Family Matters

 
Rethinking the First Rule

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Henry threw me an interesting curve last Monday:

For those who are new to the site, the First Rule states that family comes before everything and paying work comes before everything but family. Okay, maybe I rewrote the First Rule somewhat, but that's how I'm applying it these days. Anyway, family time is delaying my Monday column until Tuesday this week.

Is this true? Do I really need to rethink the First Rule, or is there previously undiscovered Zero^th Rule waiting to be formulated? (I've spent thirty years working in computer software. Yes, of course I always count integers this way: 0, 1, 2, 3...)

Asimov did that. Sometime in the early 1970s he published a short story in which a couple of his robots secretly formulated their own Zero^th Law, which was something on the order of, "A robot shall not tolerate the existence of any other robot that makes humans question the inviolability of the Three Laws."

Or something like that. To tell the truth, the story, like most Asimov stories, struck me as being enormously cool when I was a teenager and shallow tripe by the time I was 25, so I got rid of the anthology it appeared in and didn't bother to think of it again until just now.

But back to the initial question: do I really need to rethink the First Rule? To develop my answer, I went back and took another look through the old Ranting Room site, where I used and expressed the First Rule many times over the years. The expression tended to drift and contract a bit over time. In LIFO order:

"Paying work on deadline always comes first."
"Paying work on deadline always takes priority."
"Paying work on deadline always takes precedence."
"Paying work on deadline always takes precedence over fun."
"The money always flows to the writer."

Huh? Where'd that last one come from? Oh, wait, that's the First Rule of Dealing With Agents.

And then it struck me: Eureka! (Followed immediately by Eurema!—and speaking of great short stories, go find and read "Eurema's Dam," by R. A. Lafferty. It's light-years better than ninety-five percent of Asimov's robish stories.)

Without thinking, I'd truncated it. The correct formulation is: "The First Rule of Being a Professional Writer is: Paying work on deadline always comes first."

Nested sets, folks. This is only one First Rule, from a subset of a much larger instruction set. For example, there's also the First Rule of Being a Good Technical Writer: "You are a lens. You stand between the user and the information he or she requires. Your sole purpose is to make that information clearer and easier to use."

Or how about the First Rule of Being a Journalist, which was pounded into my head decades ago in J-school? "It doesn't matter if it's perfect. What matters is if it's done on-time. We can always correct or retract it later."

I suppose there's also a First Rule of Being a Blogger. I shudder to think of what it might be. That might make a good Friday Challenge, though, so let's chuck that thought into the Idea Bin for now and move on.

Having reconsidered it, then, I stand by my current draft specification of the First Rule of Being a Professional Writer: "Paying work on deadline always comes first." However, and this is a big however, the Rules of Being a Professional Writer are subordinate to a greater set of rules: let's call them, say, The Rules of Being a Decent Human Being?

I don't know. I never thought about it much before. That's one of the problems with being a professional writer: you tend to spend your waking hours with your nose so close to the [ paper | screen | monitor | grindstone | ideation process ] that you forget to step back from time to time, to take both a deep breath and a larger view of your life. Worse, it's very easy for a writer—especially a published, award-winning writer—to develop the conceit that he or she is somehow exempt from the rules for the common people, as he or she answers to a higher calling. So what are The Rules of Being a Decent Human Being?

Let's talk.

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FAMILY MATTERS posts at 7 a.m. each Sunday and is dedicated to serious discussions of marriage, family, children, human sexuality, and all the other things that writers ignore when they cocoon in their offices and try to create fiction. This series will run until we either run out of things to talk about, solve all the problems in the world, or you tell me to shut up and go get some professional therapy. If you have a question you'd like to ask or a topic you'd like to expound upon, send it to slushpile@thefridaychallenge.com and we'll work it into the queue.