Goodreads asked Stephen Burckhardt:

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

Stephen Burckhardt Just start writing. Even if for right now it's just for yourself. Get a blog site and just start writing about something, anything. I work as a journalist for a while and that really helps you to focus on facts. You learn how to give a lot of information in a short space. I think my journalism writing classes were much more beneficial to me as a creative writer than any of the creative writing classes I ever took in college. To be honest, I thought my creative writing teacher was kind of an ass. He told me to never write surprise endings because the audience hates them. I asked him if he had ever seen Psycho or The Sixth Sense. There was one assignment he gave where you had to pick an author and write about them. I choose Madeline L'Engle. He told me I couldn't write about her because she was a children's author. I told him she is mostly famous for being the author of children's books but she had written mostly adult books in her career. He still told me no. I wrote about her anyway and he ended up giving me an A and had to admit that she was much more than just a children's author. (check out her books on here Goodreads and Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Madeleine-LEngl...). My point for telling that story is to say don't take no for an answer. If you know you are right, prove it. If someone rejects you, go to someone else. If you know your work deserves to be read, do what you have to to get it in the hands of readers.

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