Writing Well (Stay out of the rut)
Beware of the Earnest Rut. Good writers who take their work seriously and try hard to write well can fall into a rut of being somewhat well respected but not particularly successful. You wind up writing stories that get accepted to a few litmags or maybe a novel that 15 people have actually read (if you are lucky). You want to avoid writing to be popular as well, which is not unlike sucking dick in a public-toilet stall, meaning soul-killing and dirty. You need to figure out what it that you like about your favorite author's work and purify it, boil it down till it becomes a more potent form. Isolate the good stuff and concentrate it till you find your own formula. Ignore the people in your writer's group.
You have to understand, few people actually enjoy reading these days. For the most part books have just become a slightly more difficult form of TV. the idea is that for a book to be any good it has to be easy to read and have a murder in it, preferably a serial killer and a team of forensic experts.
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