As I mentioned, it helped me tremendously in my life/career (I do not separate those things) to have spent time listening to Ray Bradbury talk about writing. I did not take his word as Gospel and indeed found that some of it did not apply to me and some didn't apply to anyone starting out when I started out. But it can help to understand how a very smart person views the world and it can even lead you to your own, competing view.
This is an hour of Bradbury addressing (mostly) new writers at the Sixth Annual Writer's Symposium by the Sea in February of 2001. Some of what he told me when I was fifteen and older is in this video. He starts out by advising new writers to write short stories instead of novels. That's probably good advice but it's not as good as it was when he was a new writer, selling to a marketplace that bought and published tons of short stories per year.
Back then, you could get your work into print if you wrote short stories and now…well, now the opportunity to get them into print is limited. That's bad not just for monetary reasons but because you learn from having your work published. You get reactions, you get distance and you're forced to apply professional standards to your work because by the sheer act of getting into print, those are the standards that now apply. When Ray was starting out, he published a lot of short stories. Tons of them. And as the market for that form declined, he still published the few he wrote because he was Ray Bradbury. For a new writer, it's still good advice but maybe not as easy to apply.
Still, everything he says is worth hearing. And some of it will make you want to stop watching videos and instead use that computer for more constructive purposes. Like, say, writing…