obssesedwithscandaledits

[obssesedwithscandaledits]

#neilgaiman #writethenextword

Good day to you, Mr. Gaiman

What do you do against that little voice in every writers head yelling at them, that every word they write is shit and the characters and the story all suck?

Write the next word.

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#neilgaiman

As an author, do you think authors should always put a piece of themselves into what they write? Like their experiences, personality traits or sense of humor? Or do you think it would make more sense to try and create something new entirely, without anything taken from your own personal experiences?

You are literally making what you write out of your experiences and your personality and your imagination. I don't know how you could do it the other way. Everything is always going to be you.

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#writingadvice #ideas

Hi Neil,

Do you ever know if an idea is good or do you just have to try and see what becomes of it?

Try it. Sometimes the ideas are better than you thought they were.

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#writingmotivation

hello

can you please tell me to continue writing whatever the hell i am writing, because currently it seems like i'm writing nonsense

thank you

You too? Absolutely. You keep going and I'll keep going too.

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#whatcountstowardswordcount

I've been trying to follow Terry Pratchett's advice of writing 400 words a day, and I've run into a bit of a conundrum. Does making the daily word count matter if you’re just transferring/typing out stuff from one of your countless notebooks onto the screen? Or would you say it has to be all new material? I know each writer makes their own rules and progress is what's key, but I would like to hear your opinion.

Typing days, second draft days, count as far as I’m concerned. Because you start off with lots of notes, and you end up with an introduction or a short story or a few pages of a novel.

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#notfeelinglikeyourskillisthere #writing

Did you/do you ever feel like your writing just isn't good enough for the story you want to write?

Yes. Sometimes I wrote it anyway. Some times I waited until I was a better writer.

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#techniques #writing #arguments

Mr. Gaiman, how important do you feel the study of the more technical side of writing is? (Like formulaic sentence structure and learning what things like predicates and articles and prepositions are.) Is it essential to being a good writer? Respectfully yours, idontknowifishouldmajorincreativewritinghelp

I think it’s a hundred times more important to know what something is than to know what the technical name for it is. (I can never be sure that I remember what litotes is. I think it’s using a double negative for purposes of dramatic understatement, eg “He was not unattractive.” Or zeugma, which I hope is making a verb do two or three things at once — as in “She drove away in a heartbroken condition and an elderly Ford truck.” “He lifted his spirits, his hat and her hopes.” I’m not even sure that I’ve spelled them right. And I’m not checking, because the point isn’t whether or not I’ve spelled them right, the point, if there is one, is that I know what the things being described are, and how to use them.)

How good does your knowledge of grammar have to be? Good enough to write something that’s obviously clear, understandable English. Good enough to know when you’re breaking the rules and to win an argument when you need to. 

There are great musicians who can’t read music. There are great musicians who cannot tell you the names of chords. There are songwriters and composers who need other people to come in and tell them what they’ve been doing technically, but just because they do not know the names of things does not mean that they are not doing them, or that their work is inferior to that of a different composer who does know exactly what a diminished fifth is.

Me, I’m the kind of person who reads Fowler’s Modern English Usage for pleasure. I like English, like writing in it, like understanding how it’s put together. And mostly, as I said before, I like knowing what the rules are for when I break them, because I can quietly win arguments with editors or copy editors that way.

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#writing

You've always given me pretty good writing advice, so here's another question: I don't have a publishing contract so I've made up my own deadline for the first draft of my novel. What's a good way for me to stick to it?

Figure out the wordcount you’re going for. Divide that by the number of days you are going to take to write it. Then make sure you hit your wordcount each day.

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#writing #seeingyourself

How much of yourself should you put in the characters you write?

If you are writing their stories, and looking out through their eyes, then you cannot help putting yourself into them. 

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#writing

Hey Mr. Gaiman, I'm in a writing class which requires us to read a short story collection by a specific author and then analyse the tools used. Since I've already read your collections I was wondering if you had any suggestions of some great short story collections that I could read?

Sure:

The Unreal and the Real -- the collected short stories of Ursula K Le Guin.

The Best of Gene Wolfe -- a selected short stories of Gene Wolfe

And because it’s October, and things are getting spooky, here are some spooky collections for you:

The Lottery and Other Stories - Shirley Jackson

The October Country - Ray Bradbury

The Books of Blood - Clive Barker

Ghosts, and other Lovers - Lisa Tuttle

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#writing

I get really discouraged when i'm writing because there's always going to be someone a lot better than i am and i don't know how to get past it... do you have any advice to help me out?

