Neil Gaiman by NRKbeta used under CC BY-SA 2.0
New authors are always looking for tips, tricks, and rules that can give them an edge in the wild jungles of storytelling, and it’s natural that established authors are considered fonts of wisdom in this regard. They’re successful, so they must have something useful to tell us, right? Well, when I looked into Kurt Vonnegut’s eight rules of writing, I found them to be a very mixed bag. So today we’re looking at another famous author: Neil Gaiman. As luck would have it, he also has eight rules of writing, gathered in this Guardian article from the ancient year of 2010.
The First Rule
Write.
Uh-huh. I guess that’s technically accurate; you must at some point write if you want to be a writer. Of course, you also need to breathe occasionally or else you’ll stop being an alive person, and it’s pretty rare to publish a bestseller from beyond the grave. We could also add “eat” and “drink” to our list of writing rules, just to cover all the bases.
To be extremely generous, we could interpret this to mean that writers should put aside supplementary tasks like researching, outlining, drawing maps, and the like so there’s more time for adding words to the manuscript drafts. And for some writers, that’s good advice, as they can get trapped in endless worldbuilding notes or kill their creative energy with too much outlining. But it’s just as likely to go the other way – writers often need a lot of research to get the feel of their setting right, or they end up with 100,000 words of unsalvageable dreck because they didn’t outline properly.
Process advice like this is extremely subjective, depending on the individual author and their needs, so it’s not useful to give out in the form of blanket statements. Although, to be honest, it’s more likely that Gaiman is being cheeky here. “What’s the first rule of writing? To write!” That might be cute, but it’s not the advice that less-experienced writers need to hear.
Conclusion: Completely useless, even when given every benefit of the doubt.
The Second Rule
Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
Really, Neil? You’ve just repeated the first rule, but with more words and more confusion. Put one word after another? Well, I was going to fill in words at random all over the page, but now I know better. I’m also not a big fan of telling authors to “find the right word.” No one picks the wrong word on purpose; the problem is they don’t always know which word is right!
My best guess is that this is meant as encouragement. Keep putting one foot in front of the other, no matter how hard it is – that kind of thing. It’s not very good encouragement, though. If that was the goal, it should have included something about how you’ll feel ground down and exhausted sometimes, which is when it’s most important to keep putting words down one at a time.
I’d also question how useful such encouragement would be in a list of “rules.” Writers can get encouragement from anywhere. The whole point of consulting experienced professionals is that they’re supposed to impart knowledge that can help you overcome problems. Not give you an incomplete pep talk.
Conclusion: Another useless entry, even if you can figure out what it means.
The Third Rule
Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
We’ve moved past tautologies and into actual advice for the first time and… it’s very situational. On its face, the idea that you absolutely have to finish every story is obviously wrong. Plenty of successful writers have put away half-finished stories, or even left best-selling series without an ending, and they’re still doing okay.
But there are a lot of writers, especially new writers, who struggle to finish anything. Starting a project is fun and exciting. Once you reach the middle, it’s often just work, and by then you have a bevy of shiny new ideas to distract you. Following this advice could be useful for writers in that situation, since buckling down and finishing a story is something they’ll have to do eventually, even if it’s exceptionally difficult.
At the same time, many other writers don’t have difficulty with finishing stories as a whole, but do run into trouble with individual works. In that case, an obsession with reaching the end can be detrimental. Some stories are never going to work out, and pushing through will only leave you with a lot of wasted time and energy. It’s better to shift focus and work on something that actually has a chance of functioning. How do you know when it’s time to abandon a story? The answer is extremely context sensitive and changes based on the person, which is why a blanket statement like this is often completely inapplicable to an individual’s situation.
Conclusion: Possibly useful for the right person, but actively detrimental for others.
The Fourth Rule
Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
This rule is actually three separate rules wearing a trench coat and hoping no one notices. Each sentence is largely unrelated to the other two. The first sentence is, like so much of Gaiman’s advice, dependent entirely on what your writing process looks like. Personally, I always put my stories aside for a while before doing any kind of revision, as it helps me establish some distance. But I’ve worked with authors who turn right around and start revising before the digital ink has even dried. Starting so soon allows them to fix problems before those problems become part of the story’s baseline. They wouldn’t gain anything from waiting.
