Looking back on your career as a writer, what is the most fundamental piece of advice you wish you had known about – or that you had taken to heart – when you set out to become a writer?
Before you answer, please note the career tag and the absence of the fiction tag. The question is intentionally not limited to a specific kind of writing, but to writing in general. I'm not asking how to write, but how to approach writing, if you want to make it your profession, or work on a professional level.
After reviewing the current answers, I have found that many of them agree with each other and give the same basic advice. I have ordered and summarized the points I have found in my answer to the meta discussion page for this question.
Answer
To me, Stephen King's advice (as seen in a live interview, and asked what advice he had for aspiring writers):
Basically he said, if you want to write, write. Every day. Don't worry about plotting, or any other technical details. That will come, write a story, then write another. Write every day (he does, including his birthday, Christmas, 365 days a year, but he takes breaks between books). If you love writing, then you will learn those technicalities when you realize your story isn't working.
(King is a discovery writer, btw.)
He goes on to make a sharp observation, in my view: That most people that claim they want to be writer are fooling themselves, because what they want is To Have Written. "They want this," he says, waving at the set and his interviewer. The interviews on TV, the book signings, the money from a best-seller, but they don't actually love writing for its own sake. So they will not succeed as a writer, because you cannot fail for years and book after book doing work you don't really love, and that is what it will take, before you are good enough to make any kind of living [in fiction]. And if you don't love writing you just aren't going to learn what you need to get better, even if you put in those years.
King says that before he sold Carrie he was not thinking that all his time would be wasted if he never sold anything. Writing fiction was his pastime, it was fun, and if he only entertained himself by getting his imagination on paper that would be fine. And that is the way to approach writing: Do it because you like it, you like crafting a story, and it entertains you. Stick with it and you will get better. But if you think the only reason to write is for the money you hope to get and would feel like you wasted your time if your story doesn't make a dime, then you should probably quit now, because if you cannot write for it's own sake you shouldn't be trying this profession.
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