3.)Get to know yourself. Go to therapy and talk about your neuroses. Write about yourself, your family, your traumas, until you ping on great Truth. It sounds weird, I know, but you have to know yourself to write well. There's a soul/mind/word connection. Emotional truth is essential to good writing, whether you're writing a SF novel or a 500 word PWP. It's what ultimately resonates with the reader, that Truth, and you can only get to it by being in tune with yourself. Your voice, your style, will come out of knowing. Or maybe it's the opposite: your knowing will come out of your writing. The two are so linked it's almost impossible to say which comes first. Writing is a spiritual endeavor.

This is so, so true. Ridiculously so. All that stuff about the best artists being tormented and depressed? I doubt if it was completely true, because I know for a fact that if my mind and my emotions aren't quite right, stories just won't come. If I'm in a good place, a healthy place, I can write 'til the cows come home. But if I'm not...

Thank you for a very good post.