Writing popular fiction

similar antiquities will never appeal to the modern reader.
    Many writers are proud of the number of drafts they do on a novel. You'll hear them say things like, "I did four complete manuscripts before I had it polished exactly as I wanted it." Indeed, the writer who won't settle for anything but the right word, who wants his prose to ring true and to read easily, is to be admired. But the writer who rewrites the same story again and again until he has it down pat is usually not so much a careful artist as he is a sloppy one. If he had trained himself to write as clean and sound a first draft as he could, he would not have needed to go over all that material again and again.
    When I sit down to begin a new novel, I type directly onto heavy bond paper, with carbon paper and second sheet attached. If a paragraph is not going well, I rip that set of papers out of the typewriter and begin the page again, but I never go on until that page is
finalized
and cleanly typed in finished copy.
    I waste a lot of paper.
    But I save a lot of time.
    The danger of planning to do several drafts lies in the subconscious or unconscious attitude that,
If I don't get it right this time, it's okay; I can work it out in a later draft
.
This encourages carelessness in your original word choices, phrasing, and
plotting. The more things you write with this approach in mind, the sloppier you
become until, finally, your first draft is so poorly done that no number of
re-workings will make it click.
    No financially successful, critically acclaimed writer I know has let himself get caught in the "fix it in a later draft" trap. Without fail, however, the hopeless amateur clings to this fallacious theory like a drowning man to the only rock in the lake.
    Disregarding this tendency for the multiple-draft writer to get careless with his work, there are other reasons why you should learn to write good first drafts and eliminate revision wherever feasible. First of all, your emotional involvement with the work can be the intangible quality that makes it exciting and marketable. If you must rework the story several times, you will lose that sense of excitement and, more often than not, create a finished piece that reflects your own ultimate boredom. Unless you have a firm grip on the structure of your story, you may begin to change things, in a rewrite, that do not need to be changed at all; reworking a story, you may begin to doubt all of it and alter it without logical reason. And, of course, a great deal of revision takes time from your
new
work.
    One familiar piece of advice given new writers is: "Put it aside for a couple of days or weeks and re-read it when you've cooled off." At all costs, ignore this advice. It is true that, in the clinical mood that sometimes follows the completion of a work, you can see prose faults and correct them. More often, however, you are only giving yourself time to start doubting the story. Often, when you approach it again, you're too critical, because you've lost the mood that generated it. When you've finished a piece, send it out straightaway and get to work on something new. You're a professional. You have all the confidence in the world.
    Reams have been written about the transition, and most all of that has only tended to confuse new writers to no good end. The transition is easily written; any mistakes you may be making with it can be easily corrected.
    The transition is the change from one scene to another in a dramatic narrative, moving your characters from one place to another or from one time to another. By stepping in on the end of this scene and the beginning of the next, we can see a
poorly done
transition:
"Are you going to just sit there like a stone?" Lou asked her, looming over her where she sat in the big easy chair.
    She didn't answer him. She looked straight ahead, her eyes on the wall behind him, her lip trembling but her determination otherwise unbetrayed.
    "I don't have to take this, and I'm not going to," he said, turning away from her. "I can always find someone else—someone who
will
talk to me."
    Still, she sat, silent.
    "Damn you," he snapped, crossing the small room, slamming the big oaken door behind him.
    He went down the steps and out into the clear spring morning, walked two blocks down Elm Avenue to the bus stop, where he caught the 9:45 for town. He rode there without incident, brooding over the scene with Rita, got off at Market Street and went to his favorite bar on the