9. Write that "million words of crap"; give yourself six years to get published; collect 250 rejections, etc etc..This advice is much like another piece of bad advice—buy pants with a 36-inch waist. Well, the plurality of people wear 36-inch pants, so... Outside of the basic advice of "Try, and a significant number of times", any specific measure is foolish and leads to aggravation. [...] This is how the Soviet Union ended up making tractor engines so heavy they'd fall out of the machines—they measured factory productivity via tonnage produced per year. Any advice that involves anything other than "Write something publishable, attempt many times to get it published" can lead to artificial goals such as the collection of rejection slips or the production of unpublishable stories.
The same is true about other "advice" like—write short stories first, writer shorter short stories rather than long ones, join a writer's group, make sure your characters are likable, write/don't write for the "market", etc. All of this is "buy typical pants" advice.
http://nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com/1732344.html
