Staying Motivated

It's hard to stay motivated. Any advice?

Get away from the place where the distractions are (television, sending/reading e-mail jokes to friends, computer games).

Take on different writing genres you think you couldn't do—step outside your comfort zone and write outside the box.

Go to writers' conferences ... for the contacts and the information.

Don't go into writing thinking, "I'm going to get big writing contracts from newspapers and magazines and get rich. Then I'll write a novel and publishing houses will fight over the rights to it." You have to lay the foundation before you can build the house and live in it.

Be a packrat; throw away nothing. You never know when something you wrote and never got published will be the perfect plot twist or big ending elsewhere.