I talk to people, mostly, I guess. It's a joy to read, over and over again. It gave me so much comfort when I wasn't publishing anything and was very depressed about the whole thing. Now that I've had a book published, I go back and realize how true everything she says is about getting published. Another good book is The Writers Survival Guide by Rachel Simon.
Writing is lonely, isolating work.
Besides, I like character driven stories and today there seems to be an unnecessary emphasis on the explicit. I've been writing professionally on and off since I am twenty one years old. Probably my first inspiration was an article that appeared in the New York Times Magazine when I was around seventeen. I WANT to do that. I love mysteries, particularly the works of Jeffery Deaver, Lee Child and Dennis Lehane.