Salman Rushdie's advice to other writers isn't mystical, and he's said as much himself. It comes down to showing up on a fixed schedule and treating revision as most of the actual work.
Treat It Like a Job
Rushdie's advice starts with a refusal to wait around for inspiration. He's compared the work to punching a clock, something you do on schedule whether or not you feel like it that day. The comparison isn't incidental. He spent close to a decade as a professional copywriter before he wrote fiction full time, and the deadline discipline from that career followed him into novels.
I've always told myself simply to treat it like a nine-to-five job. If you have a job, you just go and do it. It doesn't matter whether you're feeling good that day.
Salman Rushdie, Harvard Business Review interview, 2015
He's made the same point more bluntly elsewhere in that conversation: once a writer stops giving themselves an excuse, the work tends to follow. 'Once your mind understands that it has no excuses, it's remarkable how it begins to play along, do its job,' he said.
For more on how this discipline maps onto an actual day, see the full Salman Rushdie writing routine.
All Writing Is Rewriting
The clearest piece of craft advice he's given is short enough to fit on a sticky note. 'It's often been said, and I think it's true, all writing is rewriting,' he says in his MasterClass on storytelling and writing. His point is less about first drafts being bad and more about them being unfinished by definition. Treating a draft as raw material, rather than a final answer, is what lets a writer keep moving instead of freezing at the first sentence.
He's also direct about how to get past the blank page: stop trying to make the first attempt perfect, and get something down. Once a draft exists, he argues, a different faculty takes over, what he calls the critical imagination, and that's the tool for finding what's wrong and fixing it. The creative imagination's job is to generate the material. The critical imagination's job is to interrogate it afterward.
By his own account, his process has shifted over the decades. 'Now I write much more slowly and I revise a lot as I go,' he told the Paris Review, describing a move away from pushing out a fast draft and cleaning it up later. The payoff, he's said, is that pages worked over early need less fixing down the line: 'I find that when I've got a bit done, it seems to require less revision than it used to.'
What You Can Steal
- Show up on a schedule. Rushdie's advice is to treat writing like a job with fixed hours rather than something you wait to feel like doing.
- Get a draft down before you judge it. Let the critical imagination stay off duty until there's something to critique.
- Revise while the page is still fresh. Rushdie found that early attention to a passage means less cleanup work later.
- Expect rewriting to be most of the job. If it's true for a Booker Prize winner, it's true for the rest of us.