The second sentence is a weird exercise in pointless make-believe. You can pretend you’ve never read a story all you want; that doesn’t actually suppress your memories.* It’s still a good idea to read through the draft a few times so you can catch obvious errors, and you should always try to imagine the reader’s experience, but that won’t actually undo what you know about the story. That’s what editors and beta readers are for!
The third sentence is actually pretty good advice, assuming the friends are serving as beta readers. You need multiple people’s reactions to accurately gauge what’s working and what’s not working, as a single person could always be a weird outlier. Likewise, you should pick beta readers who typically enjoy the kind of story you’re writing, as that’ll be the core of your target audience. There’s no point in giving a story about dueling starpilots to someone who hates spaceships.
Conclusion: One-third situational, one-third pointless, and one-third useful. I guess that makes it 33.3% good advice.
The Fifth Rule
Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
Hot damn, now we’re talking. This is basically Mythcreants’ philosophy on beta reading and on getting feedback in general. People can tell you their experience with a story and, short of malicious intent, they’re rarely wrong. This is a major reason you don’t argue with your beta readers. If a reader is confused by your plot twist, explaining why it happened doesn’t fix their confusion in the moment. If a reader is bored at a battle scene, telling them the battle is actually very exciting doesn’t help.
By the same token, the vast majority of people are not qualified to tell you how to fix your story, whether they’ve read the story or not. They probably don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish, so their advice often goes in the wrong direction entirely. If they do know what your goals are, they probably still lack the expertise to make useful recommendations. Storytelling is both very complicated and poorly understood, meaning that most people’s revision ideas won’t be any better than yours, and probably worse.
Ideally, editors are the exception, since they should actually possess the expertise to make useful recommendations on a story. But there are a lot of editors out there, and some are better than others. In particular, a lot of content editors don’t take the time to figure out what the author is trying to accomplish. Without knowing the author’s goals, an editor’s advice can be technically accurate while also being completely unhelpful. That’s why it’s a good idea to research an editor before hiring them, and why we make our editing philosophy as transparent as possible.
Conclusion: Very useful, and something I hope authors keep in mind regardless of whatever else is on this list.
The Sixth Rule
Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
This rule is more than a little confusing. It starts with “Fix it,” which is indeed something writers have to do. Maybe there’s an author out there who doesn’t have to revise, but I’ve never met them, and the rest of us mere mortals will have a lot of fixing to do before even our best work is ready for publication. So far, so good.
Then, with no transition, the rest of the rule is a caution against perfectionism. Without more context, this sounds like contradictory advice. Are we supposed to fix the story, or are we supposed to accept its flaws and move on? Maybe you should fix the story a little, but then stop at some indeterminate point. No one knows!
Contradictions aside, perfectionism is certainly a problem for some authors, but in my experience, the reverse is much more common. Revising a manuscript is hard, even when you have an editor to point out the problems and offer recommendations. The process is so difficult that authors will often reach for any excuse to avoid it, as I’ve done myself on several occasions. It’s easy to convince yourself that all you’re doing is fiddling with minor issues, so you might as well stop when there are still story-breaking problems to address.
Conclusion: Contradictions aside, this rule could be useful to perfectionist writers out there, but it’s useless to the rest of us.
The Seventh Rule
Laugh at your own jokes.
I don’t get this one, possibly because I’m not very funny.* While it’s possible to laugh at your own jokes, it’s an uphill battle because you already know the punchline. This rule seems like an unnecessarily high standard to set for your writing, assuming you write humor in the first place.
Maybe it means you should write the jokes for yourself first? That’s a risky strategy if ever I heard one. I love obscure Star Trek jokes, but unless my target audience is people who also love obscure Star Trek jokes, I probably shouldn’t fill the manuscript with references to that time Wesley got drunk and took over the ship. Of course, sometimes a story does want that audience specifically, as is the case for Redshirts and Lower Decks. But in most cases, you’ll want jokes that appeal to a wider group of people.
