Goodreads asked Martyn V. Halm:

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

Martyn V. Halm Don’t write a book. Draft a story. Commit your story to paper or hard drive and pay no attention to the rules a book has to follow. When you’re finished telling your story, you have a rough draft.

The draft needs to be edited to be readable to outsiders. Get a good book on self-editing for fiction writers and follow the advice in how to improve your draft until it becomes a manuscript. Find people who are willing to read your manuscript and tell you where the story fails to engage them, so you can improve the manuscript until it’s worthy of publication.

And don’t forget to have fun while you’re doing this.

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