Don't try to guess what sort of thing editors want to publish or what you think the country is in a mood to read. Editors and readers don't know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, they're always looking for something new.

Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.

Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.

A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.

But nothing has replaced the writer. He or she is still stuck with the same old job of saying something that other people will want to read.

All your clear and pleasing sentences will fall apart if you don't keep remembering that writing is linear and sequential, that logic is the glue that holds it together, that tension must be maintained from one sentence to the next and from one paragraph to the next and from one section to the next, and that narrative - good old-fashioned storytelling - is what should pull your readers along without their noticing the tug.

I almost always urge people to write in the first person. ... Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.