There will always be people worse than you, too. Read some books by them, think “At least I can do better than that” and start writing.

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#writing

Can I ask you where do you get the ideas to write a story and how do you know if what you are writing is actually good and valid? Do you ever get the feeling that what you are writing is going to go into a dead end and you are not going to get out of it?

1) Where do you get your ideas from?

 http://www.neilgaiman.com/Cool_Stuff/Essays/Essays_By_Neil/Where_do_you_get_your_ideas%3F

2) How do you know if what you are writing is actually good and valid?

You don’t. You do your best.

3) Do you ever get the feeling that what you are writing is going to go into a dead end and you are not going to get out of it?

Frequently. Usually, on something long. And I usually get out of it, too. Read this: http://nanowrimo.org/pep-talks/neil-gaiman

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#writingadviceineedtocomebackto

Hello Neil, Have you ever written a full book which hasn't been published? If so, how do you feel looking back on it now? Also, looking to the future, if you'd spent thousands of hours researching, writing, and rewriting a book to find you just weren't happy with the finished product, would you publish it anyway?

My first book is sitting in the attic, unpublished. And I’m glad it wasn’t published, because when I came to read it to my daughter, twenty years after I wrote it, I discovered that it wasn’t very good. But I don’t believe a second of the time I spent writing it was wasted.

You’ve got a lot of bad words and awkward plots inside you. Better to get them all down on paper, so the good ones can come out.

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#writersblockadvice

Reposted as something that can be reblogged. ON WRITER'S BLOCK.

I’ve seem to be hitting writer’s block far too often now. My grade in my creative writing class is suffering because i don’t turn in anything because i’m never really satisfied with anything i do. all my good ideas seem to turn into bad ones once i write it down. How do you get pass writers block?

 whimsyrachy

You turn off your inner critic. You do not listen to your inner police force. You ignore the little voices that tell you that it’s all stupid, and you keep going.

Your grade isn’t suffering because your writing is bad, it’s suffering because you aren’t finishing things and handing them in. 

So, finish them and hand them in. Even if a story’s lousy, you’ll learn something from it that will be useful as a writer, even if it’s just “don’t do that again”.

You’re always going to be dissatisfied with what you write. That’s part of being human. In our heads, stories are perfect, flawless, glittering, magical. Then we start to put them down on paper, one unsatisfactory word at a time. And each time our inner critics tell us that it’s a rotten idea and we should abandon it.

If you’re going to write, ignore your inner critic, while you’re writing. Do whatever you can to finish. Know that anything can be fixed later.

Remember: you don’t have to be brilliant when you start out. You just have to write. Every story you finish puts you closer to being a writer, and makes you a better writer.

Blaming “Writer’s Block” is wonderful. It removes any responsibility from the person with the “block”. It gives you something to blame, and it sounds fancy.

But it’s probably more honest to think of it as a combination of laziness, perfectionism and Getting Stuck. If you’re being lazy, don’t be. If you’re being a perfectionist, don’t be. And if you’re stuck, figure out where the story went off the rails, or what you got wrong, or where you need to go deeper, or what you need to add to make it work, and then start writing again.

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#writing #vulnerability

Hi Neil, i'm writing a story and I'm feeling very exposed, like if anyone could read through the words directly in to my soul, that all my secrets and fears are there for everyone to see it. Have you ever felt like this? How did you deal with it?

1) Yes.

2) I wrote more stories. And discovered after a while that the ones where I opened a door into my soul were the ones people liked the most.

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#howlongitshouldtaketowriteanovel

Kind of a two parter here... How long do you think it should take a person to write a book? I mean, I'm sure part of the answer is "as long as it takes." But for a story that doesn't require much research, what do you think? And do you have stories on hold, of which you're still waiting for missing pieces?

I wrote my shortest book in 6 weeks. My longest took 10 years. So somewhere between the two. Unless you’re a fast writer, or it takes you longer than ten years.

And yes.

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#outlining

How do you outline your books? Right now I’m working on a story and I’m writing the outline first so I can get a picture of what’s gonna happen, and I’ll add more to when I’m actually writing? Is this a good strategy?

Sounds good to me. I tend to mostly only write outlines when I get stuck these days, but as a beginning writer I would outline everything. (I always know less about the end than I do about the beginning, so I normally start writing lists of things that need to happen for myself about 60% of the way through. So I don’t forget them or miss things.)