I collected the following snippets of advice for writers. Just follow them all simultaneously to get published.
What is most important is the story, your voice, your imagination. The nuts & bolts of grammar come later.
Write from the soul, not from some notion about what you think the marketplace wants. The market is fickle; the soul is eternal.
You need to practice your craft and learn the tools of the trade. A good place to start is a creative writing group.
Rejections give you the opportunity to improve your work.
You may write if you don't network, but you're probably not going to be published. And you're probably not going to be as good a writer as you could be without it.
Writing is like everything else; ten percent inspiration or talent, and ninety percent hard work.
Read, read read. Read current titles as well, to get a sense of what today's editors seek. Study recent issues of publications that interest you. Keep an eye out for trends.
Lower your expectations. The happiest authors are the ones that don't expect much.
It is necessary for the writer to know what he wanted to say, in short, what he was talking about. As an exercise we were to try reducing the meat of our story to one sentence.
Forget the "creative writing" classes in school or college; if the writer is a good-selling professional he should be selling, not teaching, and if he isn't, he has nothing to teach you.
It is not remotely surprising, or improper, to find that publishers are 'obsessed with celebrity authors and "bright marketable young things" at the expense of serious writers.' Serious writers, in this context, I understand to mean that readily recognisable group of writers who take themselves far too seriously, who produce books which very few people want to read, much less buy, and who believe, wrongly, that the world owes them a living.
The best time to start promoting your book is three years before it comes out. Three years to build a reputation, build a permission asset, build a blog, build a following.
Be determined, and be thick-skinned. I collected rejection slips for 6 years before I finally sold my first short story.
Acceptance or rejection is not about you; it's about the text.
1. Marketing is important. If there's no market, there's no money (and writing is, after all, a job - a wonderful job, but a job nonetheless). 2. Know how to write. Really, it helps.
Writing is a job. It's a great job, but after you get over the thrill of publishing your first book, you realize if you're going to make a living you have to write another. And another. I support a family. And i don't do it by pretending writing is all about feeling the creative fairy dust drift over my soul while I sit in my ivory tower. It's bloody hard work. But I do what I love for a living and it pays.
I know a lot of people who have started to write novels, but the only people I know who have finished them belong to writers' groups. I think the primary benefit of degree and certificate programs and conferences lies less in the skills you learn than in the sense of connection to other writers.