The most generous interpretation I can think of is that you shouldn’t put a joke in your story if you don’t think it’s funny. Which is correct, but also, was anyone doing that? Maybe someone writing a wedding scene who thinks they have to put in sexist humor about the groom’s life being over? Seems like an edge case at best. Heck, this might not even be writing advice. Maybe Gaiman is offering tips on how to enjoy social gatherings – it’s impossible to tell!
Conclusion: A rule can’t be useful if you don’t know what it means.
The Eighth Rule
The 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.
Nope nope nope. Do not approach. Attempt no landing here.
Neil, I have to ask, have you ever met a brand-new writer? I promise that confidence is not what they’re typically lacking. Half a content editor’s job is explaining that no, it won’t work for the story to be about every single thing the writer cares about, all in one manuscript. Beginner’s hubris is a problem in most fields, but it’s especially common in writing because the craft is so poorly understood. New authors often emerge from a four-year English program still thinking that they can revolutionize the concept of a novel on their first try.
Even if overconfidence weren’t rampant among beginners, this rule has an incredibly privileged bent. It’s no secret that only a certain group of people is likely to have their bluster mistaken for competence. Although, to be honest, the writing market is so competitive that even the most privileged authors still need a baseline of skill to be popular. That, or a huge marketing budget.
Weirdly, Gaiman seems to be selling himself short here. Does he think that Good Omens is popular because he was confident while writing it with Terry Pratchett, rather than because it’s very good? Granted, Gaiman’s career benefited from having the right friends, and confidence probably helped there, but I doubt it would have come to much if he hadn’t also been a skilled writer. Most writers need to put in a lot of hard work to achieve that level of skill – a fact no amount of confidence will change.
Conclusion: Some of the worst advice a new writer can get.
Out of eight, we have exactly one useful rule, while the rest range from overly ambiguous to possibly career sinking. That’s significantly worse than Vonnegut’s eight rules, of which 50% are at least somewhat useful. Why the difference? Because most of Vonnegut’s advice is craft focused, while these are all process tips. The writing process differs greatly from author to author, so giving advice on it is extremely difficult. What helps one author might be detrimental to another. The craft of storytelling, on the other hand, is the same for everyone. That doesn’t mean all craft advice is good, but at least we all start from a common point of reference. On the bright side, that Guardian article has rules from several other famous authors, so perhaps we’ll return to it in the future and see what they have to say.
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To be fair to the first rule, I have met a lot of people (including several in writing groups) who say they want to write … but don’t actually write anything.
Sure, some of them are in love with the idea of ‘being a writer’, but can’t think of anything to write (which is always going to be a bit of a non-starter), but I think for plenty of them it’s a confidence issue – they are literally scared of starting to write. Not least because of all the stuff you’ve mentioned before about people thinking they have to be a genius from the get-go, or they might as well give up.
I’m going to guess these people are who the first rule is directed at – just write, it’s fine to be bad to start with, and you’re never going to get any better if you don’t write anything. But yes, assuming that is the case, I definitely agree it could do with a bit more explanation …
Yes, I agree! I think the idea of “you have to start somewhere, so just start” was good for me to hear, too. Otherwise, I don’t think I would’ve ever tried getting into writing at all.
That one is literally the most helpful one on here for me. I could sit and overtime my stories for years before I put a single word on page and it really does bring me back to getting to the point
Personally, I can see some wisdom in those rules, even the ‘useless’ ones.
As for the first one: an astounding number of people think that at some point the muse will pass by, kiss them on the forehead, and the story will flow right through them into the word processor. The harsh reality of writing is that you need to write, to make yourself write regularly, to accept that you’ll cringe at your first forays when you rediscover them later. You must write or you will never be a writer – some people think they just need to wear the proper clothing and wait for the muse.
I read the second one as ‘get your story down on page as you think it should be written,’ which is very close to ‘make a first draft without second-guessing all you write down, you’ll make it better later.’
