I’ve got a couple really simple rules for most of the new writers that I work with: tell your story from start to finish, and tell it from the narrator’s point of view. That sounds obvious, right? Well you’d be amazed how much my writers hate to hear it. My dad wrote his first book [...]

Your job as a person is to examine and understand the world around you, to empathize with new people in a way that lets you see them as real people (not just extras in your life story), and to comprehend the short- and long-term ramifications of events both in and out of your control. Your job as a person (no matter who you are, or what you do) is to be an observer, a communicator, and a creator, and every moment you spend writing you’re working on those things. Usually you’re working on all of them on every page.