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sarhoskedi-deactivated20241211

suivra

Room 14 Cartwright, Ocean, 2013, Robyn Stacey.

iloveyou-writers

Am I still considered a writer, even if…

“I don’t write every day?” Yes.

“it goes weeks or months between sessions?” Yes.

“my stories don’t get any or much interaction?” Yes.

“I only write fanfiction?” Yes.

“I only write for fun?” Yes.

“someone criticizes my skill?” Yes.

“my family are the only ones who read my stories?” Yes.

“I only write for myself, with no intention of sharing it with the world?” Yes.

“I don’t know writing terminology?” Yes.

“I’m not very good at what I’m doing?” Yes.

“I don’t believe myself worthy of being called one?” Yes.

“the publisher turned me down?” Yes.

“I only write one genre?” Yes.

“I use clichés?” Yes.

“I lack motivation?” Yes.

“I excel at dialogue but suck at description, or vice versa?” Yes.

“I keep abandoning projects to start something new?” Yes.

“I say screw the rules?” Yes.

- D

dduane

Am I still considered a writer, even if…?

I invite my colleagues to come in behind this and add their details.

“…I don’t write every day?” Yes. You need to find your own best writing rhythm. Don’t let people bully you into theirs.

“…it goes weeks or months between sessions?” Yes. Writing comes from an internal “aquifer” that can take time to refill. Let it.

“…my stories don’t get any or much interaction?” No one can guarantee that anyone will interact with their work, even if it is good… now, or in decades/centuries past. For example: you want to sit down and have a long talk with the shade of James Joyce.

“…I only write fanfiction?” Oh FFS. This “Fan fiction isn’t as valid as non-fan fiction” thing: who made THAT up? Write what you love. God knows I have, and continue to.

“…I only write for fun?” This is the single best and most valid reason to write. (Though `’and also for money” comes pretty close behind it). You could, though, make a strong case for “There is no point in writing for WHATEVER amount of money or fame if you’re not having fun as well.” In fact I think my professional colleagues may possibly agree that without the fun, the money’s value decreases significantly. Lack of fun in writing, in fact, could be considered to be one of the very few things in the world (besides outright currency devaluation) that can make money worth less.

“…someone criticizes my skill?” (…A pause while I fall to the ground wheezing with laughter.) Jeez. Publishers may try to declare you less of a writer than you are, but usually that’s only because they know you’re about to be poached by another publisher.

“…my family are the only ones who read my stories?” If only your family read your stuff? Assuming they’re not assailing you with inadequate critiques about it, then they are perceptive people. Others will get there. Thank them for their support, and give it time.

“..I don’t know writing terminology?” This is another O,FFS! thing. I couldn’t diagram a sentence if my life depended on it. The only way I know about gerunds is from Nigel Molesworth. Just write.

“…I only write for myself, with no intention of sharing it with the world?” When you are a writer, you get to write only for yourself if that’s what you choose. …And you know what? The world has its own imperatives. If you really don’t want your words shared, dig a deep hole to put them in, and never tell anyone where it is. Because words will out.

“…I don’t know writing terminology?” Whatever I previously knew, I’m happily to have pretty much forgotten, except when I need to coordinate with editors. When I have to do that, if someone uses a writing word I’ve misplaced by disuse, I go look it up. No one cares.

“…I’m not very good at what I’m doing?” If you’re just getting started on this journey (i.e., you’re only within the first five or ten years of it), you’re not in the best position to make that judgment. Give it some time yet.

“…I don’t believe myself worthy of being called one?” Oh, gosh, who sold you the idea that you have to believe you’re worthy of this work to be doing it? Routinely the people who hand you this line are the ones who feel the most unworthy themselves. Unfollow them at your earliest convenience.

“…the publisher turned me down?” Oh, my sweet summer child. The only time to pay attention to anything a publisher says is after they’ve paid you. If money hasn’t changed hands, wave bye-bye and move on. It’s not your job to validate them or their (soi-disant) taste. A publisher’s quality is known by those they take on, and how they treat them.

“…I only write one genre?” …What? What are you saying? You write. All writing is in the One Great Genre. Everything else is nonfiction. (Or something.) You’re where you need to be. Relax, and write, and have a party. :)

“…I use clichés?” All clichés had some truth in them once. That’s how they got to be clichés. … Some of them are still true. Use them judiciously… or rephrase them and make them new. They’ll thank you for that.

