A Nice Meaty One For the Writers Out There
First and foremost, I find the advice Neil hands out (sometimes off-handedly, sometimes with the intent to advise) pertaining to writing to be the most inspiring. There have been some really powerful little snippets to come out of the blog that have helped me whan I was at my worst creatively. So here, again, is a ost dedicated to writing: The craft, the culture, the continuous combat of simply putting one word in front of another in order to get a point across to a person besides yourself.
"It's not a science. It's an art and a sometimes it's a craft. The most important thing (and I know I say this a lot but it's true, or at least it's true for me) is finishing things, because that's when you find out if they worked or not. The rest of the time it's just hoping."
–Neil Gaiman 12/01/05
"Today I sat and listed all the characters in the book, and what each character needs by the end of the book. (Some need lots of things. Some don't.) I think it helped."
–Neil Gaiman 07/12/04
"Spent the afternoon writing the novel, which went from completely despondent "this is awful the whole thing is unusable I have no idea what I'm doing" to, a thousand words later, "I suppose it's not that bad really and I think I know what happens next," and there are worse places to be."
– Neil Gaiman 05/31/04
“I hate being in the final stages of a story. It's like trying to run programs on a computer with 100% CPU use. I'm left with just about enough native intelligence to walk, talk monosyllabically, and tie my shoelaces. I assume that I'm off figuring out the end of the story I'm writing, because the alternative, in terms of sudden-onset mental decay, is too dreadful to think about. Meanwhile I walk around aimlessly, cannot remember where I put things, or the names of the things that I can't remember where I put them. And I say "er..." a lot, and pick things up and look at them.”
– Neil Gaiman 01/10/03
“I can't think of a definition of "fiction" that isn't a variation on "stuff you make up", and fantasy is a branch of fiction. Personally, I think it's an enormously useful branch of fiction.”
–Neil Gaiman 09/02/02
“I tend to find that comics fans read books, and that anime fans also watch other things. Most people don't just like one thing.”
– Neil Gaiman 09/09/04
“[I don’t] go "Wow. A short story -- here's my opportunity to depress people." But I know what you mean -- the cumulative effect of the short stories isn't one of unalloyed joy and delight, and the characters who creep out into the short fiction tend to be slightly more hurt and damaged than the ones at novel length.”
–Neil Gaiman 12/16/05
“I long ago resigned myself to the fact that the next thing I'll write will be the next thing I want to write, and it doesn't really matter what people are waiting for. Readers mostly want more of the last thing they liked, anyway. I'd rather write something that nobody knows if they'll like yet or not, which may be perverse of me, but is how I'm built.”
– Neil Gaiman 01/08/03
“I know what you mean, and have no solutions to offer, other than, you do it. The only comfort I can offer is that the "small, less significant, often transitional sections of plot" may be obvious to you while you're writing the book, but by the time you've finished it you normally can't remember what was a bit of plot that only existed to link two scenes where you knew what you were doing, and what was an integral part of the story from the start. And often some of the best bits turned up in the transitional places. How do you do it? You grit your teeth, and you do it. Some days it's about as romantic and magical as ditch-digging, but you carry on, because that's how you make it happen.”
--Neil Gaiman 08/15/03
“I love being a writer because it is something you can do anywhere. Some jobs like for example being an astronaut you can only do in special places like in for example space rockets or outer space or somewhere like that eg the moon. If you were trying to be an astronaut in the supermarket people would just laugh at you and say What Is He Doing Is He Absolutely Barking Mad Or What? The same thing goes for people who pick grapes and the people who show you to your seat in theatres after the light is all gone down. They can only do it in their special place.
But I can write anywhere.”
--Neil Gaiman 10/24/04
“I've been writing now professionally for twenty years and it's not yet become "another monotonous job" -- although when I was done with journalism I stopped, and when I could see myself becoming tired of comics if I didn't take a break and learn some new skills, I took a break and learned how to write novels and screenplays, before coming back to comics.
Learning how to do new things makes me happy. ( I think I was happier making "A Short Film About John Bolton" than I have been in the last few years, just because there were so many new things to learn.)”
