The One Piece of Advice Every Aspiring Author Needs to Know

If you are one of the millions of people who aspire to be a published author, I have some writing advice for you: never listen to writing advice.

Not that it’s easy to avoid. If you go on Twitter and follow the hashtag #amwriting you’ll get more unsolicited advice than you know what to do with. Do this, do that, don’t on any account do the other. Everyone it seems, has some rules for you to follow.

Which is hardly surprising, as literally almost everybody is writing a book. And I use the phrase “literally almost everybody” advisedly. At the BookExpo America conference in 2015, author Jane McGonigal claimed that 90 per cent of young people in the US say they want to write a book.

That’s a lot of potential authors… in fact, if my quick calculations are right, and we take “young people” to be up to the age of 24, that means 75.6 million young people in the States have aspirations to be novelists. That’s 10 million more people than the entire population of the UK, and doesn’t take into account all those over the age of 25. Which, in a country where the illiteracy rate is something like 14 per cent, is frankly astonishing.

And possibly crap. Here’s not some writing advice for you, but an honest-to-goodness law, as laid down by the science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon: 90 per cent of everything is crap. Curiously, that’s the same percentage as the young population of America which wants to write a book. And – though I have as much scientific backup for this as Sturgeon did for his law – the same percentage of writing advice, I’d warrant, that also qualifies as crap.

read more at independent.co.uk