Art & Creativity Quote by Rudy Rucker

Rucker’s advice has the blunt, workshop-floor cadence of someone who’s watched a thousand brilliant premises die of neglect. It’s not a romantic manifesto about “finding your voice.” It’s a logistics memo: produce volume, complete units, then subject them to the real-world test of repeated submission. Coming from a scientist, the subtext is almost methodological. Writing becomes an experiment you run over and over, with “finish what you write” acting as the control condition most beginners refuse to keep.

The first clause, “Write a lot,” is a quiet rejection of the SF newbie’s favorite procrastination: worldbuilding as avoidance behavior. Science fiction attracts architects of imaginary systems; Rucker is nudging them toward throughput, not perfection. “Finish what you write” is the hard line. Drafts don’t count as data. A story that never resolves its own promises can’t teach you pacing, endings, or the discipline of revision - the unsexy mechanics that separate a cool idea from a publishable artifact.

Then comes the most telling part: “keep sending it out for quite awhile.” That’s not optimism; it’s inoculation. He’s normalizing rejection as part of the process, stripping it of moral meaning. The phrase implies a marketplace with gatekeepers, tastes, and timing - variables you can’t control, only outlast. In SF specifically, where editors are balancing novelty against readability, persistence isn’t just grit; it’s a strategy for matching your weird to the right moment and venue. Rucker’s intent is to move writers from identity (“I’m an SF writer”) to practice: iterate, complete, submit, repeat.