Goodreads asked Greg Barth:

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

Greg Barth Read a lot. Read everything you can. Watch a lot of movies. Study the movies you like best. You can learn much about pacing and how to build a scene from watching a good movie. And then I would say let yourself go wild as you write. Hold nothing back. You must first entertain yourself. If you are not enjoying it, then it will be a chore for your readers. Think of a few big, exciting scenes that you can write toward. As you are doing this, if you find yourself writing a scene that is not as much fun as the one you can't wait to get to, stop and ask yourself how you can make this scene interesting and the best it can be. You want the reader flipping the pages and not being bored. And then seek to elicit emotion in your readers. Your audience wants to feel something--pain, jealousy, satisfaction, turned on, angry, love--anything, when they read your story.

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