--Neil Gaiman 02/27/03
“(I think I told someone who asked if writing fanfiction would be good for "honing writing skills" that of course it was, but if that was what he was writing for, he'd have to start writing his own stuff eventually. This was, I was told at length and by many many people, a terrible thing to say.) So... yes, I think that playing with other people's ideas and work is a perfectly valid way to make art. I also think it's much wiser and safer to do it with ideas and work that are comfortably in the public domain if you want your work to be seen professionally.”
–Neil Gaiman 11/21/04
“Discovered to my chagrin this evening that Alfred Austin, Victorian Poet Laureate, quite probably never wrote the poem on the illness of the Prince of Wales in 1871 that included the couplet,
Across the wires the electric message came,
He is no better, he is much the same.
…And what's really sad and funny at the same time is that, whether he wrote them or not, they're the only thing he might have written that anyone remembers or quotes at all, and they're only remembered for demonstrating how incredibly crap British Poet Laureates can be when they attempt to be topical.”
– Neil Gaiman 01/11/03
“I try and hear stuff in my head while I write it. I'm mostly too self-conscious to read to myself in empty rooms as I write, but I do tend to read aloud as soon as I can -- sometimes as soon as something's in first draft I'll telephone friends and read it to them. That's where I hear things that don't work, and fix them.”
-- Neil Gaiman 12/29/01
“The best reaction to a rejection slip is a sort of wild-eyed madness, an evil grin, and sitting yourself in front of the keyboard muttering "Okay, you bastards. Try rejecting this!" and then writing something so unbelievably brilliant that all other writers will disembowel themselves with their pens upon reading it, because there's nothing left to write. Because the rejection slips will arrive.”
–Neil Gaiman 02/03/04
“I don't think writing means you don't do your share of the house stuff (it never got me out of anything significant).”
–Neil Gaiman 07/17/04
“The biggest problem with author photos as far as I'm concerned, is the disappointment that sets in somewhere in the vast gulf between Cool Author Photo and Sadly Not As Impressive Author in Real Life, which is why I try and get new author photos taken every few years, so with luck people don't look at me and feel sadly disappointed at how much older or scruffier or less impressive I am than I was in the photo.” – Neil Gaiman 03/22/05
“I always used to like knowing what authors looked like, perhaps because I've always liked thinking that real people made the books I loved: it made it even better, somehow, knowing that Mike Moorcock was huge and bearded, that Samuel R. Delany was black, that Will Eisner looked strangely like Commissioner Dolan, that Harlan Ellison looked like a feisty Jewish Puck in shades. (I don't think I ever thought that Zelazny heroes looked like Roger, except on the inside, just as I didn't think that Elric of Melnibone looked like Mike Moorcock.) I wanted to be an author, so I liked seeing photos of authors, because it made them real.” – Neil Gaiman 03/22/05
“Well, I remember Roger talking to me and Steve Brust. We'd just suggested that if he did an anthology of other-people-write-Amber-stories that we'd be up for it (understatement), and he puffed on his pipe, and said -- extremely firmly -- that he didn't want anyone else to write Amber stories but him.
I don't believe he ever changed his mind on that…
Would I love to write an Amber story? God, yes. Would Steve Brust? Absolutely. Will we? Nope, because Roger told us he explicitly didn't want it to happen.”
-- Neil Gaiman 12/29/01
“Does it matter if he's respected? Not a bit. Does it matter if he's read? Damn right it does.”
– Neil Gaiman 12/31/01 (On R. A. Lafferty)
“I've spent a day fighting with an uncooperative novel and every scene I wrote kept turning into two people having a conversation, and it was driving me nuts. It wasn't even that they were sitting around having interesting conversations. They were telling each other things the reader had already seen occur, and I felt powerless to stop them... "You're not allowed to do that any more," said Dave. "Something else has to happen."
–Neil Gaiman 12/11/04
“(Writing American Gods) was a bit like wrestling a bear. Some days I was on top. Most days, the bear was on top.”
–Neil Gaiman 02/09/01
"(Writing) has no job security of any kind, and depends mostly on whether or not you can, like Scheherazade, tell the stories each night that'll keep you alive until tomorrow."
-- Neil Gaiman 02/03/04
"Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins."
–Neil Gaiman 02/03/04
"It's not a science. It's an art and a sometimes it's a craft. The most important thing (and I know I say this a lot but it's true, or at least it's true for me) is finishing things, because that's when you find out if they worked or not. The rest of the time it's just hoping."
