Goodreads asked Adam James:

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

Adam James The simple advice is to just write. Write about anything as much as you want. Always carry a little notebook and a pen wherever you go. Good ideas fly through you mind like a murder of crows. You gotta capture them and write them down right then, or they are gone forever. I come up with some of my best stuff in waiting rooms or just when I am out and about watching people and listening to conversations. There you get ideas and you develop a sense of how various kinds of folks talk and act.

Have a dialog with yourself and your characters. Write it all down. Now I find that I can let it flow by writing with a pen in a nice notebook. When writing on the computer I tend to want to edit and fix stuff right there and then. This interrupts the flow. Initially, don't worry about a thing. Just write your ideas as fast as possible. All this counts as "first draft" which will all need to be edited and rewritten anyway-thousands of times. That's just how it is. So get over it. I learned to self-edit when I was a technical writer and business analyst. As a writer of fiction or non-fiction pieces, you will want to work with a good editor. Ya gotta! No way around it. Appreciate what they have to say. Suck it up and deal with it. However, it is your work and you don't have to do what the editor says, simply because the editor says it. However, you do need to understand what the editor is saying and why. Then you can address what you are going to do. I am self-published, which means that I can do whatever I want. But you gotta watch out.

Here's something I heard a long time ago: Initially your piece is comprised of two stories. One is for you and the other is for the reader. During your editing, you need to identify all the stuff that you put in there for you, and get rid of it. This would include smartass remarks, pontificating, becoming overly political, etc. All that stuff interrupts the reader's flow of consciousness. This is often called the fictive dream, where you put the reader into a little bubble where the timing of your plotline and your choice of words in dialog and narrative just float the reader happily along without interruption. Read aloud what you have written. Listen to yourself.

Lastly, visualize everything in your story as much as possible. Make drawings, paintings. Find photos of scenes and character faces. Build storyboards. That's what I do. I am a visual thinker by nature. Maybe you are too.

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