Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone.
Tell the story that's been growing in your heart, the characters you can't keep out of your head, the tale story that speaks to you, that pops into your head during your daily commute, that wakes you up in the morning.
Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college.
If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?
I was an English major in college, took a ton of creative writing courses, and was a newspaper reporter for 10 years.
