Advice for aspiring authors

I have a few suggestions for aspiring authors. The first and most important thing I’d say is persevere. It takes a lot of time, effort and commitment to complete a book and a lot of resilience to see it through to publication, not to mention the knock backs along the way and afterwards. Two more things, (i) try and write something every day, it doesn’t matter how much, just so long as you’re making progress. (ii) Don’t keep going back to ‘perfect’ your first chapter(s) without continuing your writing. There will be plenty of time for editing later but if you keep trying to improve what you’ve already written then you won’t make progress and will most likely lose heart and never complete your work. It’s a long process and you need to know you’re making progress as an incentive to keep going.