Alan "Watchmen" Moore, the Wizard of Northampton, gives some frank advice to beginning writers at a Q&A at a 2011 an anti-library-closure protest at St James Library, Northampton, UK.
tl;dr: Write every day. Work on the stuff you know you're bad at (advice I wish I'd taken sooner). Don't let discouragement win. And…self-publish, because publishing is fundamentally broken.
(via Richard Kadrey)