This is a question I hear fairly often, and I’m afraid I have either a short answer or a very long one. The short one is: I’ve never taught creative writing; I haven’t taken a creative writing class since 1982, so please I'm afraid you shouldn't look to me for too much wisdom.

The long answer is that while I don’t have much wisdom, that doesn’t keep me from having a lot to say. I’ve been giving this question a fair amount of thought over the past few days, and here, in a very large nutshell, is what I have to offer:

WRITE

Write anything. As I said, I haven’t taken a creative class since in twenty-five years. But in that quarter century (and yes, that does make me feel ancient, thank you very much) I’ve written a gazillion research papers for high school, college and grad school; I edited two books; I wrote museum wall plaques; I wrote several installation manuals for a manufacturing company; I copy-edited magazine ads; I wrote grant proposals for an architectural firm; I wrote a catalog for a pool-supply company; I wrote ten screenplays, with multiple drafts of each script; I wrote many, many letters to the editor, most unsent, the rest unpublished . . . the fact is, I wrote a lot. And every single one of these experiences made me a better writer. The ability to write clear, compelling prose crosses every discipline (except maybe legal writing, but that’s another story). If you can explain how to assemble a gizmo so that anyone could follow your written directions, you’re that much better off the next time you to have to compose a descriptive paragraph.

So write. Write a letter to the editor every week, and try to get it published. Write for your school newspaper, yearbook, clubs. Write a blog. Write a screenplay (my own favorite writing experience). It won’t be very good – mine were horrible at first, then with experience they became slightly less horrible – but I learned so much. Get a job with a business – a realtor, say – writing descriptions. Write for the local paper. If you wanted to become an amazing runner, how would you start? By running, duh. Same applies here.

READ

Of course you should read the type of books you’d like to write, but I recommend reading them several times. The first time is for the story, but then return to the book and savor the author’s accomplishment. How did the author build suspense, create romance, construct sympathetic characters? What about the dialog appeals to you? Is there anything you’d change? (No book is perfect, even if it’s been published.) Writers learn from other writers.

LISTEN

I say this over and over and over again – mainly because it took so many years for the truth to sink into my thick skull – but the criticism that you receive, painful as it may be to hear, will only make your writing better. If a reader doesn’t understand what you’re trying to say, it’s because you’re not writing clearly enough. (Or because the reader is insane, in which case you made a poor choice of readers, but that circumstance is more uncommon than you’d think.) Anyone who makes the effort to think about your writing – to question a particular word, to wonder about dialog, to scratch their head at your conclusion – must be taken seriously. Trust me, it’s far easier for a reader to mutter “oh, it’s fine,” and be done with it. That’s what someone who doesn’t care would tell you.

This isn’t to say that listening to criticism is a trip to Disneyworld. It stinks. Even when you’re an official grown-up published writer, it stinks. I have on many occasions thought horrible thoughts about my editor and her awful, mean, cruel comments. Luckily I’ve kept these thoughts to myself until I calmed down enough to recognize that her questions and suggestions were actually quite brilliant, and they made my writing much, much better. So listen.

DISCARD

It’s such a thrill to write something and say, “Look! I wrote it! It’s done!” Unfortunately the act of putting words down on paper, or typing them onscreen, is only the first step. What really matters is the far more painful process of editing those words. And a huge part of editing, I’m sorry to say, is throwing some of those words away. Including – especially including – the words you like most. One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was to erase my favorite sentence. At first I thought that was crazy, but then I noticed how often I wrote myself into a literary pretzel to save that one precious little morsel. If preserving this morsel becomes the least bit stressful, toss it. Or don’t toss it but simply put it in a “prose I still love” file (I keep one of them going all the time), so that losing it won’t be quite so painful. Trust me, you’ll go back in a few weeks’ time and discard it without a second thought.

On a related note, in college I finally figured out that I should discard the first paragraph of my papers. That paragraph always ended up being a warmup, really, that didn’t help the overall argument. In graduate school, I learned to throw out the first chapter. And guess what? I threw out the first chapter of Dairy Queen (not without prodding, to be sure), and then I threw out the first chapter of Princess Ben. So it’s not like this advice ever becomes irrelevant.

STUDY

Millions of Americans don’t know its from it’s, or there from their, and they’re fine with it. But those of us who do often care intensely about these differences, just as we care that the first-person singular pronoun should always be capitalized, that the word your’e doesn’t exist, and that participles should never dangle. Learning the rudiments of grammar and spelling will only work to your advantage. This doesn’t mean you have to turn into William Safire, heaven forbid, but the more you know about these writing fundamentals, the better off you’ll be on any job you eventually acquire (and the smarter you’ll sound in your emails now).