Happy birthday, Neil Gaiman! As we celebrate one of the most iconic writers of our time on November 10, we look to his words of wisdom he has shared over the years. As one would expect of such a well-known and prolific author, he has a lot of advice to give on the topic of writing.
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Read
Read, read, read. Read widely. Read the classics. Read in your genre. Read way outside your comfort zone. Read anything you can get your hands on. Learn something new.
“Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over.” (The Guardian)
“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.”
“Read everything you can lay your hands on. Read the ‘classics’ in whatever areas of writing you want to work in so you know what the high points are. Read outside your areas of comfort, so you know what else is out there. Read.”
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Write
If you’re serious about writing, you have to treat it like a job because, well, it is. You cannot simply opt out because you don’t feel like it or you’re uninspired. Push through and write anyways.
“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 wordcount today, and those words aren’t going to wait for you, whether you’re inspired or not. . . 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.”
“On the whole, anything that gets you writing and keeps you writing is a good thing. Anything that stops you writing is a bad thing. If you find your writers group stopping you from writing, then drop it.”
“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.”
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Edit—but not too much and not too soon
When you write, don’t worry about things like grammar, just get the words out there. You can fix it later. Resist the temptation to edit as you go. Seek out beta readers who you trust.
“The best advice I can give on [revision] is, once it’s done, to put it away until you can read it with new eyes. Finish the short story, print it out, then put it in a drawer and write other things. When you’re ready, pick it up and read it as if you’ve never read it before. If there are things you aren’t satisfied with as a reader, go in and fix them as a writer: that’s revision.”
“ . . . 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.”
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Be you, and don’t judge yourself too harshly
Each of us has a unique voice. Only you can tell a story like you, so don’t try to imitate other authors. Do your best to quiet your inner critic.
“The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.” (The University of the Arts)
“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.”
“Learn from your mistakes, and get better, and one day you’ll write something you won’t loathe. (Also, it’s fine to dislike something you’ve written. But don’t dislike yourself for having made it.)”
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