If you were advising a budding writer about the career path . . . how would you tell them to start out?
Write and read. A lot. Don’t worry about publishing at first—spend a few years just writing. Discover if this is something you enjoy spending long periods of time doing, and see if you have the ability to make good habits and write consistently.
Writers have to be self-motivated, and you can’t be in it for the money. If you want to make piles of cash, go into programming or web design. Writers should write because they absolutely love it, and are willing to work long hours for potentially no pay just for the experience of writing. That isn’t to say you can’t make money at this; but in most cases, the money will be slow coming, and you will spend years writing before you are able to make a living at it.
Every person’s experience is different, but I wrote 13 novels across nearly ten years before I sold one. The best thing you can do starting off, in my opinion, is give yourself two or three years to just WRITE and practice. Read good books on writing (Stephen King’s is quite good) and read widely, looking for examples of good fiction that you admire within your genre, but also looking outside the genre to see what other writers are doing well. Try to incorporate that into your own writing, learning the craft and adapting what you learn to your own style. But mostly just write. A lot.
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