"Celebrate everything. Probably seems like a strange writing tip, but in this business we take a lot of knocks and hard hits. It’s important to keep your spirits up, and one way to do that is to keep a bottle of champagne (or whatever you celebrate with) handy at all...
"The best tip given to me when I started my writing career is…BE PROFESSIONAL. From your first query letter to your follow-up thank you that you send after receiving a rejection. Publishers, editors, and reviewers will remember how professional you acted. You want...
"My advice is to give yourself permission to suck when you're generating the first draft. You can worry about making it beautiful and flawless in revisions, but the first draft isn't meant to be perfect. I know if I don't give myself permission to write dreck, my...
"My best advice if you're starting out is sit down and write a whole book from page one to the end. That will teach you more than anything else, wonderful as the resources available to a writer are. Don't listen to the siren call of a new idea when you hit the...
"My advice is to keep hope in the mail ie. always have more than one submission out with editors or agents at a time. If you receive a rejection, this means you'll still have another submission to pin your hopes on, and it will cushion your disappointment about the...
"Read everything you can, both inside and outside your genre." Visit Victoria Janssen's website at www.victoriajanssen.com Purchase Victoria's latest release, The Moonlight Mistress
"Editing: The most important thing you will ever do. I'm not kidding. First, self-edit. Find your style. Do you like to edit as you write? Do you prefer to finish the first draft and then go back and edit? Fine. The important thing is that you do it. You may scoff,...
"The best writing tip...hmmm. I guess it would be keep your head down and get the job done, first of all. You can't be published if you don't finish your book. Be ruthless. Pretty good books aren't going to sell, so dig deep. And have faith in yourself. No one was...
"Grammar matters. So does punctuation. Seriously, they do, and your future editors don't exist to fix them for you. Editors reject books that need basic grammatical polishing even if the story's good. But here's the awesome part. The correctness of grammar and...
