There’s a moral to this. Write what’s in your heart, not what’s in your head. Write from the basement, not from the living room. Write from the places that make you afraid.
- Dylan Landis

This.

“You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it’s hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it’s better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can’t write anybody’s book but your own.”

— Cheryl Strayed

Story

"Never include anything the audience can reasonably and easily assume has happened. Never pass on exposition unless the missing fact would cause confusion. You do not keep the audience’s interest by giving it information, but by withholding information, except that which is absolutely necessary for comprehension.

Pace the exposition. Like all else, exposition must have a progressive pattern: therefore, the least important facts come in early, the next more important later, the critical facts last. And what are the critical pieces of exposition? Secrets. The painful truths characters do not want known.”

— Robert McKee, "Story"