Goodreads asked Cynthia Raleigh:

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

Cynthia Raleigh A couple of things come to mind right away. As someone who started writing after houses, children, and jobs, I had to learn to battle through doubts and obstacles to writing created by a lifetime of not writing. In my experience, routines needed to be changed and time reallocated before I found what I could make work for me. I quickly realized that instead of plonking my rear end down to write, I was identifying many things that "required" doing first, but they didn't and those things will never be appeased. I worked on knowing what I really did need to do first and moving everything else down the list.

Second is a very valuable piece of advice I took from many other writers. Write even when you don't know what you want to say or how the story will progress. Get something on the page, anything. Spruce it up later. For me, writing a couple of pages would often clarify what I did not want to say and led me in the direction I did want to go. The initial few minutes can be grueling, but stick it out.

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