–Neil Gaiman 12/01/05
"Today I sat and listed all the characters in the book, and what each character needs by the end of the book. (Some need lots of things. Some don't.) I think it helped."
–Neil Gaiman 07/12/04
"Spent the afternoon writing the novel, which went from completely despondent "this is awful the whole thing is unusable I have no idea what I'm doing" to, a thousand words later, "I suppose it's not that bad really and I think I know what happens next," and there are worse places to be."
– Neil Gaiman 05/31/04
“I hate being in the final stages of a story. It's like trying to run programs on a computer with 100% CPU use. I'm left with just about enough native intelligence to walk, talk monosyllabically, and tie my shoelaces. I assume that I'm off figuring out the end of the story I'm writing, because the alternative, in terms of sudden-onset mental decay, is too dreadful to think about. Meanwhile I walk around aimlessly, cannot remember where I put things, or the names of the things that I can't remember where I put them. And I say "er..." a lot, and pick things up and look at them.”
– Neil Gaiman 01/10/03
“I can't think of a definition of "fiction" that isn't a variation on "stuff you make up", and fantasy is a branch of fiction. Personally, I think it's an enormously useful branch of fiction.”
–Neil Gaiman 09/02/02
“I tend to find that comics fans read books, and that anime fans also watch other things. Most people don't just like one thing.”
– Neil Gaiman 09/09/04
“[I don’t] go "Wow. A short story -- here's my opportunity to depress people." But I know what you mean -- the cumulative effect of the short stories isn't one of unalloyed joy and delight, and the characters who creep out into the short fiction tend to be slightly more hurt and damaged than the ones at novel length.”
–Neil Gaiman 12/16/05
“I long ago resigned myself to the fact that the next thing I'll write will be the next thing I want to write, and it doesn't really matter what people are waiting for. Readers mostly want more of the last thing they liked, anyway. I'd rather write something that nobody knows if they'll like yet or not, which may be perverse of me, but is how I'm built.”
– Neil Gaiman 01/08/03
“I know what you mean, and have no solutions to offer, other than, you do it. The only comfort I can offer is that the "small, less significant, often transitional sections of plot" may be obvious to you while you're writing the book, but by the time you've finished it you normally can't remember what was a bit of plot that only existed to link two scenes where you knew what you were doing, and what was an integral part of the story from the start. And often some of the best bits turned up in the transitional places. How do you do it? You grit your teeth, and you do it. Some days it's about as romantic and magical as ditch-digging, but you carry on, because that's how you make it happen.”
--Neil Gaiman 08/15/03
“I love being a writer because it is something you can do anywhere. Some jobs like for example being an astronaut you can only do in special places like in for example space rockets or outer space or somewhere like that eg the moon. If you were trying to be an astronaut in the supermarket people would just laugh at you and say What Is He Doing Is He Absolutely Barking Mad Or What? The same thing goes for people who pick grapes and the people who show you to your seat in theatres after the light is all gone down. They can only do it in their special place.
But I can write anywhere.”
--Neil Gaiman 10/24/04
“I've been writing now professionally for twenty years and it's not yet become "another monotonous job" -- although when I was done with journalism I stopped, and when I could see myself becoming tired of comics if I didn't take a break and learn some new skills, I took a break and learned how to write novels and screenplays, before coming back to comics.
Learning how to do new things makes me happy. ( I think I was happier making "A Short Film About John Bolton" than I have been in the last few years, just because there were so many new things to learn.)”
--Neil Gaiman 02/27/03
“(I think I told someone who asked if writing fanfiction would be good for "honing writing skills" that of course it was, but if that was what he was writing for, he'd have to start writing his own stuff eventually. This was, I was told at length and by many many people, a terrible thing to say.) So... yes, I think that playing with other people's ideas and work is a perfectly valid way to make art. I also think it's much wiser and safer to do it with ideas and work that are comfortably in the public domain if you want your work to be seen professionally.”
–Neil Gaiman 11/21/04
“Discovered to my chagrin this evening that Alfred Austin, Victorian Poet Laureate, quite probably never wrote the poem on the illness of the Prince of Wales in 1871 that included the couplet,
Across the wires the electric message came,
He is no better, he is much the same.
…And what's really sad and funny at the same time is that, whether he wrote them or not, they're the only thing he might have written that anyone remembers or quotes at all, and they're only remembered for demonstrating how incredibly crap British Poet Laureates can be when they attempt to be topical.”
