Throwing Out the Garbage

It was in January, 1971, when I was not quite sixteen years old, that I decided I wanted to take a shot at getting a piece of my fiction published. And by “published,” I didn’t mean doing so by being included in a school magazine, or by placing high in a contest, or proceeding through some sort of self-publication process. I meant “for real,” as in, by having a short story accepted by a professional newsstand magazine or having a novel published by a New York trade publisher. I did not imagine it would be easy to achieve that goal, but part of the allure was that if I succeeded, I would have done something hard enough that other people might be impressed by. I gave myself what I saw as a reasonable deadline. I figured I had until I was out of college to either “get there” or turn my creative energies toward pursuits that would be at least somewhat gratifying but which did not require so much affirmation from the world at large.

I did get there. I was still in college when I made that first sale, a novelette purchased by Orson Scott Card for the Ace Books anthology Dragons of Light. I had not, after all, misjudged my potential.

I had, however, not understood how much the process would ask of me.

Let us say for metaphor’s sake that getting published was a climb of a thousand steps. The fifteen-year-old me assumed I was already at, say, step 631. In reality, I was still somewhere below step number 100, i.e. at the level of a high school student who could reliably write essays that received “A” grades from his teachers. Also, I failed to realize some steps were higher than others, and that among those ahead of me was a real whopper.

The whopper step? At age fifteen, and for several years thereafter, I made the mistake of thinking of my stories and novel fragments as my children. I figured they deserved my protection.

What did that mean in the short term? It meant I kept every piece of fiction I generated. Moreover, I even kept some of the early drafts, even after I had gone on to compose better versions. I was never hugely prolific, so it wasn’t like the stack of manuscripts towered high enough that it might kill me if it fell over on top of me, but it eventually the total amounted to enough sheets of 8½ x 11 paper that it filled one-and-a-half drawers of a file cabinet.

As I saw it, if the results of my novice attempts did not measure up to professional standards, they might contain elements that could inspire a higher level of output down the line, and if not, the material could still serve as documentation of my process. As in, “Look here, that now-famous Dave Smeds fellow may have had to go through a learning curve, but here you can see the stages of his development. Isn’t this stuff interesting?”

Shift forward to January, 1976. It was precisely five years since I had given myself the goal. I still was not a published author, but I was being regular about my writing habits, in part because at Sonoma State University I was taking the fiction-writing course taught by Professor Gerald Rosen, and with the coming semester would be taking a course specifically devoted to science fiction, taught by a Vietnam War veteran grad student named Drew Mendelson, who had sold work to the New Dimensions anthology series edited by Robert Silverberg. (Later he would be California Governor Gray Davis’s speechwriter.) As a student in each of those classes I was responsible for producing at least three separate pieces of fiction.

Having been spurred by these circumstances to a certain level of output, I indulged in what is often known as a “writing retreat.” (I smile as I think about this, having recently committed to being part of the Rainforest Writers Retreat only a few weeks from now.) I was living in the dorms at SSU. The dining hall was not in operation during the winter break, but the living quarters were otherwise just as habitable as the rest of the year, and accessible to me with my usual key. The main difference was, in January hardly anyone was there. I spent the holidays with my parents and other family and then returned to my suite on the third of the month. I was looking at a stretch of nearly four weeks of isolation before classes resumed.

I spent every day writing, writing, and writing, hammering out manuscript pages with my old, built-like-a-brick-shithouse Underwood manual typewriter. And then as the semester began, I kept churning out pages, managing over the span of February through April to come up with an amount equal to the January binge.

In early May, having turned in my assignments and being especially aware of how much of my file cabinet was now occupied with manuscripts, I contemplated what was there. Contemplated it hard, as the saying goes.

There was some good news. The sustained period of toil had made my writing better overall. I had the feeling I was on the verge of knowing what I was doing. As it turns out, I was correct. Three of the pieces I worked on during those weeks were published a decade later, including “Gullrider,” my first sale of many to the Sword and Sorceress series, and “Goats,” my first truly high-profile sale, which was published in the Tor Books Vietnam War-themed anthology In the Field of Fire, edited by Jeanne Van Buren Dann and Jack Dann. Though to be fair, the drafts that existed in the spring of 1976 needed reworking before editors were willing to fork over the money for them.

The less welcome epiphany was how much truly terrible stuff file cabinet held. I was competent enough now to recognize not only the stuff that had promise, as in the above-mentioned pieces, but also what stuff was irredeemable. And there was a lot of that. It made up about a third of the contents of the file cabinet.

Something happened then. For the first time, I gave up treating pages such as that as something to be protected. They were not my children. They were words intended to serve an audience, and I could not imagine any audience appreciating the worst third of what fiction I’d created to that point in my life.

So I threw that third away. As in, completely, so that even I would not be subjected to it. The shocking thing, to me, was that it included some of the pages I had written in that January burst, and even some stuff that I had turned in to my teachers that semester.

Even back then I had already encountered advice essays written by older writers that said the same thing I had just learned, that you have to be merciless in judging your own writing, if you want to reach a professional level. Finally I had taken that advice to heart.

This happened again in 1979. Again, a third of my surviving output went into the dumpster.

I have not been as drastic since. For one thing, by early 1979 Orson Scott Card had accepted “Dragon Touched” for Dragons of Light. Within another year or so, everything I wrote was at a level worthy of pro publication. I figure if someone paid money for something I wrote, it must have some sort of value greater than zero.

That doesn’t mean every story or novel is sacrosanct. I faced a different sort of self evaluation when I chose the contents of Swords, Magic, and Heart. I had two dozen imaginary-world stories available to consider for that book. I chose only half of them for inclusion. Stories are not children. I don’t have to protect them. What I need to do is serve the audience. That obligation required me to cull out the distaff dozen, the better to keep the remaining twelve in good company.

A reader of the collection recently singled out the story “Dust and Sand” for her particular praise. As it happens, that piece was one I almost culled. It received a last-minute pardon, you might say. The story was originally accepted by editor Katharine Kerr for her big mid-1990s fantasy anthology, published as Sorceries in the U.K. and The Shimmering Door in the U.S. During my selection process for the collection, I didn’t get around to re-reading it at first. I thought I might skip it, because I recalled being less than satisfied with it. Turns out I was mis-remembering details. Finally I did re-read the story. And I found it did, in fact, measure up to the standard I wanted, as my reader’s enthusiasm reflects.

My reservations about the piece had nothing to do with the final work, as submitted to and accepted by Kit for the anthology. It had to do with my 1976 wholesale assessment of my output. One of the stories I had thrown away at that time — one of the ones I’d written for Drew’s class but belatedly understood was meant for the pyre — had an underlying premise that I had not done justice to at that time, but which in itself wasn’t garbage at all. Given an entirely new set of characters, a new context, a prose style much richer in the mid-1990s than what I was capable of in the mid-1970s, and a switch from science fiction to fantasy, the premise was instead a kernel from which something good could — and did — blossom. But over time, knowing the origin of that kernel, I had let myself suspect the 1990s work must have been contaminated.

Should it have mattered? Well. Yes. Because step 1000, simply having been published professionally, is not the last step. I am not just a writer, I am a curator of what parts of my career output I offer to the public. If I take that job seriously — and I do — there are always more levels to climb.