NEIL GAIMAN'S ADVICE TO WRITERS
G'day folks,
Here are some quotes and good advice from Neil Gaiman. Who is he? Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman is an English author of short
fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre and films. He offers some very good advice and keeps it simple.
QUOTES:
‘If you’re only going to write when you’re inspired, you
may be a fairly decent poet, but you will never be a novelist — because you’re
going to have to make your word count today, and those words aren’t going to
wait for you, whether you’re inspired or not. So you have to write when you’re
not “inspired.” … And the weird thing is that six months later, or a year
later, you’re going to look back and you’re not going to remember which scenes
you wrote when you were inspired and which scenes you wrote because they had to
be written.’
‘The process of writing can be magical — there times when
you step out of an upper-floor window and you just walk across thin air, and
it’s absolute and utter happiness. Mostly, it’s a process of putting one word
after another.’
‘You have to finish things — that’s what you learn from,
you learn by finishing things.’
‘If you like fantasy and you want to be the next Tolkien,
don’t read big Tolkienesque fantasies — Tolkien didn’t read big Tolkienesque
fantasies, he read books on Finnish philology. Go and read outside of your
comfort zone, go and learn stuff.’
‘Tell your story. Don’t try and tell the stories that
other people can tell. Because [as a] starting writer, you always start out
with other people’s voices — you’ve been reading other people for years… But,
as quickly as you can, start telling the stories that only you can tell — because
there will always be better writers than you, there will always be smarter
writers than you … but you are the only you.’
AND …
HERE ARE HIS EIGHT BASIC RULES:
1.
Write
2.
Put one
word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
3.
Finish
what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
4.
Put it
aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose
opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
5.
Remember:
when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are
almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and
how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
6.
Fix it.
Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will
have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is
like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
7.
Laugh at
your own jokes.
8.
The main
rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence,
you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as
for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it
needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not
sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.
AND ONE CLANGER QUOTE:
"I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.
I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.
I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.
I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.
I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.
I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.
I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.
I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.
I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.
I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.
I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”
Clancy's comment: Mm ... hope this post has made your day.
To all authors and writers. A special today. A book I contributed to, How To Self-Publish: A DIY Approach, is free till Friday, thanks to a former guest on this blog, Leti Del Mar. Its Amazon
rankings are through the roof!
I'm ...
Think about this!
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