Don't Encourage Them!

I think aspiring novelists need as much discouragement as we can muster. Nobody should undertake the life of a fiction writer--so monetarily unrewarding, so maddeningly beset by career vagaries--who has any other choice in the matter. Learn a trade! Flannery O'Connor said it best: "People are always asking me if the university stifles writers. I reply that it hasn't stifled enough of them."

Gerald Howard in Advice To Writers, edited by Jon Winokur, 1999