Ursula K. Le Guin on How to Become a Writer:
Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts—only in the truth. You get the facts from outside. The truth you get from inside.
OK, how do you go about getting at that truth? You want to tell the truth. You want to be a writer. So what do you do?
You write.
Honestly, why do people ask that question? Does anybody ever come up to a musician and say, Tell me, tell me—how should I become a tuba player? No! It’s too obvious. If you want to be a tuba player you get a tuba, and some tuba music. And you ask the neighbors to move away or put cotton in their ears. And probably you get a tuba teacher, because there are quite a lot of objective rules and techniques both to written music and to tuba performance. And then you sit down and you play the tuba, every day, every week, every month, year after year, until you are good at playing the tuba; until you can—if you desire—play the truth on the tuba.