Goodreads asked J.L. Forrest:

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

J.L. Forrest It's almost a cliché at this point: The only way to be a writer is to write. That, however, is not enough.

Yes, the self-publishing world has created a kind of democratization in writing; anyone can be published, and anyone can act like a trained critic, whether they've got the chops to critique others' work or not. I could sneak onto the field of a major league baseball team, throw a couple of pitches, and call myself a professional ballplayer too. The only person I'd be fooling, I hope, is myself.

Write. Then learn to write well. Read the classics, as many as you can. If you aspire to write genre fiction, read literature. Read nonfiction. Read everything. Learn to distinguish excellent style from hack nonsense.

Dream up stories. Write them down. Keep doing this over and over until some of them are good. Get your friends and family to read them and, unless they're giddily excited about at least one or two, keep writing new stories until they are.

Once you write a few good stories, write more. Share them with more and more people. Never stop this process until you are dead.

Then you're a writer.

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