I gave a talk the other day at a local community college about writing your first novel. There were about twenty would-be writers in the room and all of them had great ideas, a desire to be a writer, and lots of question. Not a single one has bothered to actually write anything.
Guess what - that doesn't work. Telling people you are a writer is fun. It illicits a lot of collateral conversations, and you find you are in great company. But one of these days you actually have to put something on paper. And that's where the fun begins.
Remember all those English classes you hated in school? - paragraphs, sentence structure, word usage.... blah, blah, blah. When I discussed just how much work editing a draft of your own manuscript is, I was amused at the response.
Writing is creative - editing and publishing is about the craft of writing. One cannot exist without the other. Even if you job out the editing, you still need to be the expert, you still need to own your craft.
My best advice - get to work. Talking about being a writier is not the same thing as being one.
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