Speed is not an indicator of quality in terms of fiction. That's true of one's relative slowness or swiftness - taking 10 years to write a book or taking 10 days to write a book (or a comic or a film or an angry postcard) guarantees nothing in terms of how good or how bad that story is.

The story goes that every Jedi constructs his own lightsaber, and every penmonkey constructs his own pen. Meaning, we all find our own way through this crazy tangle of possibility. This isn't an art, a craft, a career, or an obsession that comes with easy answers and isn't given over to bullshit dichotomies. We do what we do in the way we do it and hope it's right. Read advice. Weigh it in your hand and determine its value. But at the end of the day - and at the start of it - what you should be doing is writing. Because thinking about writing and talking about writing just plain isn't writing.

Characters exist in a flat line until we challenge them - sometimes they challenge themselves, sometimes they're challenged by other people, by nature, by robots, or by fungal infections in and around one's nether-country. Stories need conflict across the physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual spectra. Accidents, betrayals, cataclysm, desperation, excess - these are the letters in the alphabet of conflict.

Writing relies on very few things, my friend. All you need to write is your brain, a way to convey the story into existence (pen, computer, whatever), and a place in which to do it (office, kitchen table, lunar brothel).

Question the Chestnuts. Chestnuts: the new name for boobs? No. NO. Why would you even say that? Get your mind out of the gutter. No, by "chestnuts" I mean, "those old pieces of writing advice that you hear as common refrain." 'Write what you know.' 'Adverbs give Baby Jesus hemorrhoids.' 'If you write a prologue, an orphan loses his sight.' All the "old saws" need to be put on the chopping block.

When in doubt, the rule of threes is a rule that plays well with all of storytelling. When describing a thing? No more than three details. A character's arc? Three beats. A story? Three acts. An act? Three sequences. A plot point culminating in a mystery of a twist? At least three mentions throughout the tale. This is an old rule, and a good one. It's not universal - but it's a good place to start.

You can feel good about failure. Failure means you did something. You finished the story even if it wasn't what you'd hoped. Failure means you're learning. Growing. Doing.