What I've Learned About Writing

I'm not a writer.  A writer is somebody who gets paid to write and makes a living out of it.  I just write.  I spill my life and thoughts out into journals or free websites but I've never made a penny.  Despite my amateur status, there are quite a few things I've learned along the way.  If I had all of the answers for writing I would have started this passage by saying "As you know, I am a writer."  Regardless, there are a few things that I've figured out that will hopefully be helpful.

1. Just start writing and keep writing.  This seems like dumb advice, but I struggled for the longest time writing stories because I didn't know how to start my story.  I would try to start at word one and progress forward only to find that after a page or two I came to a place that felt like a better starting point.  Then I'd scrap all of the things that I had written and start from my new starting point.   I spent an ungodly amount of time worrying about what was the beginning, middle, and end.  I stressed about it, sought feedback from my friends, and generally did everything I could think of to devise a way for figuring out where to start.  This one just came to me of my own accord.  One day I was sitting in this usual quandary when I realized that I could just keep writing.  The beginning, middle, and end only matter if the story is completed, so I learned to just keep writing until I came to the end of the story.  When I reached the end, I knew that I could work backwards to find where the story needed to begin.
2. Don't force a story.  My last sentence in the previous point says "needed to begin" because if the story ends a certain way, there are certain plot points that have to have happened.  The old theater adage says that if you show a gun in Act One it better go off by Act Three.  This makes sense because if the gun was never meant to be shot, it wouldn't be in the story in the first place.  If your main character falls in love, he/she has to meet their lover, and before that they'll have to be looking for another for one reason or another.  No matter how much we disagree, life happens as a logical progression.  If your story ends in a place that you don't like, change your main character's personality a bit.  Fire him from his job.  Have him be inside a bank when it gets robbed.  Do anything other than expect the reader to think "Well, sometimes people just snap, I guess," because they will never believe your story.
3. Revise your story.  Then go back, read it again, and revise it again.  I'm only now learning the value of revision and I hate it, mostly because I didn't do it before.  Revision allows you to tweak details to make the story better.  It allows you to catch stupid mistakes.  It allows you to get inside the head of your character and learn things you didn't even know before.  Stories are intricate pieces of construction like cars, and you'll never make them better unless you crash them on purpose and sift through the wreckage to figure out how.  Sometimes you'll find out nothing is wrong at all, but if you smash the story by telling it through another character's eyes it comes out even better.  You'll never know unless you experiment.
4. Write about your life and those of your friends.  I'm not advocating that fiction die off and everybody start penning essays, but use the things that you know.  The only things that are genuine are the things that come from you, so even if you're writing about an intergalactic war between octopus people and creatures that look like wire whisks, make one of those wire whisks a lot like you or a friend of yours.  Base its interactions off an anecdote from your own past.  If you want to make it fantastical you can do it by translating it into a weird world or starting at the same point and then exaggerating, but if it isn't grounded in reality your readers will never buy in.

I have more tiny nuggets of wisdom but it's two in the morning and my eyelids are pressing down on my eyelids and my will to write any longer.  Hopefully these points are useful.  Hopefully they make some manner of sense because I will certainly be skipping point three tonight.