Lisa Gabriele
National Post
Thirteen ways of becoming an author:

1. Start small. Put aside a few words every week. Whatever you can afford. Words you won't miss. After a while, you'll have a few hundred words, then before you know it, you'll have a few thousand, and then suddenly you will have a book. Hopefully a good one that you can retire on. Writing a second book is really hard, and inadvisable.

2. Write what you know. But be careful. Just because you know To the Lighthouse by heart does not mean you should write that book. Somebody else already did.

3. If you hit a writer's block, stop and take a break. Try to keep breaks under ten years in length.

4. Have a muse. If none is apparent, hire one from the back pages of your local urban weekly magazine. Get a receipt.

5. Start young. God, not too young. But ask yourself, "Is 35 considered young, anyways?" Then stop worrying because it is so not young.

6. If you are going to write a memoir, ensure that you were wonderfully poor, or terribly rich, or survived a brutal war (domestic ones, especially) and, in the end, you came out pretty much OK. If the above criteria do not apply to you, write of baseball.

7. Good luck with the sex scenes. Again, write what you know (hee hee).

8. Stay away from ghostwriters. They don't really exist.

9. Get an agent. Thank the agent in your book.2