– Neil Gaiman 01/11/03
“I try and hear stuff in my head while I write it. I'm mostly too self-conscious to read to myself in empty rooms as I write, but I do tend to read aloud as soon as I can -- sometimes as soon as something's in first draft I'll telephone friends and read it to them. That's where I hear things that don't work, and fix them.”
-- Neil Gaiman 12/29/01
“The best reaction to a rejection slip is a sort of wild-eyed madness, an evil grin, and sitting yourself in front of the keyboard muttering "Okay, you bastards. Try rejecting this!" and then writing something so unbelievably brilliant that all other writers will disembowel themselves with their pens upon reading it, because there's nothing left to write. Because the rejection slips will arrive.”
–Neil Gaiman 02/03/04
“I don't think writing means you don't do your share of the house stuff (it never got me out of anything significant).”
–Neil Gaiman 07/17/04
“The biggest problem with author photos as far as I'm concerned, is the disappointment that sets in somewhere in the vast gulf between Cool Author Photo and Sadly Not As Impressive Author in Real Life, which is why I try and get new author photos taken every few years, so with luck people don't look at me and feel sadly disappointed at how much older or scruffier or less impressive I am than I was in the photo.” – Neil Gaiman 03/22/05
“I always used to like knowing what authors looked like, perhaps because I've always liked thinking that real people made the books I loved: it made it even better, somehow, knowing that Mike Moorcock was huge and bearded, that Samuel R. Delany was black, that Will Eisner looked strangely like Commissioner Dolan, that Harlan Ellison looked like a feisty Jewish Puck in shades. (I don't think I ever thought that Zelazny heroes looked like Roger, except on the inside, just as I didn't think that Elric of Melnibone looked like Mike Moorcock.) I wanted to be an author, so I liked seeing photos of authors, because it made them real.” – Neil Gaiman 03/22/05
“Well, I remember Roger talking to me and Steve Brust. We'd just suggested that if he did an anthology of other-people-write-Amber-stories that we'd be up for it (understatement), and he puffed on his pipe, and said -- extremely firmly -- that he didn't want anyone else to write Amber stories but him.
I don't believe he ever changed his mind on that…
Would I love to write an Amber story? God, yes. Would Steve Brust? Absolutely. Will we? Nope, because Roger told us he explicitly didn't want it to happen.”
-- Neil Gaiman 12/29/01
“Does it matter if he's respected? Not a bit. Does it matter if he's read? Damn right it does.”
– Neil Gaiman 12/31/01 (On R. A. Lafferty)
“I've spent a day fighting with an uncooperative novel and every scene I wrote kept turning into two people having a conversation, and it was driving me nuts. It wasn't even that they were sitting around having interesting conversations. They were telling each other things the reader had already seen occur, and I felt powerless to stop them... "You're not allowed to do that any more," said Dave. "Something else has to happen."
–Neil Gaiman 12/11/04
“(Writing American Gods) was a bit like wrestling a bear. Some days I was on top. Most days, the bear was on top.”
–Neil Gaiman 02/09/01
"(Writing) has no job security of any kind, and depends mostly on whether or not you can, like Scheherazade, tell the stories each night that'll keep you alive until tomorrow."
-- Neil Gaiman 02/03/04
"Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins."
–Neil Gaiman 02/03/04
posted by Really_Rather_Not_Nice at 8:29 AM
5 Comments:
great advice, thanks for putting these together
cheers
Yep, gotta agree, good work on picking out some of the gems. I'll pass this around to the other folks in my writing circle. It's always reassuring to know that even brilliant, famous writers sometimes have a hard time getting something to work, or are willing to admit they don't have a clue where something is going.
Yes, I often feel like Neil might have a thing or two to say about writing...
I know what you're thinking: But Neil's not as well known for writing as he is for his out-standing croissont-baking skills, or his time spent on the British bob-sled team (I assume they have one)... so what advice could he possibly have to give on a skill such as writing?
But that's what I'm here for. To prove those naysayers wrong.
Neil Gaiman may just have something useful to contribute to the world of literature after all. No matter what his neighbors say about him.
I really enjoyed reading Neil's comments. Thanks for posting them. I'm adding these pages to my favorites. I love to collect quotations by writers too.
thanks a lot for putting these together =)
Post a Comment
<< Home