Goodreads asked Sandra L. Rostirolla:

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

Sandra L. Rostirolla Many aspiring writers say to me, "I have an idea for a story, I just don't know where to start." When I workshopped the screenplay version of CECILIA in the Australians in Film's Writers Room, one of my peers inquired as to where I got the idea to start the story with a young woman in a forest watching as a deer foraged on fiddleheads. My answer was simple. Act I of the ballet that inspired my novel was titled: "Cecilia in Plockton". When I thought about what Cecilia would be doing in Plockton, this image was the first one that came into my head, so I wrote it down. From there, the next image followed, then the next and so on.

New or aspiring writers are notorious for editing themselves before they even write a single word. My advice is to not double question the image in your head. Put it on paper and trust that the words for the next image will come. After all, as Stephen King points out, there's only one way to write a book - one word at a time.

I also tell aspiring writers that if they don't believe me, maybe they'll believe George RR Martin. He once got an image of a young boy watching his father behead a man. The image wouldn't leave him, so he wrote it down. This simple act of putting an image to paper spawned one of the best fantasy series ever and a brilliant HBO show.

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