Goodreads asked Sandy McIntosh:

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

Sandy McIntosh Some years ago, a friend announced that he would like to be a writer. He asked me what would he have to do? I thought about it a little and told him that he’d have to write something.

“Oh,” he said, fading.

And that was the end of that for him.

If you’ve already decided to write something then I would suggest you make a study—really, a life-long study—of the books in your genre written throughout history. As writers, we are part of the dialogue of books already written. When you read a book you may not be aware that you are evaluating it as part of this ancient dialogue, but you are. The more you read the more you understand what has already been written and what may be left for you to write. Without doing a lot of reading you’re bound to re-invent the wheel, so to speak, which, unless you’ve taken quite an extraordinary angle on it, will get you nowhere in the end.

But whatever you write, you must be genuinely enthusiastic about it, if you’re going to hold another reader’s attention. If you think you’re writing something important but are bored stiff with it, how would you expect a stranger to be excited by it? It doesn’t work like that. You have to be your own best audience. You have to be able to come back to your story or poem or novel and reread it after some time. At that point, if you surprise yourself and think “Hey! This isn’t bad,” then you’ve got somewhere.

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