There is so much I’ve learned dur­ing my jour­ney as an author. Some of it I picked up along the way and some of it I’m still dis­cov­er­ing. If a young per­son asked me for advice about becom­ing a writer, here is what I would tell them.

First, read every­thing you can get your hands on. Not just the books you already love—though yes, read those too — but the ones that seem unusu­al or from a genre you’d nor­mal­ly skip. Read new books. Read award win­ners. Read clas­sics. Read whatever’s on the shelf that makes you even a lit­tle bit curious.

Every book you read is secret­ly teach­ing you how sto­ries work. You might not notice it while it’s hap­pen­ing, but you’re learn­ing. The rhythms, the struc­tures, the way a writer builds ten­sion or earns a moment that makes you cry. Your brain is absorb­ing it and you’re learn­ing all of it.

Then write. Write what­ev­er you want. Write sto­ries you wish exist­ed. Write a scene that makes you burst out gig­gling, or a poem about some­thing so embar­rass­ing, you start blush­ing. Write about miss­ing some­one so much your heart phys­i­cal­ly aches. Write about your best friend, even if it’s your dog (mine is). There’s no wrong genre, no wrong form, no top­ic too sil­ly or strange.

The only mis­take is not writ­ing. Because writ­ing is a skill, and skills grow with prac­tice. The more you prac­tice, the bet­ter you get. Ath­letes train, musi­cians rehearse, painters paint. If you want to be a writer, write. Every page you write, every sen­tence you put down on paper or type into your com­put­er — even the bad ones — is grow­ing your skills and improv­ing your craft.

Next share your work for feed­back. Take the feed­back that res­onates and use that to help you revise. Then repeat. Rewrite, share it again per­haps and revise again. Do this until you have a pol­ished, shiny draft you’re hap­py with. Then do it all over again with anoth­er idea. Keep doing it.

If you read a lot, write a lot, learn to get feed­back that works for you, and revise a lot, your writ­ing will improve. This will pave your way to becom­ing pub­lished, but there’s more — and this has noth­ing to do with the act of writ­ing. You will have to be brave. Be brave and face rejec­tion because there’s a ton of it in pub­lish­ing. Every work­ing author you’ve ever heard of has a stack of rejec­tion let­ters or emails stashed away some­where. It doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly mean the work was bad. It might mean it just wasn’t ready yet. Or it prob­a­bly means art is sub­jec­tive and the world takes time to catch up sometimes.

But maybe the biggest piece of advice I would give is, be brave with your writ­ing. Don’t write to please every­one. You can’t and try­ing to will make your work small­er and less inter­est­ing and less like you. Instead, write hon­est­ly. Write per­son­al­ly. The more real and spe­cif­ic your work is — the more it sounds like you and no one else — the more it will actu­al­ly move peo­ple. When you write from a true place, read­ers can feel it.

Write from the heart. The sto­ries peo­ple remem­ber are the ones that feel real. Write about the things that make you laugh so hard you can’t breathe. Write about the moments that hurt. Write about the peo­ple you love, the places you dream of, and the hopes and fears you car­ry. Your feel­ings are not weak­ness­es in writ­ing — they are your great­est strength. The more per­son­al your work is, the more uni­ver­sal it becomes.

I remem­ber work­ing on A Year With­out Home and becom­ing so lost in the sto­ry, it was as if I was reliv­ing one of the most dif­fi­cult moments in my family’s life — being forced to flee our home, the place we cher­ished beyond words. I won­dered, was I shar­ing too much about my heartache and grief? In the end, I kept my vul­ner­a­ble emo­tions in the book and so many read­ers said to me that while read­ing, they felt seen. They relat­ed to the main char­ac­ter on so many lev­els. They con­nect­ed deeply to her sadness.

And you nev­er know the impact your work might have on oth­ers. When I first start­ed writ­ing my chap­ter books, I was excit­ed to be writ­ing a series with Hmong rep­re­sen­ta­tion. I was glad to write hap­py sto­ries fea­tur­ing Hmong kids. I was eager to cre­ate char­ac­ters that felt hon­est and real. I hoped for but didn’t antic­i­pate I would hear these reac­tions again and again: your char­ac­ters have made my kids proud of their back­ground, your books turned my stu­dents into read­ers, and most often, your work is chang­ing lives.

The path to writ­ing can be hard, but don’t give up. If writ­ing books is your dream — if it’s where you feel most like your­self — then you will be a writer. Keep going through the hard stretch­es. Keep going when it feels slow or impos­si­ble. Just. Keep. Going. Write sto­ries only you can tell. Be brave and write what is authen­tic and true because you just nev­er know. As author-illus­tra­tor Deb­bie Rid­path Ohi says: what you write might change the world.