6. What's your best advice for a writer?Read the complete Q & A.
Don't listen to me would be my advice...7. No really. One thing?
All right...read. Immerse yourself in reading the kind of writing you're doing. Writing screenplays? Read them, & watch movies. Constantly. Writing a memoir, read them. Writing poems, read them--& not just the latest National Book Award finalists or whatever is fadish--the Bread Crumb Prize Winner for Best Decolotage Ficton. Follow the trail: If you like writer X, see who writer X read, then read that writer. And so on. There you have it, one thing: Read. The ratio between what you read & what you write will be enormously imbalanced. More reading compared to less writing. And yet--let me contradict myself--write more, too.
Read--or listen to David Biespiel read--the poem, "Though Your Sins Be Scarlet."
--Marshal Zeringue