7. Write a lot.

As the old joke goes:

New York City Tourist: How to you get to Carnegie Hall?

Street Musician: Practice, man, practice.

It takes roughly ten thousand hours to achieve mastery in anything, from tennis to needlework, from juggling to playing the guitar. It takes roughly that much writing to become a "professional."

Of course not everyone wants to be or must be a professional.

You can sit around and plink at the piano with two fingers and have lots of fun, amuse the kids with your rendition of Honolulu Baby on the ukulele with two or three chords and not much effort at all, but if you want to be really good at either, or at writing, you have to write a lot. Ten thousand hours is roughly twenty-seven years at an hour a day, so you'll have to spend more hours per day if you want to progress more quickly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert

But it all depends on what you want to do. Not everyone needs to be a novelist.

Cheers,

Puddin'