John Updike's advices for writers

1. Begin with a blind, innocent faith that you do have something to say. Most people who are failed writers are the ones who didn't push ahead with singlemindedness. They allow themselves to be deflected.

2. Try to read. To see what's been done in languages, so you don't repeat what has already been done as well as never can be done.

3. Don't begin the project until you have some sense of how it's going to end. I think there's too much writing done impossibly. We do need when we put a story down, a sense of author knew what he was doing. After all, that's what distinguished art from real world. We are not sure the real world knows what it's doing. But we do hope that in books, put in the hands of someone who would guide us along certain paths.

(source)

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