He sits in a garden, pulling weeds. "Every young writer asks me: 'How do I find my voice?' You don't find it. You earn it. Write a million words. That’s the price of admission. The first 900,000 are just practice. Your voice is the sum of everything you’ve ever read, loved, hated, and forgot you remembered. Stop trying to sound like Hemmingway. Sound like you."
"Stories are the only thing we truly own. They’re how we make sense of the chaos. In this class, I’m not going to give you a formula. Formulas kill stories. I’m going to give you a toolbox." MasterClass - Neil Gaiman Teaches the Art of St...
"When I was a kid, I didn’t think I was going to be a writer. I thought I was going to be a superhero. Then I realized no one was going to give me X-ray vision, so I decided to build worlds instead." He sits in a garden, pulling weeds
NEIL GAIMAN TEACHES THE ART OF STORYTELLING Write a million words
Neil Gaiman sits in a high-backed leather chair, surrounded by bookshelves crammed with strange artifacts, first editions, and a raven skull. He leans forward, eyes twinkling.
He acts out two voices, shifting in his chair. "Dialogue is not conversation. Real conversation is full of 'umms' and 'hellos' and 'how’s the weather.' Dialogue is a sword fight. Every line should either advance the plot or reveal character. And what they don’t say is more important than what they do. Subtext is the ghost in the room. Learn to write silence."
He holds up a thick stack of rejection slips. "I have a wall of these. From The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction , from publishers, from my own mother. (She said The Graveyard Book was too dark. I ignored her.) The secret to a career is not talent. It’s stubbornness. Finish what you start. Let the work be bad. You can fix bad. You can’t fix nothing. And when you finish? Send it out. Then start the next thing."