“…I lack motivation?” Are you kidding? All working writers lack motivation, repeatedly, every single day. All you have to do is be motivated one more time than all those times… and then write something.

“…I excel at dialogue but suck at description, or vice versa?” If (a), write more dialogue. If (b), write more description. Play to your strengths, and let the world beat a path to your door. No one ever said you had to be great at everything.

“…I keep abandoning projects to start something new?” (a) Make sure to make notes on what you’ve been working on. (b) Keep those notes safe, and move on! Sometimes the writer’s brain recognizes something as being of value, but doesn’t yet know how to make use of it. Give it time.

“…I say screw the rules?” Every day, and twice on Sunday! Do it as necessary while finding your way. A big part of your job is to find what the rules are for you… the specific working writer who you are. Your job is to find the writing habits and style that will enable you to share with other human beings what the most important things are that you feel the need to share. …And to have as much fun as possible doing it.

…Are you still here? Get on with it! :)

neil-gaiman

As a bestselling author, I need to admit that I’m also not entirely certain what a gerund is. In the Molesworth books I learned they were tubby and had horns and pointy noses and that was good enough for me.

neil-gaiman

Hi, Neil! How do you stay focused while writing? For some reason I am having a very hard time not being distracted when I try to work on a story- even with this ridiculous amount of Quarantine Free Time. Any advice?

Pretty much everyone I know (including me) is dealing with the gulf between “I suddenly have all this time, whee I am going to write all the things,” and “why aren’t I getting everything written? Why am I confused and distracted and worried?”

And all I can say is, you aren’t alone in this. Be kind to yourself. Nothing quite like this has happened in living memory, we don’t know how it’s going to end, and the world is unsafe and different. All of that takes headspace. More if you’re mourning people.

So forgive yourself, be kind to yourself, and look out at your world from the place of “ANYTHING I get written during lockdown times is a small (or not so small) victory”.

neil-gaiman

I'm 24, and have dreams of becoming a writer, but my brain keeps telling me it's too late to start now. Any advice?

Tell your brain to hush, and start writing. It’s never too late.

beggars-opera

The best notes written in manuscripts by medieval monks

Colophon: a statement at the end of a book containing the scribe or owner’s name, date of completion, or bitching about how hard it is to write a book in the dark ages

Oh, my hand

The parchment is very hairy

Thank God it will soon be dark

St. Patrick of Armagh, deliver me from writing

Now I’ve written the whole thing; for Christ’s sake give me a drink

Oh d fuckin abbot

Massive hangover

Whoever translated these Gospels did a very poor job

Cursed be the pesty cat that urinated over this book during the night

If someone else would like such a handsome book, come and look me up in Paris, across from the Notre Dame cathedral

I shall remember, O Christ, that I am writing of Thee, because I am wrecked today

Do not reproach me concerning the letters, the ink is bad and the parchment scanty and the day is dark

11 golden letters, 8 shilling each; 700 letters with double shafts, 7 shilling for each hundred; and 35 quires of text, each 16 leaves, at 3 shilling each. For such an amount I won’t write again

Here ends the second part of the title work of Brother Thomas Aquinas of the Dominican Order; very long, very verbose; and very tedious for the scribe; thank God, thank God, and again thank God

If anyone take away this book, let him die the death, let him be fried in a pan; let the falling sickness and fever seize him; let him be broken on the wheel, and hanged. Amen

neil-gaiman

How old were you when your first piece of writing was published? I'm 24 and I'm worried that I'll never make anything worth publishing.

I was 23 when I was first published, and I don't think I wrote anything good until I was 26 or 27. But I knew I had a lot of writing to do before the good stuff would turn up.

neil-gaiman

I'm 14 and I dream of becoming a writer, do you have any advice on what I can do for now so that when I 'grow up' I can achieve my dream?

First of all, you need to read. 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.

Second, try things out. Enjoy yourself. If you find a writer you like, write like them. And then sound like something else. Write anything. Don’t worry about it being good or read by other people. Just play, and play a lot.

Third, read books on writing, use anything that seems interesting and ignore anything that you want to. When I was a boy, I remember the delight with which I found a book called THE CRAFT OF SCIENCE FICTION, edited by Reginald Bretnor with essays by a bunch of writers, although the only things I’ve used (I think) were John Brunner’s descriptions of the different shapes of stories, and Larry Niven’s advice to treasure your typos (which is where CORALINE came from).

