You refer, somewhat illusively, to your “dreadful” first attempts at writing. How old were you when you wrote your first story?
I was, oh, 15, but I don’t count that. When I’m talking about my dreadful stuff, I’m talking about my first serious attempt when I started when I was 19. Those were still bad, but that’s when I first considered myself a writer. I think anyone you go to is going to have a story they wrote when they were 15 in creative writing class. The point is, I was still bad when I decided, “I’m going to be a writer.”
It takes time to learn to do this right. I spent 10 years figuring it out before I sold anything. That’s consistently true across the board. Writers spend a decade figuring this out before they really start to get good. Whether they do it like J.K. Rowling did where they pick one story and slave over it for 10 years, or if they do what I did and write book after book trying to improve with each one. You find people divided along that line doing different things. It’s not something you figure out immediately, for most of us.
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