Practice Makes Permanent

If you say you want to be a writer, people will tell you to write. That’s sound advice. Writers write shit. But what a lot of folks fail to mention is that there are plenty of people writing hundreds of thousands of words a year who just keep writing the same shitty words, the same shitty books, the same shitty unpublished (and sometimes published) shit. They never get any better. It’s just churn. They stagnate.

Back at Clarion, Carol Emshwiller said something I didn’t really understand at the...