Cory Doctorow's Advice

How did you become a writer? When I was six, my dad took me to see STAR WARS. In 1977, kids weren't exposed to a lot of complex narrative. There wasn't cable, there weren't VCRs. I'd never experienced a story with nonlinear telling, multiple PoVs, etc. It set my brain a-fizz. I rushed home, stapled together some scrap paper, and trimmed it to approximately mass-market size. Then I wrote out the Star Wars story, as best as I could remember it, over and over, like a kid practicing scales. It felt *amazing*. I declared on the spot that I would be a writer.

When I was 12, I wrote a fanfic Conan novel. Again, it felt *great*.

At 16, I started sending my stories to magazines. At 17, I sold one.

At 26, I sold one to a "pro" market. At 32, my first novel came out.

At 36, I quit my day-job.

If there's one thing that made me a "writer" and not just a guy who manages to turn out some fiction now and again, it was getting into the habit of writing every day, whether I felt "inspired" or not.

People had told me that this was important all my life, but it took me about 15 years to actually take it seriously and realize how magic it was.


Write every day. Habits are things you get for free, without requiring any special work. Set a daily word target. Make it small. 75 words a day is a novel a year. Finish in the middle of a sentence, so you can type three or four words the next day without having to be "creative." Don't get in the habit of only writing when there's some ritual that's been satisfied -- the right music, a clean apartment, whatever.

Especially don't get in the habit of writing while smoking or boozing. Don't hook the thing that makes you sane and whole to something that's killing you. Write even when you feel like it's shit. You can't tell what's good and what's bad while you're writing it. Don't ever rewrite until the whole thing is done. Once you start thinking about what you're writing, you lose the ability to stop writing it.

http://www.advicetowriters.com/interviews/2012/4/5/cory-doctorow.html