Dedicated to every young person who loves language, literature, wordcraft, and writing. I know you’re out there. I know you’re listening. If you’ve found your way to this article, please consider the following advice carefully. Implement it religiously. It’ll save you a lot of time and aggravation, and when you are older, you will hopefully not be plagued by the same regrets I have.

Keep track of everything you write. Name it meticulously. File it meticulously. This will save you much trouble in the future. You know that masterpiece you just wrote? Fifteen years from now, the file name iwrotethiswhileiwasdreaming_final in a sub-folder labeled with the year and maybe a pencil emoji, if you’re lucky, might mean something to you, but more likely, it won’t. I am guilty of horrible file-keeping practices on my own computer. Don’t be me. Be yourself instead.

Keep track of every book you read. You will not regret this, and future historians will thank you if and when you become a best-seller. Your future self will thank you, too. This is a great way to keep track of what is inspiring you. Looking back many years from you, you will often see a correlation between what you read and what you Write. For each book, keep track of the following metrics:

• Date read
• Title of Book
• Author
• Genre
• Rating (out of 5, or 10, or some other consistent number)
• Whether or not you’d recommend the book to a good friend
• A short summary

Keep track of how many words you write. They tell you your first million words will be rubbish. They’re right. You’re Young. You’ll recognize that feeling of grappling for the right words, a shiny new turn of phrase, the perfect metaphor for such and such a character as they Fall in love, or worse, fall out of it. You’ll look for the perfect words to express just how the light glints off the water, or falls in dapple patterns beneath a beloved tree on a still and windless day. You’ll also recognize the frustration that arises when your words fall short. It gets better with time, I promise. And by time, I mean it gets better with practice. Lots of it. Write daily, if you can. Even if you are just journaling, get some words on a page.

When you are ready to send your work out into the world, keep careful track of where you submit to. You’ll want to mark off each time you are rejected (and you will get rejected) and you’ll want to know where to withdraw your simultaneously submitted work from when you inevitably get your very first acceptance, and the one after that, and the next one after that, etc. You can do this through an Excel spreadsheet, or through a service like Duotrope.

Let me know if this has helped you in any way!