For me, the third rule is hard, as I tend to have a problem with endings. It’s gotten better since I transitioned from discovery writer to plotter. I agree that you don’t have to finish everything you start (I don’t, either), but it is a good idea to keep in mind that you should write a full story from beginningto end.
The fourth rule is actually pretty important. Don’t revise your written story right away. I always make sure to put it aside for a while (a couple of months is a minimum for me), so I can look at it with fresh eyes. No, of course I don’t forget all about it, but I have a distance that way which makes it easier to work it over.
I’ve got nothing on rule 5, apart from ‘you can’t please everyone,’ so let’s move to rule 6. I’ve learned the hard way that you can’t make a text perfect, so I do limit the amount of revision and editing I do. A new writer can very well fall into the trap of ‘just one more round of editing’ and never let go of a story which is already very good, if not perfect.
I have nothing on rule 7. Perhaps it means ‘you should only put jokes in your story if you find them funny?’
I was not very confident when I started writing, to get to the last rule. I learned over time that I am a good writer, that I can write stories which others enjoy as well. Some authors go in and think ‘I’m going to be a bestselling author in two weeks’ (nope, you won’t), but many also write for themselves but are very afraid of letting others see their own writing. They need the confidence if they’re ever to release or publish anything. I could also read this as ‘be confident in your own skill and write in your own voice, don’t try to copy somebody else’s.’
I am either missing your humor or your reading of the first rule is just off completely, based on your sarcastic comparison with his advice to write with other requirements like breathing. He’s not saying “if you want to write you’d better write” in any sense that could solicit the response “well, duh”. What he means is that no one draws a masterpiece out of the ether the first time they put pen to paper. Just like basketball, or chess or the trumpet, if you want to be good at writing, you have to practice, rehearse.
Many people, if pushed to consider it, would erroneously assume good writing just pours from the minds of gifted people. After all, a genius has genius thoughts and writing is just recording them in a mechanical manner. Writing is not actually considered an art by quite a few people, but rather the simple dictation of thoughts and ideas wherein the actual art lies.
What he is saying is that writing, just like other arts and skills, is something all its own that must also be practiced. It’s not enough to just have amazing ideas for plot or character or setting or poetry. The actual act of committing these things to paper, regardless of the beauty of your ideas themselves, requires practice and lots of time doing the thing until it becomes almost automatic. Think “wax on, wax off”.
I read the review of Vonnegut’s rules as well, and with all due respect both sets of criticism are written as if from a tedious, grey outlook on the art of writing that not only lacks imagination but revels in that lack. This is not a criticism, just an observation. That may very well be your intent and perhaps you’re proud it came through. Or perhaps what I say offends you. That was not my intent. Personally both pieces miss the mark for me, but it takes all kinds.
If Gaiman meant these things from just the word “write,” he should’ve explained them instead of just saying “write.” If he meant “don’t believe that good writing pours from gifted people,” he could’ve said that. If he meant “writing is a skill that can be built,” he could’ve said that. If he meant “practice writing,” he could’ve said that. Instead all he said was “write,” and because you have to do so much work explaining the things he didn’t say, I’m still inclined to think it’s bad advice. If he meant this stuff, he should’ve said it!
But he did said it? It was obviously the very message that he wanted to come across. He doesn’t need to explain it further. It’s obvious that you have to train in order to work, but it’s not something everyone does and that leads to a mediocre performance. So having as first rule you to practice your art and then get better as a result is good advice.
But he didn’t say “train,” or “practice,” he said “write.” Which could just as obviously be read as the cheeky “well, write!” that the article describes. “Write” doesn’t mean “train,” it just means “put words on paper.” There’s nothing in there about practicing.
In my view, that’s a bit of a pedantic interpretation, hinging on the letter of how it’s phrased, and ignoring that repetition is how most skills are improved.
And before it’s said, yes, there isn’t anything EXPLICITLY spoken in that point about “writing continually” or “practicing”, that’s definitely what’s implied by it.
The more one writes, the more one is going to learn about how they do so: the good, the bad, the interests and the things to avoid.
