Elizabeth J. Rekab
I'm not sure how much my advice is worth at this point given I've only just released my debut. But I have been writing for years regardless, and one of the best pieces of advice I was given was that you can edit a bad page, but you can't edit a blank page.
It's perfectly fine for a first draft to be a pile of garbage because I guarantee there are still pieces of gold scattered around inside that garbage. It's up to you to find those pieces of gold, polish them, and start weeding them out from the empty snack bags and tissues and apple cores until all you're left with is a pile of gold. That's what the subsequent drafts are for.
The second most important piece of advice? Just keep going. Keep reading; read a lot and read often. Keep writing, keep practicing, keep honing your craft, and never ever give up. I don't plan to.
It's perfectly fine for a first draft to be a pile of garbage because I guarantee there are still pieces of gold scattered around inside that garbage. It's up to you to find those pieces of gold, polish them, and start weeding them out from the empty snack bags and tissues and apple cores until all you're left with is a pile of gold. That's what the subsequent drafts are for.
The second most important piece of advice? Just keep going. Keep reading; read a lot and read often. Keep writing, keep practicing, keep honing your craft, and never ever give up. I don't plan to.
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