Here are some potential impediments for you to forget<br>about:<br><br>First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit<br>will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will<br>help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't<br>Habit is persistence in practice.<br><br>Forget talent. If you have i, fine. Use it. If you dort have it,<br>it doesn't matter. As habit is more dependable than<br>inspiration, continued learning is more dependable than<br>talent. Never let pride or laziness prevent you from<br>learning, improving your work, changing its direction when<br>necessary. Persistence is essential to any writer—the<br>persistence to finish your work, to keep writing in spite of<br>rejection, to keep reading, studying, submitting work for<br>sale. But stubbornness, the refusal to change unproductive<br>behavior or to revise unsalable work can be lethal to your<br>writing hopes.<br><br>Finally, dort worry about imagination. You have all the<br>imagination you need, and all the reading, journal writing,<br>and leaning you will be doing will stimulate it. Play with<br>your ideas. Have fun with them. Don't worry about being<br>silly or outrageous or wrong. So much of writing is fun. Its<br>first letting your interests and your imagination take you<br>anywhere at all. Once you're able to do that, you'll have<br>more ideas than you can use.<br><br>Octavia E. Butler, “Furor Scribendi” from BloodChild and<br>Other Stories. Copyright ©1996, 2005 by Octavia E. Butler.<br>Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions<br>Company, LLC on behalf of Seven Stories Press,<br><br>www. sevenstories.com.<br>