If the implication of “practice” was so obvious, this discussion would not be taking place.
Based on what else he’s written about writing etc, I’m pretty sure he’s being cheeky, and that rule #2 is an extension of the joke. If anyone gets more value than a laugh from it, that’s wonderful of course, but it doesn’t change the ambiguity of what he actually said.
I agree completely. The advice is so ambiguous and open to interpretation that it’s not useful on its own. With more context and explanation it might have been good.
It isn’t ambiguous, it is deliberately short and simplified so that one would think first what he means. If I say as advice for drawing that you need to draw, the obvious interpretation would be drawing as practice. In fact that is an advice that you would get very often, because it is well understood. He said it so simply both to make it clear and a bit as a joke. Just because it wasn’t for everyone clear, it is not a bad advice. Not everyone’s way of communication is understandable for everyone and even the best advice is unclear for some, so I see no reason how this rule is bad, because it still does tell us what it wants us to tell. This article and many others here ultimately came to the conclusion of practicing as well and understood it, so the message was not lost at all.
People reached the conclusion that it meant to practice, but they had to do all the work because the advice was so vague. Vagueness is not clarity; if it was, the people who concluded that it meant “practice” wouldn’t have needed so many words to explain it. If someone gave me the advice that in order to draw I needed to draw, I’d be more annoyed with them than anything. Like, what do you think I was planning to do, go pogo-sticking? Good advice is not vague, nor really even open to interpretation. “Just because it wasn’t for everyone clear, it is not a bad advice”/”Not everyone’s way of communication is understandable for everyone and even the best advice is unclear for some” is kind of the definition of bad advice: advice should be easily understood by whoever reads it, because it should be thoughtful and well-explained. It should be direct and clear, but saying one word and leaving the recipient to do all the work of deciding what it means is not that. I could just as easily look at “write” and decide that it means I should string a bunch of random words together once and then be done with it because hey that means I’m writing. If it’s a joke, then the joke is on us, because he sure doesn’t bother explaining. If you asked me how to write characters and I said “Write characters!” I would be a crappy advice-giver.
My two cents:
Do not compare your work-in-progress to a published novel. Those go through multiple rounds of editing and multiple drafts, possibly getting scrapped and starting over from scratch. Comparing your work-inprogress to a published bestseller is always going to feel disheartening, because you are comparing a finished, polished woodcarving to a block of wood, and that is if you are being generous.
that’s good advice to anyone starting out in a field. An aspiring game dev’s first project isn’t going to be Dark Souls, they simply don’t have the resources. Allowing room for yourself to improve is vital.
This applies to everything, but it goes doubly for creative pursuits like writing: Most laypeople and even more so most novices vastly underestimate just how much time, effort, and (sadly) money these things take.
Love or hate his works on their own merits, but one of the reasons I am such a fan of Sanderson is that, of all of the major living authors, he is the most open and transparent with all of the behind the scenes things that go into making and publishing a novel, to the point of having progress-bars and weekly videos about his ongoing projects.
One of the most interesting things he has done is publish a prototype of one of his more famous works, The Way of Kings, as a Kickstarter bonus. PDF and audio versions are both online for free, if you want. The prototype, now called Prime to distiguish it from the Way of Kings proper (herafter WoK), was written nearly a decade earlyer, by a far less experienced author. Prime is… not good, strictly speaking, and WoK is probably the weakest of the Stormlight Archive series it started, but the two side-by-side is perhaps the most fascinating thing I have read in a long time, intellectually.
Prime is, recognizably, a VERSION of WoK, but it is so far removed that I would not even call it a first draft, so much as a wholly distinct work that had elements salvaged and reworked. Not an ancestor so much as a disowned mutant uncle. Some characters and plot-lines are copy and pasted more-or-less unchanged from Prime to WoK, while others where dropped entirely or massively reworked. Some concepts are the same in the broad strokes, but are changed massively by seemingly small details. Seeing what changed, what stayed the same, what was kept but moved over to a different spot, ect, and why, is itself a lesson in story-craft.
