So, you want to be a writer? Here's how.

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WHEN PEOPLE hear that I'm a novelist, I get one comment more than any other. "I'm a physician (or a third-grade teacher, or a venture capitalist) but what I really want to do is write." A mother of three muses: "I've always loved writing since I was a little girl." A physicist declares, "I've got a great idea for a mystery-thriller-philosophical-love story - if I only had the time." I nod, resisting the temptation to reply: "And I have a great idea for a unified field theory - if I just had a moment to work it out on paper."

Book sales are down, but creative writing enrollments are booming. The longing to write knows no bounds. A lactation consultant told me, "I have a story inside of me. I mean, I know everybody has a story, but I really have a story."

Forthwith, some advice for those of you who have always wanted to write, those with best-selling ideas, and those who really have a story.

To begin, don't write about yourself. I'm not saying you're uninteresting. I realize that your life has been so crazy no one could make this stuff up. But if you want to be a writer, start by writing about other people. Observe their faces, and the way they wave their hands around. Listen to the way they talk. Replay conversations in your mind - not just the words, but the silences as well. Imagine the lives of others. If you want to be a writer, you need to get over yourself. This is not just an artistic choice; it's a moral choice. A writer attempts to understand others from the inside.

Find a peaceful place to work. Peace does not necessarily entail an artists' colony or an island off the coast of Maine. You might find peace in your basement, or at a cafe in Davis Square, or amid old ladies rustling magazines at the public library. Peace is not the same as quiet. Peace means you avoid checking your e-mail every 10 seconds. Peace means you are willing to work offline, screen calls, and forget your to-do list for an hour. If this is difficult, turn off your Web browser, or try writing without a computer altogether. Treat yourself to pen and paper and make a mess, crossing out sentences, crumpling pages, inserting paragraphs in margins. Remember spiral bound notebooks, and thank-you notes with stamps? Handwriting is arcane in all the best ways. Writing in ink doesn't feel like work; it feels like secret diaries and treasure maps and art.

Read widely, and dissect books in your mind. What, exactly, makes David Sedaris funny? How does George Orwell fill us with dread? If you want to be a novelist, read novels new and old, satirical, experimental, Victorian, American. Read nonfiction as well. Consider how biographers select details to illuminate a life in time. If you want to write nonfiction, study histories and essays, but also read novels and think about narrative, and the novelist's artful release of information. Don't forget poetry. Why? Because it's good to go where words are worshipped, and essential to remember that you are not a poet. Lyric poets linger on a mood or fragmentary phrase; prose writers must move along to tell their story, and catch their train.

And this is true for everyone, but especially for women: If you don't value your own time, other people won't either. Trust me, you can't write a novel in stolen minutes outside your daughter's tap class. Virginia Woolf declared that a woman needs a room of her own. Well, the room won't help, if you don't shut the door. Post a note. "Book in progress, please do not disturb unless you're bleeding." Or these lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which I have adapted for writing mothers: ". . . Beware! Beware! / Her flashing eyes, her floating hair! Weave a circle round her thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread, / For she on honey-dew hath fed, / and drunk the milk of Paradise."

Correction: Cyclist Floyd Landis won the Tour de France in 2006, not last year, as I wrote last week.

Allegra Goodman is a guest columnist and author of "Paradise Park." Her first book for younger readers, "The Other Side of the Island," will be published in September.