Something I've learned is that writers who give advice on writing are giving advice on how to write like them under their circumstances. Anne LaMott, for example, gives excellent advice on how to be a writer if your father was a writer, if you have a pet agent you can subject to your prose for ten solid years before producing anything noteworthy, and if you don't need the income generated by mass-market appeal. Stephen King gives great advice on how to write mass-market fiction quickly. John Gardner can tell you exactly how to be an esoteric high-brow literature professor with limited output.

My editor turned me onto Stein on Writing, which is the advice of an editor on what sells. It's brutal and not even vaguely encouraging - it is the windshield LaMott's bird flies into. But having written screenplays for ten years I was mystified by how non-commercial and loosy-goosy all the advice these "writing gurus" were giving. Then I read Stein and I was "a ha. It's because they wrote these things after they were famous and could get their grocery lists published."