Maybe it’s just that time of year or something, but over the last few weeks I’ve received several emails from high school and college students who want to talk turkey about writing as a career. That’s cool. I’m happy to talk about it. But I often come away from these interviews/conversations feeling like I’ve discouraged the writer-in-training, and that’s not my intent.

Here’s the thing — it doesn’t matter what creative pursuit you’re chasing. To succeed as a creative professional you must permanently exist in a state of contradictions. You must simultaneously and thoroughly believe that you’re brilliant and unstoppable, but you’re ignorant and clueless. There’s no substitute for bull-headed persistence, just as there is no substitute for humility in the face of (informed, intelligent) critique.

The trick comes in balancing your pride with the absolute certainty that you have infinite room for improvement. You’ve got to be stubborn and self-confident enough to keep plugging away at it, but smart enough to learn from people who are wiser and more talented than yourself.*

That’s all there is to it, really. That’s the best observation I can offer.

So now I’ll conclude with a smidge of advice, since these undergraduate interviews always close by asking for some: Nothing will improve your output like improving the quality of your input. If you’re a writer, this means reading better books. Read lots of them. Eventually it’ll sink in. Yes, there’s more than one way to do it right; but there are more than a billion ways to fuck it up royally.