Dean Wesley Smith has a series of lectures he’s put together on the stages of a fiction writer.

I watched the video version of this a while back and found it informative (albeit frustrating at the same time, because I was looking for an easy answer to how to reach the next level and for me there wasn’t one).  He’s turning it into a book and writing each chapter and posting them for free as he goes, which makes it a great opportunity for everyone to read it now.

Well worth it, I think.  (And not sure how long they’ll be up before he pulls them and puts out the book, so get over there now.)

Today is about stage one writers.  If you find that you don’t write more than a story or two a year and that you’re always rewriting your stories based upon what everyone else says about them.  Or that you rewrite stories WAY too many times and focus on the sentence-level issues, this may be you.

And if you think he’s full of it, feel free to participate in the comments section and hash it out with him.

But give what he says some thought.  I’ve definitely seen the writers that rewrite and rewrite and rewrite (justifiably so in some cases).  And I’ve definitely seen the writers who spend so much time doing character sketches that they never write the story.  And the ones that let a critique group full of other unpublished or barely published authors who write in different genres than them kill their story.