I believe that rewriting is almost the most important thing of all. "Go over a story again and again and again" may be a counsel of unattainable perfection, but I know it's good. It has never failed in my own case. When I have failed to satisfy it has been because, for financial reasons, I have neglected this essential.
It may rarely happen that because of long forethought or peculiar skill or familiarity with a certain subject, a writer may be able to dash off a story without pause. Perhaps pause is a bad thing anyway. But reconsideration—polish—elimination of unnecessary words, sentences, paragraphs and even chapters—these are almost as important as the plot. For of what use is a story if it gives the reader no pleasure to read? Each story should be a finished job.
There ought to be a law against writing more than one book a year. In fact there is a law against it. I'm going to reform and obey the law. One book or its equivalent in twelve months would pay ninety-nine out of a hundred writers (in the end) vastly better than the novelette a month that I have been attempting.
Kathleen Norris: Write as freely as you would bake if you meant to be a baker.
Imagine that your seventeenth story is going to be your first success, and move steadily and indifferently through the discouragements that meet the first sixteen.
Live, in loving and giving, to the full; and think of your work as a sort of overflow.
4th to 56th rule. Write.
Anne O'Hagan: The usual one—know enough about your story, your characters, their lives and experiences, to be in a way possessed by them when you are working with them. Otherwise you can't write with any profit.
Do things not connected with the business of writing now and then—study unrelated topics, travel, farm, get into movements, etc., etc., not for the purpose of getting material but for the purpose of getting fertilizers; as the good agriculturist plows, cultivates and seeds a field every now and then, not in order to reap a crop, but in order to plow under his crop for the enrichment of his soil.
Grant Overton: There is no suggestion of a concrete sort that one can make which will be of any value to a beginner—that is, a general suggestion. He must work it all out for himself. He will get it with all his intellectual five or six or seven senses from reading and from following writers and other people in general. The work of synthesis is his job. The creative emergence is his genius if he has it. A practised writer is not in need of suggestions, or, if he is, they have nothing to do with his actual writing but with his qualities as a man and a thinker, his general outlook upon life, his philosophy, etc.