As a writer looking back on a long career – forty years, fifty-some books and counting – I have, as might be expected, hindsights. There are things I wish somebody had told me. So I’m telling you.

Back when I was first trying to get started, I wish I’d known I had the right to write. I was paralyzed until I decided to write fantasy so nobody could call me out. Maybe things are better now that female authors are studied in schools, girls have opportunities, etc. But I bet there are still young people out there who want to write but feel they lack any authority because they haven’t been abused or slept under bridges or lived with wolves or whatever. Hear ye, everyday persons: Just being human is enough. Just experiencing life in this world is enough. Let your eyes see, let your mind roam free, and write.

Another thing I wish I’d known: Form needs to come before technique. I learned this at an art show with a knowledgeable friend. We were looking at somebody’s pen-and-ink rendition of a very faulty nude, lovingly shaded. “Nice stippling,” she remarked, “but form needs to come before technique.” The artist had not mastered the structure of the human body before oozing technique all over it. Same here. Writing my first novel, I tried to imitate T.H. White’s use of anachronism. I would have done better to structure my story. To this day, I love experimenting with unusual viewpoints like, say, second person plural. I love to texture my prose by changing fonts. I love all the gimmicks: epistolary novel, or novel told in journal, or as e-mail, or by the dog. But before indulging in any such shenanigans, I must make sure I have a story structure: character, conflict, crisis, conclusion.

The next thing is milk it, and one of my early editors taught me that, though not in those words. He chose certain portions of the book (it was THE WHITE HART) and instructed me to lengthen them. The idea was to make the emotional high points of the book last longer for the reader, he told me. In brief, milk it. On another occasion he complimented me on my good pacing. What is pacing, I wanted to know? After a speechless moment of surprise that I had no idea what I was doing, he told me it was a matter of sensing how long to linger with a scene – say, dialogue -- before moving on to a different, maybe action scene. In other words, how long to milk it.

Yet another thing I wish I’d understood is the importance of a good idea. Somehow, maybe from being an English Literature major in college, I had glommed onto the notion that ideas were no big deal, that I could make any idea sparkle by the brilliance of my writing. Wrong. Those people who ask where you get your ideas are not clueless; it’s a legitimate question. A writer should know where s/he gets ideas; should know, for instance, how to turn a vague premise into a valid story idea. How two or more premises have to combine; if you have the metaphor, you have the story. (Ray Bradbury.) How to tell the difference between a good idea and a brain burp: one comes from the heart, the other from the head. Heartfelt ideas are usually winners, brain burps usually losers. Where do you get your ideas?

It took me a long time to find out the thing I’m going to tell you next: Editors and agents are very likely as confused as you are. They, like the writers you look up to, are floundering just as you are floundering, only at a slightly higher level. More often than not, revision letters give bad advice, but they do serve to tell the author where the problem areas are. I have encountered very few editors who are truly stupid, but also very few who really understand the writing process. So fix the manuscript your own way. Just make sure not to violate the integrity of the book. As for agents – overall, my agents have done tremendously well for me, but sometimes they drop the ball. So writers need to pay attention, because no agent or editor, however well intentioned, is as interested in the writer’s career as the writer is. Plus, these people are not one size fits all. Editors and agents have different ideas of good writing. For one editor, I include lots of “sense of place,” meaning description. For another, I pare the story to the bone. Both editors acquire books that sell sometimes, or not. Both are probably totally confused about the marketplace right now, and so, I dare say, is my very good agent, and so am I.

The last thing I’m going to tell you falls under the category of life conditions of which people say, “It is what it is.” Here’s the clincher: in my experience, sometime along the way, after you master the fundamentals of being a fiction writer, and after you achieve publication, you will reach a point where you find that you are on your own. You’re asking questions for which you can’t find the answers. You speak your needs but people do not understand them. At least that’s been my experience. About the same time I discovered I couldn’t always listen to editors or agents, I realized that other writers couldn’t necessarily give me good advice either. I wanted a group of writing chums like the Inklings, but I found I was on my own. Yet there’s a rather lovely paradox here: because my advice to you would be “Don’t necessarily take anybody’s advice, including mine,” then what I’ve just said may not be true for you. And if “it is what it is” isn’t, wow! Just wow.

Maybe that’s the last thing I should tell you: that “it is what it is” isn’t always.