I wrote, I tried my level best to get it right the first time. I failed. No matter how carefully I wrote, there were always things that had to be changed. I decided I just wasn’t as good as Heinlein.
But then, in 1950, I attended the Breadloaf Writers’ conference at the invitation of Fletcher Pratt.
There I listened in astonishment to some of the things said by the lecturers. “The secret of writing,” said one of them, “is rewriting.”
Fletcher Pratt himself said, “If you ever write a paragraph that seems to you to sing, to be the best thing you’ve ever written, to be full of wonder and poetry and greatness-cross it out, it stinks! “
Over and over again, we were told about the importance of polishing, of revising, of tearing up and rewriting. I got the bewildered notion that, far from being expected to type it right the first time, as Heinlein had advised me, I was expected to type it all wrong, and get it right only by the thirty-second time, if at all.
I went home immersed in gloom; and the very next time I wrote a story, I tried to tear it up. I couldn’t make myself do it. So I went over it to see all the terrible things I had done, in order to revise them. To my chagrin, everything sounded great to me. (My own writing always sounds great to me.)
Eventually, after wasting hours and hours-to say nothing of spiritual agony-I gave it up. My stories would have to be written the way they always were-and still are.
What is it I am saying, then? That it is wrong to revise? No, of course not-any more than it is wrong not to revise.
You don’t do anything automatically, simply because some “authority” (including me) says you should. Each writer is an individual, with his or her own way of thinking, and doing, and writing. Some writers are not happy unless they polish and polish, unless they try a paragraph this way and that way and the other way.
Once Oscar Wilde, coming down to lunch, was asked how he had spent his morning. “I was hard at work,” he said.
“Oh?” he was asked. “Did you accomplish much?” “Yes, indeed,” said Wilde. “I inserted a comma.”
At dinner, he was asked how he had spent the afternoon. “ More work, “ he said. “Inserted another comma?” was the rather sardonic question.
“No,” said Wilde, unperturbed. “I removed the one I had inserted in the morning.”
Well, if you’re Oscar Wilde, or some other great stylist, polishing may succeed in imparting an ever-higher gloss to your writing and you should revise and revise. If, on the other hand, you’re not much of a stylist (like me, for instance) and are only interested in straightforward storytelling and clarity, then a small amount of revision is probably all you need. Beyond that small amount you may merely be shaking up the rubble.
I was told last night, for instance, that Daniel Keyes (author of the classic “Flowers for Algernon”) is supposed to have said, “The author’s best friend is the person who shoots him just before he makes one change too many.”
Let’s try the other extreme. William Shakespeare is reported by Ben Jonson to have boasted that he “never blotted a word.” The Bard of Avon, in other words, would have us believe that, like Heinlein, he got it right the first time, and that what he handed in to the producers at the Globe Theatre was first draft.
(He may have been twisting the truth a bit. Prolific writers tend to exaggerate the amount of nonrevision they do.)
Well, if you happen to be another Will Shakespeare, or another Bob Heinlein [Mr. Heinlein now admits to two or three drafts on his longer works.-Ed], maybe you can get away without revising at all. But if you’re just an ordinary writer (like me) maybe you’d better do some. (As a matter of fact, Ben Jonson commented that he wished Will had “blotted out a thousand,” and there are indeed places where Will might have been-ssh!-improved on.)
Let’s pass on to a slightly different topic.
I am sometimes asked if I prepare an outline first before writing a story or a book. The answer is: No, I don’t.
To begin with, this was another one of those cases of initial ignorance. I didn’t know at the start of my career that such things as outlines existed. I just wrote a story and stopped when I finished, and if it happened to be one length it was a short, and if it happened to be another it was a novelette.
When I wrote my first novel, Doubleday told me to make it 70,000 words long. So I wrote until I had 70,000 words and then stopped-and by the greatest good luck, it turned out to be the end of the novel.
When I began my second novel, I realized that such an amazing coincidence was not likely to happen twice in a row, so I prepared an outline. I quickly discovered two things. One, an outline constricted me so that I could not breathe. Two, there was no way I could force my characters to adhere to the outline; even if I wanted to do so, they refused. I never tried an outline again. In even my most complicated novels,
I merely fix the ending firmly in my mind; decide on a beginning; and then, from that beginning, charge toward the ending, making up the details as I go along.
On the other hand, P. G. Wodehouse, for whose writings I have an idolatrous admiration, always prepared outlines, spending more time on them than on the book and getting every event, however small, firmly in place before beginning.
There’s something to be said on both sides of course.
If you are a structured and rigid person who likes everything under control, you will be uneasy without an outline. On the other hand, if you are an undisciplined person with a tendency to wander allover the landscape, you will be better off with an outline even if you feel you wouldn’t like one.
On the third hand, if you are quick-thinking and ingenious, but with a strong sense of the whole, you will be better off without an
outline.
How do you decide which you are? Well, try an outline, or try writing without one, and find out for yourself.
The thing is: Don’t feel that any rule of writing must be hard and fast, and handed down from Sinai. Try them all out by all means; but in the last analysis, stick to that which makes you comfortable. You are, after all, an individual.
Irony
It is well known that I know nothing about the craft of writing in any formal way. I say so myself-constantly. Being an editorial director, however, has its demands and duties. I must answer letters from readers, for instance, and take into account any unhappiness they may have with stories and editorial policy. And that means I am sometimes forced to think about writing techniques.
That brings me to the subject at hand, the matter of the use of irony by writers.
In the March 1984 issue, I discussed satire. The two are often lumped together, and, in fact, sometimes confused and treated as though they were synonymous. They are not!
Satire, as I explained, achieves its purpose of castigating the evils of humanity and society by exaggeration. It puts those evils under a magnifying glass with the intention of making them clearly visible.
Irony does it differently. You can get a hint from the fact that “irony” is from a Greek word meaning “dissimulation.” An ironist must pretend, and the classic ironist was Socrates, who in his discussions with others would relentlessly pretend ignorance and ask all kinds of naive questions designed to trap an overconfident adversary into rashly taking positions that then proved to be indefensible under further naive questioning by Socrates.
Naturally, Socrates was not ignorant and the questions were n ot naive, and his method of procedure is known as “Socratic irony.” You may well believe that those who suffered under his bland lash did not grow to love him, and I suspect he fully earned his final draught of hemlock.
