In its most literal sense, of course it is. It’s certainly a YMMV as a writer issue, and it is, but it can easily be reduced to a binary statement. And, my guess knowing professional writers, is that most do edit/re-write.
It seems we have our answer.
Pro writers who’re concerned about producing max output for minimum effort may eschew editing/rewriting. At the expense of being poor communicators.
IOW, Smith’s bread is buttered by quantity, not quality.
QED.
Whether a budding author like our OP @Godwin wants to take Smith’s advice is a different question. Just understand the trade-offs you’re accepting whichever direction you take.
Dick Francis rarely did rewrites. He explained that he tried early in his career and felt it didn’t improve anything.
This is from a published interview in The Dick Francis Companion. He described his writing process. His wife did the research for the novel and assembled a file of information. Francis referred to it while he wrote the story. He wrote every day on a strict schedule until completing the book. Then took the rest of the year off.
Just as another data point my favorite author right now is Brandon Sanderson and he keeps a fun little tracker on his website for where he thinks he is in the progress of each of the books he’s working on. This shows that he’s done 5 rewrites/edits on his major novel prior to sending it off for copying editing. He is also part way through drafts on two other novels. He keeps a pretty tight publishing schedule and is balancing 5 different series right now.
Some writers intensely plot their novels before writing a word. Others have only a vague notion of the plot at the beginning and prefer to let the story go where where the narrative and characters take it.
Some writers write one draft and only edit begrudgingly. Others are perfectionists who can rewrite and edit a story for uears until they are satisfied.
What the author might have been trying to get across is that there are many traps writers can fall into, and one of them is endlessly rewriting or tinkering with the story before they get the nerve to just call it done and market it. If you are one of those types, maybe his advice will work for you.
For myself, I prefer Heinlein’s rules for professional writers:
- You must write.
- You must finish what you are writing.
- You must keep trying to publish or sell what you’ve written.
That’s pretty much it. You’d be surprised how many would-be writers stall out at step 1, and a huge number never make it through step 2.
Unless you are consistently reachjng those three goals, I’d focus on the basics.
Rewriting in the days of typewriters or pen and paper would have been a laborious task of starting from scratch every time. I can imagine that was very discouraging for a lot of writers, and they would have planned ahead to avoid as much of that as they could.
These days a new draft ranges from a complete rewrite, all the way to changing chapter headings or replace a character name. It’s so much easier now to write over the top of your previous drafts with small tweaks, simple drag-and-drop shifting around, and search-and-replace adjustments, each of which is considered a “new draft”. It costs almost no time or effort, and can be very satisfying, to do as many drafts as you can before your deadline.
I think most writers of today are fools if they don’t take advantage of what modern technology provides for them.
Not fiction, but I used to work with a guy who wrote an op-ed piece every week for my publication. He would come into the office about an hour before deadline, take four sheets of erasable bond [note, this was a long time ago], roll one into the typewriter [Selectric, it was long ago but in the second half of the 20th century] and start pounding away using about 2/5ths of his fingers and going about 60 wpm. 15 minutes later he had a polished, coherent, readable, and often brilliantly perceptive op-ed, with very few typos. He threw four pages, usually a little under 1000 words, at the copy editor (me) and left until the next week about an hour before the deadline.
IME most editorial writers do not work that way but that one did.
You would never guess that Asimov is also my favorite writer. Sometime around the late 80s he claimed that he would never get a computer to write on because he typed 200 wpm (or some ridiculous amount) and never revised, so what was the point? He did eventually use a computer, though.
I think the answer to the OP is that every writer has their own MO. I have the impression that JK Rowling was edited at first and her books came in at a reasonable 300 pages or less, but then she got so popular that she could tell her publisher to go screw themselves; if she wrote 700 pages they would publish it unedited or she would find a publisher who would. Certainly, the Deathly Hallows book has many longueurs.
I had an interesting experience with a non-fiction book I coauthored. When we were finished there were still 8 paragraphs that the hyphenator could not set without going into the margin. The problem always lay in the first line of the paragraph having a long word or name in it that could not be hyphenated for some reason. So I volunteered to rewrite those 8 sentences and did so. My collaborator remarked that in every case the new sentence was clearer, better expressed, whatever, than the original. He added that we would doubtless have a much better book if we tried to rewrite every sentence in the book. But we could not face that and didn’t do it. Still, it made me think that perhaps the best writers do exactly that. Rewrite until they can’t improve it any more.
I’ve rewritten parts of everything I’ve ever written (just did it, in fact; changed “sections” to “parts” before I went on with this sentence).
You’re going to run into an Edits vs Drafts debate, but I think the real point is, put out the best work you can.
Don’t rush and submit it without a critical reading (by you AND OTHERS) and rewriting. But don’t overwork it either. This relates to my drawings, paintings and short stories.
In both art and writing, I’ll sometimes get things where I like them, then put it aside and start over, with all the critiques/changes/edits fresh in my mind. That way I preserve an immediacy and “fresh” feel while avoiding the mistakes I made the first time.
I’m an author and I do many, many drafts.
Some case studies from established novelists:
I’ve read that the catch phrase “just one more thing” used in the Columbo TV show was accidentally invented because the authors noticed they had left out a question and didn’t want to retype the script to insert it earlier in the text.
I guess Proust didn’t get the memo:
Proust’s method of composition was highly accretive. He wrote primarily in children’s exercise books, but his first drafts were supplemented by countless additions, revisions, and extensions of thought which he scribbled down on any paper which came to hand.Envelopes, magazine covers, scraps of paper of different length and format were glued into the exercise books or joined together to form long scrolls sometimes two metres long.
This process also continued when proofs of his manuscript came back from the printer. This was a habit very similar to that of his illustrious predecessor Balzac. As Terrence Kilmartin observes:
The margins of proofs and typescripts were covered with scribbled corrections and insertions, often overflowing on to additional sheets which were glued to the galleys or to one another to form interminable strips – what Françoise in the novel calls the narrator’s paperoles. The unravelling and deciphering of these copious additions cannot have been an enviable task for editors and printers.
Can’t remember who it was, but someone has already done the trick where every single printed copy of a book differs from all the others, for example in the order of the chapters, alternate versions or omissions of some of them, mutation of details like characters’ names, that sort of thing. I can think of even more experimental things to do 
A week of nothing, then suddenly I’m quoted three times in a row within an hour of each other. It’s like Mark Rylance’s movie career.
Hey, just be wildly wrong more often. Dopers will come out of the woodwork to correct you. (I’m not saying we’re like cockroaches; but I’m not not saying it either.)
I started in the days of typewriters. Retyping was an essential part of the process. Just about every writer above the level of hack rewrote and retyped. (Remember, clean copy was a necessity except for a few geniuses who could get away with it.)
Today’s university libraries are full of the papers of major authors and the jewels in their collections are the multiple drafts that got saved, so that the various changes can be studied. There are whole books tracking revisions.