From Nick Hornby in the The Believer (December, 2011):

One of the things that did me no good at all in the formative years of my career was prescriptive advice from established writers, even though I craved it at the time. You know the sort of thing: “Write a minimum of 15 drafts.” “A good book takes five years to produce.” “Learn Ulysses off by heart.” “Make sure you can identify trees.” “Read your book out loud to your cat.” I cannot tell an oak from another tree, the name of which I cannot even dredge up for illustrative purposes, and yet I got by, somehow. Walk into a bookshop and you wil see work by writers who produce a book every three months, writers who don’t own a TV, writers with five children, writers who produce a book every twenty-five years, writers who never write sober, writers who have at least one eye on the film rights, writers who never think about money, writers who, in your opinion, can’t write at all. It doesn’t matter: they get the work done, and there they are, up on the shelves. They might not stay there forever: readers now and way off into the future, make that decision.