Excerpt from an interview with Dustin Long, author of Icelanders:
What tips would you give to aspiring writers?
This has been true for me, at least: If you want to write novels, write novels. By this I mean two things.
- Don’t concentrate on writing short stories, thinking you’ll build up to a novel. They’re completely different animals. I still can’t write short stories very well, and I don’t feel that writing one has ever taught me much about the craft of writing a novel.
- Actually write a whole novel. Don’t begin a novel, decide it’s bad, and then begin another one. Finishing a novel, however bad, taught me much more about novel-writing than beginning a novel ever did.
Taken from an 8/31/06 interview at Notes of a Defeatist.