Fourth, live as much as you can. The more things you see, the more places you go, the more lives you touch, the more you will be able to write truthfully, and the more memories you will have to make your imaginings real.

Don’t let people discourage you. (You are under no obligation to tell anyone you are going to be a writer.) You are not on anyone’s timeline. You can get a job that’s a writing job, or get a different sort of job: neither of these things matter in the long run. Just know that you are going to have to make the time to write.

Beyond that, you are on your own. And, when it’s you in front of a screen or a blank piece of paper, that’s the way it’s always going to be.

filmsnark

Writing, Neil Gaiman, and Kon Satoshi

I almost gave up writing altogether after reading Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman.

I didn’t read it as it was coming out in comics, but later, when it was published in collected volumes.

It was too perfect. Too complete. It seemed like it had sprung fully-formed from Gaiman’s head, and he had to spend years waiting for artists to catch up.

It was overwhelming. Unattainable.

I wasn’t reading the book’s post-scripts, though, because I wanted to avoid potential spoilers. I wanted to experience the material, not the author dissecting it.

I did read them on a second pass. There’s a story on Dream Country, the third volume, about a writer keeping a muse captive so she can give him ideas. It’s a piece with characters that tie into Morpheus’ past and who will come up again, woven into the larger narrative. The book also contains a post-script on how the story came about, where Gaiman states it was at first about a succubus, before moving on to talk about his process for working with the artist.

My eyes kept moving forward, brain storing words from the original script, but my consciousness had taken a step back.

Wait, back up, what was that character again? Who? Calliope. Originally a succubus, replies brain, let me keep going here.

Yes, stupid me. I had assumed Sandman had been gestating inside Gaiman from the start, waiting for an opportunity for the entire story to burst out. He didn’t transcribe a long epic he had already come up with. He wasn’t born with the tale. He worked at it for years, sometimes throwing away material and replacing it with things that fit better. Like a normal human being.

I keep making the same mistake. I wrote about a similar mental bug when talking about Kon Satoshi and Dream Fossil.

We only see the finished product. We don’t see the author sitting down at the typewriting and bleeding.

It’s all work. Some people have more potential and have it easier, others have to work harder at it, but in the end it’s only work. If you want a chance to get better at it, you should treat it as such.

neil-gaiman

I can’t see Sandman, really. All I can see is the patches and the solutions and the hacks, the places where the art wasn’t what I hoped for or expected, or where the writing fell short of the thing in my head. It’s long enough ago that I still wonder why I was so insistent that DC simply dump “Three Septembers and a January” because it was bad enough that simply publishing it would ruin Sandman. (Sensibly, Tom Peyer, who was editing while Karen Berger was off having a sudden baby, ignored me, or made pacifying noises that perhaps it wasn’t as bad as I believed. These days it’s one of my favourite episodes.)

But yes. It’s all work, and it’s all about the work. I used to write four pages of SANDMAN a day on a good day, which was about eight pages of script, although I’d usually write the last six pages in one swoop being grumpy that I didn’t have enough pages and throwing things away so we’d end on page 24. (Although once, in Game of You, I simply miscounted and wrote a 25 page comic accidentally, so we only did 23 pages the next month to make up for it.) By the end of Sandman I was writing two pages a day on a good day…

neil-gaiman

On Writing. (A bit long. Sorry.)

I got up this morning, and read the thirty or so questions that people had left in the last 8 hours. And apart from the few that wanted to tell me that, honestly, there’s nothing in the whole world like a photo of a gentleman holding a small yellow chainsaw, most of the rest of them were writing questions, about how you start writing and how you continue, and how you keep going when people criticise you and so on. And I thought, all this is stuff I’ve covered so extensively over on my blog at neilgaiman.com… and 90% of the answers were probably in one post. It was called On Writing.

