Excerpt from an interview with Dustin Long, author of Icelanders:

What tips would you give to aspiring writers?

This has been true for me, at least: If you want to write novels, write novels. By this I mean two things.

1. Don’t concentrate on writing short stories, thinking you’ll build up to a novel. They’re completely different animals. I still can’t write short stories very well, and I don’t feel that writing one has ever taught me much about the craft of writing a novel.
2. Actually write a whole novel. Don’t begin a novel, decide it’s bad, and then begin another one. Finishing a novel, however bad, taught me much more about novel-writing than beginning a novel ever did.

Taken from an 8/31/06 interview at Notes of a Defeatist.

got up at 8.47am. read some tim o’brien. signed up for gmail. my new email address is rkthornwell (at) gmail.com. checked five college newsgroup for cars. nothing. put some pants on. put a bagel in the toaster. read some more tim o’brien. went to my america at war class. came back. made myself a new homepage. called the bursar’s office. found out that my CD in Jewish History is okay for a gen-ed requirement. awesome. signed up for walmart’s cd club. ordered blade runner and terminator 2 and some douglas sirk movie i know nothing about. sent off another ebay sale. went to my fantasy and literature class. read tim o’brien’s “sweetheart of song tra bong.” read tim obrien’s “the things they carried.”