Also, even though Prime is, generously, a mediocre example of early-2000s fantasy, and Sanderson all-but admitted as much, he released it free to anyone who wants to see it, with a lengthy introduction explaining the context of its creation and the mistakes he made in making it. I can think of no other major author who has done something like this, and doing it must have taken a whole lot of confidence to put oneself on public display in such a vulnerable way.
Here are my views on this and I will explain on who’s side I am on and why:
1. Neil could have gotten more elaboration on what it means with “write”, but the point is clear: If you want to become a writer you need to keep writing and treat it as an art that gets better with practice. I do see no contradiction with this rule and doing research. It might see a bit too obvious, but the message is clear: practice!
This is not really a bad tip, because people need work and routine in order to be good in a field and that doesn’t include writing. Also comparing write with eat is a poor analogy. Getting the tip “Train” when you want to go training is an ok tip.
2. No, it isn’t the first one again, it is completely different. He means that you have to first think about how to structure a sentence and the best way is to figure out if the sentence does work by writings the words and putting the right ones in a good order.
For instance you can have a sentence a character says and write it down, then think again if it sounds reasonable and write it. If it doesn’t, write a new word and structure it anew.
It’s pretty useful to first think about the words you are going to use.
3. Yeah Neil engages in the Sunk cost fallacy, just because we spend time with something, we shouldn’t finish it. Oren is right one this one.
4. You should work the way that is best to you, but it is always good to first put it aside for a while after you are done, so you can relax and then read it.
Also trying to read a sentence by *pretending* it isn’t written from you, can help you to write more objectively and is good exercise and not impossible.
Friends can be useful as beta readers and I agree with both of you.
In actuality this advice is useful to 100%.
5. This rule is not a writing advice at all, it’s just online discourse advice and not exactly the kind that is actually interesting. People who don’t like your story will always have reasons as to why they didn’t like it and would often offer you advice to get better, so what is the useful thing here? I can say “this novel is garbage” and say something more correct than “this novel is badly written because the main characters reasoning for betraying his friends is not understandable due to blaming them on things for no reason. A more coherent and relatable one would be greed or him being frustrated with the way they treated him.”? I don’t think it works.
6. I do not see the contradiction here. Trying to do the best is not perfectionism and should not be seen as such. You can always attempt to be better than the person you were before without being trapped into perfectionism. You can always stop when you see that you can’t do anything anymore or that it isn’t useful and hope for the best. A perfectionist won’t stop, until their perfect idea is realized and would hurt themselves on their way far more than the first example. So it’s not a contradiction, it’s pretty useful.
7. A more useful tip would be: If you want to be funny, try not to be offensive to marginalized groups.
Also, making jokes you think the public likes, but you are not fully behind it is not funny, it is just lazy copy pasting and chasing trends. Humor needs to be funny to you in order to make it funny for others in your work. We write for our own self, not just for others. Art needs to touch you and then the others if you want to make it. That is the cycle of creativity.
8. You kinda have to believe that you are going to be the best like no one ever was to make it far. The best cooks and the best athletes are those, who really believe they can do it and excel in anything. I only accomplish tasks when I really have the confidence that I can make it through. This sounds narcisstic, but without confidence, you are never going to write anything and even if this is narcissism, our society is all about success and it’s typically the narcsissts who wins. Also as editor, you can only advice them and show them the way, but you are not able to force them to any path and its up to them to accept it. As an advisor, the responsibility is ultimately on your client and when they do not always heed you, it’s fine, they can do it, but there will always be people willingly to listen and learn, because that is necessary to succeed. Even if these fail, they did at least something and it’s not a waste.
Try to be the best writer you can is the best advice you can give and more encouraging than having the cost of failure being hammered onto you, even if it’s not high.
Overall these rules are useful and far better advice than the one twitter blog with 101 writing tips.
I’ve never understood Neil Gaiman’s level of appeal, and every piece of his advice I’ve come across seems in line with why I don’t enjoy his work. Granted, I’ve only read Neverwhere but it was surprisingly unengaging.
