Lift Up Your Hearts!

John C. Wright is a science fiction writer, but his essay, On Writer's Block struck me for its wider applicability in his assertion that even the best advice can be counterproductive if it doesn't fit the personality of the recipient.  [The emphasis below is mine.]

Each writer approaches his craft in a different way, and advice from one writer to another is useful if and only if you happen to be a writer of the same method and temperament as the first.

Robert Heinlein famously used to advise would-be writers never to rewrite their first drafts, except at an editor’s suggestion. Unless you are a ditherer, that is, someone who wastes his limited writing time rewriting scenes that are already saleworthy, this advice is not useful, or indeed may be counterproductive. Heinlein was warning against the pitfalls of perfectionism. But if you are not a perfectionist, and not a ditherer, the advice is counterproductive, because writers who should rewrite are being told not to. Heinlein was a First Draft man: he could breeze off printable copy his first try. His books sold on the strength of their wittiness, readability, and speculative ideas: one strongly suspects he never went back to his first chapter to set up some plot twist he invented for the last.

If you do not write like him, merely able to breeze off finely crafted copy in your first try, then do not take his advice. Frankly, I thought this one of the worst pieces of writing advice ever, because I suffer the opposite vice. I write impromptu and I like to stick with my first instinct, and therefore I do not rewrite often enough. Hence Heinlein’s advice was the opposite of what someone like me should be told.

Every bit of writing craft advice is only good for you to the degree that it applies to your situation. In this example, Dithering Perfectionists should follow Heinlein’s advice, and never rewrite except at an editor’s suggestion. Impromptuarians should follow the opposite advice that all writing is rewriting.

The catch, of course, is that Impromptuarians are inclined to snatch at the advice best for Dithering Perfectionists, and vice versa.  Back in the late 1970s and early 80s, we were frequently urged to do less driving and more walking, advice that I followed with alacrity and even a bit of pride.  Alas, there was no virtue in my environmentally-correct response, since at the time getting behind the wheel of a car tended to bring on panic attacks.  What I needed to do, at that particular moment, was to walk less, drive more, and conquer my phobia.