These are definitely rules to live by so I copy them here to refer to again and again.
1. Stop writing to impress your Lit 400 prof. Readers can smell it from the first sentence, and the last thing your lit teacher wants to see is a successful student. It's the most jealous profession on earth.
2. Write every day. Only hacks write when the spirit moves them.
3. Finish the goddamn book. Every year I meet maybe twenty people writing novels and not one of them has ever finished one. That's three hundred novels across fifteen years. Finish the book and you're practically published already.
4. Getting published doesn't change your life. If you're writing because you think being published will change your life in some way, stop immediately, because nothing changes.
5. Do you sound like yourself? If a committee of people who know you were given a thousand samples of writing and were asked to tell which one was yours, could they do it? If not, keep working.
"Five Rules for Writers" by Douglas Coupland can be found in Writer's Gym: Exercises and Training Tips for Writers, Eliza Clark (2007).
