A copy of The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White. Also, a good dictionary, a good thesaurus, and a good style manual.

To be a successful selling writer, Robert A. Heinlein came up with five very good rules:

1. You must write.
2. You must finish what you write.
3. You must not revise what you write except at editorial request.*
4. You must submit what you write.
5. You must keep submitting it until it sells.

Sounds about right.

*The one thing I disagreed with on this list was item 3, about revising. Then I read an explanation of what Heinlein meant:   don't keep fussing and tinkering with the piece or you might never finish it. Get it done! Computers, as great as they are for editing, can be a trap if you let them be. I found that what I have to do to avoid this trap is (with the excepting of correcting typos and other obvious goofs as I write), don't stop to rewrite anything. Speed write. Don't stop to revise, rewrite, or edit until you have the piece finished. Then you can go back, read it over, and start changing words, moving phrases, rewriting sentences, and such.

I learned this the hard way. Editing on the computer is so easy that I would write a paragraph, read it over, and then start changing or moving words and phrases and sentences. After several hours, I would have one lousy paragraph. Brilliant, glowing prose! But only one paragraph! Then, the following day I'd pull it up on the screen and read it over, and . . . nowhere near as brilliant as I thought it was! That's when I started to blaze through and complete a first draft before I went back to revise and edit.

My stuff is selling a bit. I have about twenty articles published so far.

And, lemme see, there was one other thing. . . .   Oh, yeah. Brevity!

I'm still working on that one.

Don Firth