Below, British historian and biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore offers an insightful thirty seconds for the aspiring writer. The quicker you learn to overcome the fear of writing that elusive "perfect piece," the sooner you have something to work with. The heart of a great work beats inside its reconstruction. Put your words to paper, edit, then edit some more. "All the great writing really takes place in the rewriting," implores Montefiore. He tears a page out of an old and trusty manual, one Ernest Hemingway bluntly coined: "Write drunk, edit sober."

Simon Sebag Montefiore is the author of "Young Stalin," tracing the roots of the Russian dictator as he clawed his way to the helm of the Soviet Union in the middle of the twentieth century.