1. If you don't love it, or need it like heroin, leave it.

2. Writing is a trade, not a profession. No exam can make you a writer. No diploma can make you an author. You become the former, and perhaps the latter, only through experience, thought, and hard work (please don't take "hard" to be an antonym for "fun" or "satisfying"). Writing's like carpentry; only the native genius can create a Stickley right off. You'll be lucky to make a pinewood racer or a bird feeder at first. Publication only comes at the end of a long, hard road.

3. Publication is also the beginning of a whole new longer, harder road. To quote Anne Lamott: "...(unpublished writers) believe that if they do get published, a wonderful new life is in store. It will turn out that deep down they are really valuable people and will have lots of money from now on and really cool people like Ethan Hawke will be dropping by all the time. But it's a lie. Being a published writer will make them long to be ONLY as mentally ill as they are now. Their current level of obsession and doubt and self-loathing will look like the good old days. Honest."

4. The alternative to the above three is to be, sleep with, or murder a celebrity. I leave it to you to decide which is more rewarding in the long run.

5. Anyone who claims to have all the answers wants money from you.

6. Money flows to the writer.

7. Read 6 again. The only possible exception to 5 is a good book doctor, and one should only be consulted if you are selling fiction already and have no idea why this particular manuscript keeps getting rejected.

8. There's nothing wrong with writing only for yourself, your friends, or a select group of perverts on the internet. However, most of us get a special thrill from being published. Besides, its the only way you'll get into the best barroom bitch sessions. Nobody slings the bull and vitriol over distilled beverages like published authors and their editors, and they don't sell tickets to these kind of performances.

9. Be a bipedal sponge as you walk through life. Absorb faces, places, sounds, smells, turns of phrase, modes of dress, banal advertising, lunchcounter wisdom, the garish, the outré, and the pathetic.

10. Make time for a little music. I don't have any evidence to support my opinion, but I believe good music and good writing gets twisted and linked at the synaptic level like a ball of mating snakes.

11. Learn your markets. Submitting inappropriately wastes everyone's time and money.

12. Don't agonize while a manuscript is on an editor's desk. Work on your next project.

13. Carry a notebook and pen everywhere, including (technology permitting) the bathtub. Ancient Chinese Secret: "The palest ink is superior to the finest memory."

14. You are human, and therefore a creature of habit. Establish good work habits and you'll be astonished at your output. Plus your agent (who works on commission) will love you, assuming that you sell consistently.

15. Think of it as a job, or a home-based business. You'll have to deal with taxes and marketing and accountants and expenses and depreciation and financial planning. Put in the kind of hours you'd put in starting up a business with you as sole proprietor. Keep track of what money is coming in and especially what money is going out.

16. Meet deadlines and other contractual obligations cheerfully. If you can't, let your editor and agent (if you have one) know as soon as you have serious doubts -- cheerfully, if possible.

17. Don't let the bastards -- and you'll meet a few, sure as sunrise -- get you down. The good guys outnumber them. Always have, always will. (I stole that one from John Wayne.)

18. You are a person. Your work is a pile of paper with words on it. Know the difference. At most, the relationship between writer and writing should be a symbiotic.

19. Drafting and editing are planter and combine -- two different pieces of machinery. Let the first finish its job, then wait a few weeks before you gas up the second.

20. Try not to spend too much time looking at Stephen King or Sue Grafton's latest deals at Publisher's Lunch. Like the people in the weight loss commercials, their results are not typical.

21. Read widely. Odd factoids disappear into your brain and then bubble up unexpectedly joined to others, like a wooly mammoth emerging from a tar pit with a pair of longjohns hung on its tusk.

22. Pay it forward. Over your career, if you are either lucky or very skilled, you'll be helped -- probably more than once -- by professionals who mysteriously decide to allocate a portion of their valuable time to you. There's no way for you to pay them back, barring a line or two on the dedication page, so take a tip from Robert A. Heinlein and give generously of your time and experience to the generation following.