There are a few key actions you must take regularly to build and sustain a writing life.

1)   You must—it seems obvious, and yet—you must write.

2)   You must then, after a time, reread what you write and make it better. Other eyes are helpful in this process, some would say absolutely necessary. But your fresh eyes, at any rate, are required. Your willingness to return to the vision and labor over it, erasing the mistakes, erasing the effort itself, in favor of the story on the page.

3)   And then you must test the work on the world. Not right away, not without the vacations from it and the visits to it, renewed, not without testing it first on yourself and on some other folks. But eventually, it must travel.

4)   You must learn to take “no” as a sign that you are on this path. It’s a path littered with “nos.” Your favorite authors, the books you cannot live without, heard these nos, too. Again and again. This is the path. Call it “No Man’s Land.” Call it “The Way of Those Who No.” Just get on it and start collecting your nos. Think of them as gold coins with which you can buy a yes.

5)   You must return again, the very next day, to the writing itself. To the words on the page, the stories you have to tell, the no’s your characters face and the ways they fight those nos. To the world of no’s your readers live in, a world in which what you write may be the balm, the saving grace, of a yes.