Goodreads asked Gloria Chao:

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

Gloria Chao 1. Celebrate every step! In a field full of inevitable rejection, no matter who you are, it’s important to celebrate when you can! I celebrated my first form rejection (as the Book Doctors say, “you can’t be a great writer until you’ve been rejected”). Then I celebrated my first personalized rejection, my first partial request, my first personalized rejection on material….you get the idea.

2. Start building your platform, website, and blog early. These things take a lot of time and it’s best to start as soon as you’re serious about writing. The Book Doctors recommend a year before your book may be published. An additional reason I’m glad I did this in hindsight is because there are some non-productive writing days. These are perfect for building your platform. Over the past couple years, I took needed breaks from writing and spent that time tinkering with my website, networking with other writers on Twitter, researching writing contests, and trying to find something to tweet or blog about.

3. There is no right way to write. Plotting is not better than pantsing or vice versa. Some writers like to move on to a new manuscript if the first one is not garnering attention, while others like to revise, revise, revise (I fall into the latter camp). There are lots of blog posts about “rules” of writing (never use another dialogue tag other than said, never bury your dialogue, etc) and while these posts are valuable and discuss great guidelines to follow, they are not hard rules. In most cases, they can improve your writing, but there are cases in which they can hurt, too. As someone who follows rules to a T, I learned this the hard way. For me, instead of Ctrl+F-ing every “explained,” “suggested,” and “argued,” I realized it was better for me to internalize the guidelines and have them in the back of my mind as I revised. Otherwise, I tended to take it too far.

4. When receiving feedback from critique partners and beta readers, figure out the why behind their words. Why isn’t this section working? Why are they turned off by this word, that action, this setting? Even if you don’t agree with their specific suggestion, it’s important to understand why they felt the need to comment. It often means something needs to be tweaked, perhaps not in the exact way they suggested, but tweaked nonetheless.

5. Even though it’s completely impossible, try (and fail) to keep yourself moving forward. Don’t look back and get caught up in things you should have done differently. I wasted too much time stressing about “mistakes” I had thought I made, many of which probably weren't mistakes anyway. It’s impossible not to feel like you messed up in this industry where hard decisions come at every turn (when is my manuscript done, when do I query, when do I stop querying, who do I query…) and there are no “right” answers. But it’s normal to freak out and you’re not alone.

6. There is more than one path to success. Don’t get hung up on other people’s journeys. Sometimes it can be inspiring to read success stories, but other times it can be difficult, especially after reading about five authors who nabbed an agent within 2 days with their first book that they wrote on a whim in one month. Remember that these stories are selecting on the dependent variable: often the writers most willing to share their stories are the ones who hit big success, fast. It takes a lot of bravery for someone who struggled for years and years to come forward and admit how hard it was for them. Don’t let the 1 in a million stories get you down or change your expectations.

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