Goodreads asked P.J. MacNamara:

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

P.J. MacNamara This is a tough question. I've been writing since 1983 and, apart from a couple of poems in the 1980s, I've never had anything published until now. I have perhaps been too unwilling to compromise, And I have definitely not submitted frequently enough because I find it very irksome when an agent hangs on to your work for nearly three months and then rejects it without a single word of explanation. Having said that, if I hadn't been snubbed and had the door slammed in my face so many times I never would have set myself the task I did. I went from poetry to songs to screenwriting to non-fiction, dipping into prose several times along the way, trying to second guess the market to some extent, trying to give them what they seemed to want without completely sacrificing my artistic visions, and it was only when I completely failed at everything and convinced myself (partially) that I really didn't care whether my work was ever read, let alone recognised by the world at large, only when I forgot about all the petty, annoying "rules" I'd been trying to follow, that I came up with something really original that I was really proud of and is now finally going to be available for real people to buy in real shops.

Does that actually count as advice? Perhaps not. So I'll end with this, that definitely is: Unless you have good reason to believe you are accidentally duplicating another author's work, don't take too much notice of what other people in your field are doing. If you're not careful you'll do a lot more reading than writing and you'll get so paranoid and depressed you ultimately might not want to write at all. There is a lot of competition out there, but THERE IS ONLY ONE YOU. You are unique, and somehow you need to turn that to your advantage.

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