Goodreads asked Mark Eisenzimmer:

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

Mark Eisenzimmer Just the other day I read that Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart each wrote hundreds (perhaps thousands) of pieces of music. Yet, out of those hundreds of pieces of music, each of them has maybe a couple of dozen that critics and ordinary music lovers consider works of genius.
The point is: these geniuses wrote a lot of crap before the good stuff came out, or maybe the good stuff was jammed here and there between the crap.
Maybe none of us will ever write a story that's on par with Beethoven's 9th Symphony, Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, or Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, but each of us will probably write a lot of crap before we get good enough to write something outstanding.
There's this idea out there that to get good at something, you have to do that something for about 10,000 hours. I don't know how many words that would add up to, but I don't think I'm there yet. What about you?

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