Writing Quote of the Week

Young Writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers. If they arrive at college with literay ambitions, they should be told that everything they have done since their first childhood poems, printed in the school paper, has been preparation for entering a long long apprenticeship.

At least in the beginning, that apprenticeship does not have to be served in a classroom. Letters can be a part of it, journals, anything that will force the expression of experience in words.
~Wallace Stegner, "On Teaching and Writing Fiction"