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2004/02/on-writing.asp

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 03, 2004

On Writing

POSTED BY NEIL AT 8:01 PM

I really don’t want to sit here giving you my life story. It’s boring and too long for me to write or for you to sit and have time to read. I was just told by a graduate school that because of my shabby GPA - a 3.07 - (not my writing sample)that I wouldn’t be admitted to their creative writing program. Anyway, with my writing, it’s just seemed like one thing after another, and I have no one to give me input on any of it since I, quite literally, come from a family of engineers, all very concrete thinkers. My question is this: when do you just give up? I don’t want to but it seems like the only logical thing to do. I’m so tired and frustrated with being deemed a failure. The one week I was actually able to give up writing was the most miserable week of my life. I know you’re busy and I really don’t expect you to answer this email. I just thought it might be nice to talk to someone who might just be able to understand, even if - at this point - I’m just sending a message out into the ether. Jarett Underwood I’m not sure what getting into a creative writing program has to do with being a writer. Go and look at Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s list of the 14 things a slush-reader or editor is looking for , and whether you’ve done a creative writing program, have an MFA in writing, or are in fact currently teaching a course in creative writing isn’t on the list. (For the record, I’ve never been involved in a creative writing program. In my case, that was mostly because I knew I wanted to be a writer, and had enough hubris to know that I’d rather make my mistakes on the job. It was also because I had a vague suspicion that people in authority might suggest that I should write respectable but dull fiction, and then I’d be forced to kill them, and it would all end in tears or in prison. Many of my friends have enjoyed creative writing programs no end. Some of them teach them.) As for giving up, well, sure, if you want to. 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. It 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. There are undoubtedly hundreds of easier, less stressful, more straightforward jobs in the world. Personally, I can’t think of anything else I’d rather do, but that’s me. If you want to be a writer, write. You may have to get a day job to keep body and soul together (I cheated, and got a writing job, or lots of them, to feed me and pay the rent). If you aren’t going to be a writer, then go and be something else. It’s not a god-given calling. There’s nothing holy or magic about it. It’s a craft that mostly involves a lot of work, most of it spent sitting making stuff up and writing it down, and trying to make what you have made up and written down somehow better. I think for me the tipping point was when I was a very young man. It was late at night, and I was lying in bed, and I thought, as I often thought, “I could be a writer. It’s what I want to be. I think it’s what I am.” And then I imagined myself in my eighties, possibly even on my deathbed, thinking that same thought, in a life when I’d never written anything. And I’d be an old man, with my life behind me, still telling myself I was really a writer – and I would never know if I was kidding myself or not. So I thought it might be better to go off and be a writer, even if what I learned from the experience was that I wasn’t a writer. At least that way, I’d know. If it’s input you need, find a helpful bunch of likeminded people, either in real life or on the web. And, as mentioned here before, there's Clarion and Clarion West and Viable Paradise among others for the would-be SF-Fantasy writers. The SFWA has a list of workshops and groups, both virtual and visitable at http://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/links-to-writers-workshops/. It does help, to be a writer, to have the sort of crazed ego that doesn’t allow for failure. 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. And, if the books are published, then you can pretty much guarantee that bad reviews will be as well. And you’ll need to learn how to shrug and keep going. Or you stop, and get a real job.

neil-gaiman

Hello Mr gaiman. How old were you when you started writing stories ? I'm 14 and I try and try but they are all awful. I always give up in the middle and I can never finish what I wanted to write.

I know. I found a pile of papers of mine from my teen years and into my early twenties recently, and there were so many stories begun, so many first pages of novels never written. I’d start them, and then I’d give up because they weren’t as brilliant as Ursula K Le Guin, or Roger Zelazny, or Samuel R Delany, and anyway I wasn’t actually sure what happened next.

I was around 22 when I started finishing things. They weren’t actually very good, and they all sounded like other people, but the finishing was the important bit. I kept going. A dozen stories and a book, and then I sold one (it wasn’t very good, and I had to cut it from 8,000 words to 4,000 to sell it, but I sold it). I probably wrote another half-dozen stories over the next year, and sold three. But now they were starting to sound like me.

Think of it this way: if you wanted to become a juggler, or a painter, you wouldn’t start jugggling, drop something and give up because you couldn’t juggle broken bottles like Penn Jillette, or start a few paintings then give up because the thing in your head was better than what your hands were getting onto the paper. You carry on. You learn. You drop things. You learn about form and shape and shade and colour and how to draw hands without the fingers looking like noodles. You finish things, learn from what you got right and what you got wrong, and then you do the next thing.

And one day you realise you got good. It takes as long as it takes. So keep writing. And all you need to do right now is try to finish things.