Advice to would-be writers

All of the good advice that I know has been said already, hundreds of times, and published in a number of how-to-write books. Still, I’ve recently been asked to give talks at a local writer’s group, and it’s made me think about what advice I would give in general at this point, looking back over almost 40 years of writing and 35 years of being published. I've said a lot of this before, I'm sure.

1) Only take advice from the successful. It’s not that the unsuccessful migh...