02c. 1960 ADWriting's a lot like cooking. Sometimes the cake won't rise, no matter what you do, and every now and again the cake tastes better than you ever could have dreamed it would.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
03c. 1960 ADThere are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
04c. 1960 ADI don't think immediate tragedy is a very good source of art. It can be, but too often it's raw and painful and un-dealt-with. Sometimes art can be a really good escape from the intolerable, and a good place to go when things are bad, but that doesn't mean you have to write directly about the bad thing; sometimes you need to let time pass, and allow the thing that hurts to get covered with layers, and then you take it out, like a pearl, and you make art out of it.When my father died, on the plane from his funeral in the UK back to New York, still in shock, I got out my notebook and wrote a script. It was a good place to go, the place that script was, and I went there so deeply and so far that when we landed Maddy had to tap me on the arm to remind me that I had to get off the plane now. (She says I looked up at her, puzzled, and said "But I want to find out what happens next.") It was where I went and what I did to cope, and I was amazed, some weeks later when I pulled out that notebook to start typing, to find that I'd written pretty much the entire script in that six hour journey.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
05c. 1960 ADYou wanna be the next Tolkien? Don't read big, tolkien-esque fantasies. TOLKIEN didn't read big, tolkien-esque fantasies. He read books on finnish philology. You go and read outside your comfort zone, go and learn stuff. And then the most important thing, once you get any level of quality--get to the point where you wanna write, and you can write--is tell YOUR story. Don't tell a story anyone else can tell. Because you always start out with other people's voices... There will always be people who are better or smarter than you. There are people who are better writers than me, who plot better than I do, but there is no one who can tell a Neil Gaiman story like I can.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
06c. 1960 ADDoing fine, thank you, I would say, never knowing how to talk about what I do. If I could talk about it, I would not have to do it. I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my heart. Some of them. Not all.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
07c. 1960 ADBut the truth is, it's not the idea, it's never the idea, it's always what you do with it.")Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
08c. 1960 ADWriting may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
09c. 1960 ADThe 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.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
10c. 1960 ADIt’s not that they’re small, the fair folk. Especially not the queen of them all, Mab of the flashing eyes and the slow smile with lips that can conjure your heart under the hills for a hundred years. It’s not that they’re small. It’s that we’re so far away.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
11c. 1960 ADAnd I thought, eight years ago, when I began carefully charting the progress of American Gods, nervously dipping my toes into the waters of blogging, would I have imagined a future in which, instead of recording the vicissitudes of bringing a book into the world, I would be writing about not-even-interestingly missing cups of cold camomile tea? And I thought, yup. Sounds about right.Happy Eighth birthday, blog.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
12c. 1960 ADAll writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
13c. 1960 ADSo 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.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
14c. 1960 ADThe 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.", University of the Arts, 134th Commencement (Philadelphia, PA, May 17, 2012)]Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
15c. 1960 ADThe best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it’s about and why you’re doing it and what these people are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising… and it’s magic and wonderful and strange.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
16c. 1960 ADAnd life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
17c. 1960 ADIf 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.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
18c. 1960 ADIf you you write with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
19c. 1960 ADIt's a weird thing, writing.Sometimes you can look out across what you're writing, and it's like looking out over a landscape on a glorious, clear summer's day. You can see every leaf on every tree, and hear the birdsong, and you know where you'll be going on your walk. And that's wonderful.Sometimes it's like driving through fog. You can't really see where you're going. You have just enough of the road in front of you to know that you're probably still on the road, and if you drive slowly and keep your headlamps lowered you'll still get where you were going.And that's hard while you're doing it, but satisfying at the end of a day like that, where you look down and you got 1500 words that didn't exist in that order down on paper, half of what you'd get on a good day, and you drove slowly, but you drove.And sometimes you come out of the fog into clarity, and you can see just what you're doing and where you're going, and you couldn't see or know any of that five minutes before.And that's magic.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
20c. 1960 ADI'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
21c. 1960 ADM is for magic. All the letters are, if you put them together properly. You can make magic with them, and dreams, and, I hope, even a few surprises...Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
22c. 1960 ADPeople talk about books that write themselves, and it's a lie. Books don't write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you'd believe.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
23c. 1960 ADThe irritating question they ask us -- us being writers -- is: "Where do you get your ideas?"Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
24c. 1960 ADSometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.Neil Gaiman / quote ↗
