I don't disagree with you on any of that. However, that doesn't apply to me. I don't write stories that way. I don't usually write a new story based on an old one or one that was successful. I like to break new ground when I craft short fiction--otherwise I'm bored. Novels? Yes, I would stick with a winning formula, but I would still try to make each book better than the last. But short stories give me the freedom to keep striving for originality, since a piece of short fiction doesn't make a career.
Also, my goal is to publish my stories. If an editor at a big magazine doesn't want a story, I'll publish it in a smaller one. I don't write short fiction for money first and foremost, so my goal is not to conform to what the editor of Analog is buying, for example (or to your thinking--conform, but be just a bit better). I write it for enjoyment, challenge, and to build my reputation. My goal is always to write a better story than the last one, to enhance my skills as far as I can--and ultimately, to entertain someone with the finished product. Ultimately, I want to be the best storyteller I can be. Aside from judging where a story might be a good fit, and reading a magazine beforehand, that's as far as I care to go. I could never write one of my stories in a similar fashion to another writer (but slightly better) just to get my foot in the door and earn 200 bucks. I write the best fiction I can, and I don't give a jolly rat's arse what other writers are writing. If an editor wants my story enough, he'll buy it.
Well, it has nothing to do with conformity. Quite the opposite. I've repeatedly said not to conform, not to write strictly to guidelines. Conformity gets you nowhere fast. I didn't say you should write anything
like Mike Resnick writes, I said you had to be
better and
more original than Mike Resnick. I don't care what your goals or aspirations are, or what size magazine you happen to be writing for, you still have to be better and more original than the other writers who submit to that magazine. But teh bigger teh magazine, the tougher it is to do this.
Like it or not, some stories are simply better than others, some styles work better with readers than others, and nearly all the cream gets skimmed by the big magazines before the small magazines even see it.
The "formula" for any big magazine is to be better, and to be more original, never to be like any other writer.
Breaking new ground is a fine thing, but changing content does not break new ground, nor does writing a story in a different way. If you really are breaking new ground, and if you have any ability to write at all well, to tell a good story and fill it with good characters, the big magazines will eat your stories for breakfast.
Striving for originality is also good, and exactly what big magazines want you to do. But quite often, as the Dutch Uncle once told a writer, "Your writing is both good and original, but what is good is not original, and what is original is not good."
Nor did I say anything about writing these stories for money. Money has nothing to do with it, except that the more money a magazine pays, the higher the level of competition you face getting into that magazine, and the better, and more original, you have to be.
But a single piece of good short fiction absolutely can make a career, and many an SF novelist made his career by writing a breakthrough short story that later became a breakthrough, award-winning novel. Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" is a prime example, but there are many others.
I still think guidelines get misread consistently. Guidelines are nealry always more about what an editor doesn't want than about what he does want. Yes, Analog wants hard science fiction, but that's like saying a fisherman wants to catch a fish. It's true, but it doesn't begin to tell more than a tiny part of the story. Does he want a farm pond catfish, a farm pond bluegill, a river cat, a pike, a sailfish, or any one of a thousand other species? Is he going to catch it with a fly, a spinner, or a worm?
On and on.
Any editor knows what he doesn't want, and guidelines usually spell this out. But what an editor does want, particular the editor of a big magazine, is the story he never imagined, the new take on an old theme that catches him by surprise, the insight into humanity that never occurred to him, all wrapped up in writing so good that it would make a grocery list publishable, and with characters who step off the page, sit down on the edge of his desk, and tell him the tale personally.
Writing to fit a large magazine never means writing the same kind of story that magazine has already published, or imitating writers who are already big names in the field. But most of the fiction in very low pay and no pay magazines does exactly this. There's a sameness to it. So much so that a vampire story often reads just like a hard SF story, reads just like a fantasy story about elves. Only the names of the characters and the type of obstacle changes. But truly innovative theme, and fresh, revealing, newly thought or better expressed insight into the human condition, which is what originality is really all about, are noticeably lacking.
But I gues when you really get down to it, the most original thing in the world is a good story, well-told.