I would like to be proven wrong. I just don’t know what people see in his books.
His specialty is creating atmosphere, especially creepy atmosphere. If that type of theming doesn’t interest you or it just isn’t enough, then you probably wouldn’t be into his works.
Nobody thinks Neverwhere is his best work? It’s his first, and weakest, novel.
It’s actually a novelization of a tv series that he wrote; he was frustrated by the changes producers made to his original script, so he wrote the “real” version as a novel.
American Gods is a striking, strange, moving meditation on grief, and all the undercurrents and unspoken beliefs that drive our actions–especially when we’re lonely or disconnected from people.
It’s one of the most profound books I’ve ever read.
Likewise, Sandman is his Magnum opus. It took ten years to write, and it imbues fantastic settings and characters with surprising psychological realism.
Specifically, the way relationships play out seems realistic in a way that’s rare in fantasy. It rejects archetypes in favor of reflecting nuanced modes of relationship. Particularly familial relationships, where there’s tension between honor, obligation, and the pursuit of (potential) genuine joy in connection.
Sandman and American Gods have a lot to say that’s hard to get at in straight non-fiction. They feel emotionally honest to people who feel grief or other experiences that wall us off from social connection.
People who don’t struggle with loneliness might not get much out of them.
I’ve never been able to get through Neverwhere, but I love American Gods and the Sandman stories. I also like his cooperation with Terry Pratchett in Good Omens – and his free short “A Study in Emerald”.
I’ll have to give Sandman a try sometime. I’m glad I’m not the only one to struggle with Neverwhere.
Definitely go to Neilman’s website and download “A Study in Emerald” if you like Lovecraftian horror. The short is good and has a great twist at the end.
Yeah, I’m also glad to learn other people struggle with “Neverwhere”. Everyone seemed to like it so much and I couldn’t make it past chapter two.
The first one really applies to me. One of the bigger challenges, I’ve found, is just actually putting the words on the computer.
Of course, it’s phrased really ambiguously, so I’m not even sure if that’s what he meant…
The writing advice most useful to me was Chuck Wendig’s advice on how to writing a section you’re not feeling inspired by: “push like you’re pooping.”
I think the advice to persevere is really helpful, while also acknowledging that you might just create dookie. Also every time I think of this advice I laugh and that makes me feel better about being stuck on a section.
Ha! That’s great!
That’s a funny visual, although you might only be pushing out, you know, doo-doo.
I don’t push when I write, because if I do, I usually have to rewrite that part later. If I feel I have to push, somewhere along the way I got off-track, and it’s time to see where I went astray.
If I’m bored with my work, how will my poor reader feel? If I don’t feel inspired, I put all my effort into getting inspired, without delay.
Mr. Gaiman’s 8 rules sound like suggestions for aspiring authors, not refinements. He’s missing a couple helpful conjunctions (I think that’s what buts and thens are called?), but the tone is generally encouraging, which I like.
On #6, “Fix It” (add “then”) I would add the wise words of published author Leonard Wolf:
“A manuscript is never finished, only submitted.”
I disagree when it comes to the opinion on the first rule listed here.
The first rule of “Write” is, exactly, the first rule of becoming a writer. It is self-evident. It may be technically avoidable: using voice to text programs, dictating, or even hiring ghost writers (all still involve writing, just a matter of relativity), but the rule of “Write” seems to me to be a truism. And that is actually important, even if its not equally important to everyone.
For people who write as if they must; for those who can always find the time to write; for those who already make a career within the writing industry; or for some other amazing people who can always do exactly what they want, whenever they want, however they want, I very much understand why this rule might flick their ire. But, those are the blessed. The first rule of “Write” is impossible to avoid, outside of technicalities that skirt the spirit of offering rules or advice at all.
Yes, it is pedantic but so are the only ways to avoid it. Yes, it is a bit of a joke. Yes, it is something that seems so obvious or broad that some people who are in the position of making a living off of writing, or those who have the endless time or motivation to write, might roll their eyes.
