Jamie Ford, the bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, when asked “What holds back most beginning writers and what they should do to make it better?”
“Two things. One: Giving up too easily. So many aspiring writers give up after one failed attempt, or one workshop experience where their work isn’t feted and praised … Two: Not knowing when you should give up. Some writers will rehash a story for years and years, cutting, editing, and rewriting until their once-hopeful story is now just a mass of scar tissue. Like Frankenstein–bits and pieces of cadaverous ideas sewn and bolted together, and even if you jolt it to life, it’s just going to stagger around and break things. It’s okay to give those stories a good Viking funeral and move on to the next story idea.”
