Also read a lot, build up a library of thoughts

As I always say, good artists borrow, great artists steal

Keep writing and producing crap. Over time you will improve. Finish what you start. Even if it’s shit. A finished shitty story is a million times better than a “good” one that never gets completed.

Dialogue is key. Pay close attention to dialogue

Read your dialogue aloud. Does it feel like a natural thing to say, given the circumstances? Do your characters sound consistently like themselves? When your characters talk to each other, do they sound like separate people with unique experiences and perspectives?

write lots of really short things, like < 5 pages or something. i think the short length helps you focus and nail down story structure + flow, plus finishing stuff feels good. you can always iterate and add on to something later when its done, or redo the entire thing but make it longer later

I find it helps a lot to plan. Try to figure your story out before you begin. You can always change your plans later.

For me, writing early in the morning with coffee and trance-inducing music makes things much easier. Lock yourself out of the internet, put your phone in a place that’s difficult to get to.

Publish your work. There’s no such thing as objective feedback. Everyone has some kind of bias. People who actually spend money on your work want to like it, otherwise they feel like chumps. In my experience, writers and editors criticize a lot more than general readers. When I read really popular and successful novels, I can’t believe how lazy they are, for lack of a better word (although many of them are still entertaining). A lot of successful writers seemingly barely edit their work at all (they go through it once or twice), while writing teachers will insist that you spend ten years driving yourself insane “honing” a piece of fiction that has a 99% chance of going absolutely nowhere, not because of your skill, but simply because thousands of books and stories are published every second, and how many of them achieve any kind of prominence? Write quickly. Crank your shit out, publish it, learn what you can, and move on to the next project. Take down ideas for projects so you always have something to work on. These days because of my job I can usually only crank out a few pages a day. This still results in me publishing about two books per year.

Politics is essential to writing. Show, don’t tell is CIA bullshit. There’s plenty of liberal and fascist slop out there, but not a lot of communist slop, especially in English. A lot of the communist fiction that exists is also depressing or defeatist. I try to be subtle about the politics in my writing, but I find that people still easily figure it out. There’s no fooling them. I feel like a lot of readers can sense that there is something different about my work, but they can’t even put their finger on it because they’ve never encountered the dialectical materialist style. The ideological realm is another front of class struggle.

The rule with reviewers is that if they all mention one specific issue with your story, then it’s probably a problem. But if liberals are complaining about the communism in your story, does that mean your communism is a problem? (No, fuck 'em.) The reviewers that truly drive me crazy are the ones who hate your story only because of its politics, but pretend that other issues, always vaguely described, are the real problem.

It’s pretty normal to dislike your work when you look back on it. Hopefully this is because we are constantly growing as writers. It makes me nuts when people tell me they like my older books rather than my newer ones. (I think this is common for lots of artists of all kinds.) Are we actually improving, or do we just desperately want to believe that we are improving?