“Write” is the rule that cannot be avoided when actually completing the task within the bounds of good faith. Some people have managed to put it into action effortlessly. Many appear to put this first rule into action without realizing its self-evident importance.
If you want to be a writer, you must actually write. If you want to be a storyteller, you have to tell a story. This is not a great leap. This is not a leap at all. This is something strongly truistic. If something is truistic, it’s important to remember that it is actually, self-evidently, true. Though, yes, again, it may be (or appear) pedantic. But rejecting a truism is much less pedantry: it is self-evidently wrong.
Many of the people who don’t need to hear this advice might, apparently, respond very poorly to it. But many of those people are, as already mentioned, likely in a position where they can already write for a living, or are in a position where sitting down and writing was never the obstacle in the first place. I consider that to be the envious position, and the dismissal of its importance to be shocking.
To be in a position where this most basic, self-evidently true piece of advice is: “Completely useless, even when given every benefit of the doubt.”
I guess my writing process is useless then, because this is exactly the advice I needed to tell myself to complete my first manuscript. Exactly the advice I needed to keep telling myself to complete my second manuscript. It is the advice I needed to actually move forward to editing and polishing my manuscripts and, even as I move towards publishing, the advice I need to keep telling myself every time I find myself in a funk.
Yes, I can write. I just need to actually do it. I need to tell myself this first rule: write.
This is already getting long for a quick response, so I’ll pull a fast one and take something of the conclusion and apply it back to the first rule, but really applying it to every rule: “The writing process differs greatly from author to author, so giving advice on it is extremely difficult. What helps one author might be detrimental to another.”
Indeedlidoo. Couldn’t agree more. You have struck upon another piece of writing wisdom that approaches truism: creating hard and fast writing rules that will work for everyone is difficult to the point of impossibility.
And so, maybe ‘completely’ rejecting rules that are approaching self-evidently true is not the greatest position. Especially when they are, in fact, demonstrably useful to some (myself), and being demonstrably put into action by the successful practitioners of the craft (literally everyone who makes, or has ever made, a career… writing).
The rule of “Write” is likely the closest we can get to a broad Golden Rule of Writing.
Thanks for reading, and thanks to the contributors for all the articles.
“Write” without any more precise advice, though, isn’t very useful. What to write? Fiction, non-fiction (it can actually be useful to try your hand at non-fiction, even if you’re a fiction writer), handbooks, letters, emails?
It seems logical that a writer would mean ‘write fiction’ when he’s saying ‘write.’ Yet, this one-word advice isn’t really helpful on its own. Naturally, writing and thus telling stories is extremely important if you want to become a writer.
‘Write regularly.’ ‘Write what you know.’ ‘Write outside of your comfort zone.’ All of that can be meant by ‘write’ or not, yet two of those options are mutually exclusive. Without a more precise definition on ‘write,’ it’s impossible to say what should be written.
Hello!
I think you’re mistaking a truism for advice. A truism is a statement that is obviously true; what it’s not is guidance. So rejecting it as useless when it’s framed as advice is perfectly reasonable. The article is not rejecting the truth that writing involves writing; it’s rejecting that “write” is writing advice, if that makes sense. If I’m having trouble breathing, telling me to breathe won’t help, even if it’s a truism that I need to breathe to live. Maybe my lungs just aren’t working! I’m glad it helped you through your manuscript; that’s great! I see it as more a mantra than a lesson that way. If Gaiman had said something like “Remind yourself to write,” that would be advice; “write” isn’t. The same is true of “The writing process differs greatly from author to author, so giving advice on it is extremely difficult. What helps one author might be detrimental to another.” I agree that it’s true and it’s writing wisdom — but it’s not advice!
It’s also odd that you position people who dismiss this advice as those “who are in the position of making a living off of writing, or those who have the endless time or motivation to write” — as someone for whom neither is the case, and who also thinks this is not good advice or really advice at all, I’m really not sure what point you’re trying to make here. In fact, I struggle a lot with writing and finding the time for it, as do most people. What I want to know is how to write. Otherwise I wouldn’t be looking at lists of writing advice!
Cheers!