Advice to writers
You know, I'm not one for just arbly posting links and articles. This isn't that type of blog.
However, I just read this over at Neil Gaiman's blog, (one of my regular haunts) and it just made me feel a lot better about how stagnant my creative writing has felt at the moment.
Although I have yet to read any of his novels (Stardust is sitting on my bedside table waiting for me once I finish Superman: True Brit), I have read several of his graphic novels, including Death, the High Cost of Living. Gaiman's career trajectory and biography (he has dabbled in all areas of writing and creative production) has really positioned him as one of my career role models, along with Tim Burton. Anyway, Gaiman regularly answers fan questions on his blog and this was a goodie!
Neil,
I am a huge fan of both your work and your advice to aspiring authors (I have a post-it note with a quote from you about bear wrestling for when i get discouraged). So I know that your most common advice to aspiring writers is to write.
Well what about when your youngish (23) and you do write, but you just feel like your skills aren't matching your ideas. In other words, you feel like most of your stuff is utter crap.
Did you ever feel like this? And if so what did you do to hone your skills, or improve your techniques?
How important do you think college is for writers?
Regardless of an answer, thanks for taking the time to read these questions.
Truly,
'tricia
That was pretty much how I felt when I was 22-23, too. I had a fairly good ear for other authorial voices, so I could pastiche, and I wanted to be a writer more than most people want to breathe, but I didn't have a lot to say and I knew that I wasn't very good yet -- and also that I had ideas that were better than I was.
What I did was work as a journalist. It forced me to write, to write in quantity, to write to deadline. It forced me to get better than I was, very fast.
It got stuff I wrote into print. There is nothing for a young author that teaches you how to get better faster than reading something you wrote in print -- suddenly every mistake, every infelicity, every laziness, shows up as if in neon letters.
And the process of transcribing conversations forced me to learn to write dialogue and learn the economies of getting speech patterns into just a few words. (Dialogue -- even "naturalistic dialogue" -- isn't how people speak. So you need to learn to distill.)
And I was also lucky in finding myself with several book review columns, being forced to read and review everything, including stuff way out of my comfort zone, or books I simply would never have picked up. (I think writers should read from the shelves they wouldn't normally go.) And it was great reading stuff where I'd read something and go "I may be crap, but I'm better than this." (Working on Ghastly Beyond Belief was a great help on this, too.)
Also I got to do some living. That bit was important too, and much of it was a side effect of being a journalist -- I got to see lots of bits of the world I hadn't known existed, and talk to people I would never otherwise have encountered. That was important too.
So that was how I did it. You'll probably want to do it differently. I don't think any two people are going to take the same path, or need to.
As for how important college is for writers -- I remember someone once asking here if he needed an MFA before he could write -- the awful truth is that no editor, picking up a manuscript, is going to check your qualifications before reading page 1, and no qualifications will keep her reading past page 2 if she isn't enjoying it and interested in what happens next. (On the other hand, to the extent that college makes you write, get stuff into print, read outside your comfort zone, and meet people you might not otherwise meet, I think it's great. But it's not any kind of prerequisite.)
Does that help?
Yes, Mr Gaiman, it does!
However, I just read this over at Neil Gaiman's blog, (one of my regular haunts) and it just made me feel a lot better about how stagnant my creative writing has felt at the moment.
Although I have yet to read any of his novels (Stardust is sitting on my bedside table waiting for me once I finish Superman: True Brit), I have read several of his graphic novels, including Death, the High Cost of Living. Gaiman's career trajectory and biography (he has dabbled in all areas of writing and creative production) has really positioned him as one of my career role models, along with Tim Burton. Anyway, Gaiman regularly answers fan questions on his blog and this was a goodie!
Neil,
I am a huge fan of both your work and your advice to aspiring authors (I have a post-it note with a quote from you about bear wrestling for when i get discouraged). So I know that your most common advice to aspiring writers is to write.
Well what about when your youngish (23) and you do write, but you just feel like your skills aren't matching your ideas. In other words, you feel like most of your stuff is utter crap.
Did you ever feel like this? And if so what did you do to hone your skills, or improve your techniques?
How important do you think college is for writers?
Regardless of an answer, thanks for taking the time to read these questions.
Truly,
'tricia
That was pretty much how I felt when I was 22-23, too. I had a fairly good ear for other authorial voices, so I could pastiche, and I wanted to be a writer more than most people want to breathe, but I didn't have a lot to say and I knew that I wasn't very good yet -- and also that I had ideas that were better than I was.
What I did was work as a journalist. It forced me to write, to write in quantity, to write to deadline. It forced me to get better than I was, very fast.
It got stuff I wrote into print. There is nothing for a young author that teaches you how to get better faster than reading something you wrote in print -- suddenly every mistake, every infelicity, every laziness, shows up as if in neon letters.
And the process of transcribing conversations forced me to learn to write dialogue and learn the economies of getting speech patterns into just a few words. (Dialogue -- even "naturalistic dialogue" -- isn't how people speak. So you need to learn to distill.)
And I was also lucky in finding myself with several book review columns, being forced to read and review everything, including stuff way out of my comfort zone, or books I simply would never have picked up. (I think writers should read from the shelves they wouldn't normally go.) And it was great reading stuff where I'd read something and go "I may be crap, but I'm better than this." (Working on Ghastly Beyond Belief was a great help on this, too.)
Also I got to do some living. That bit was important too, and much of it was a side effect of being a journalist -- I got to see lots of bits of the world I hadn't known existed, and talk to people I would never otherwise have encountered. That was important too.
So that was how I did it. You'll probably want to do it differently. I don't think any two people are going to take the same path, or need to.
As for how important college is for writers -- I remember someone once asking here if he needed an MFA before he could write -- the awful truth is that no editor, picking up a manuscript, is going to check your qualifications before reading page 1, and no qualifications will keep her reading past page 2 if she isn't enjoying it and interested in what happens next. (On the other hand, to the extent that college makes you write, get stuff into print, read outside your comfort zone, and meet people you might not otherwise meet, I think it's great. But it's not any kind of prerequisite.)
Does that help?
Yes, Mr Gaiman, it does!
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