Neil Gaiman’s Advice to Aspiring Writers
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Neil Gaiman’s Advice to Aspiring Writers
“The advice I like to give anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to do an awful lot of work.
All the best ideas come out of the process
... See more“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is
... See moreWhat is your advice to aspiring writers?
... See moreLearn to enjoy the process of writing. Don’t think too much about future results, i.e., best-selling books or movie deals or literary acclaim. That may or may not ever come. But if you love the act of writing, and the thrill of exploring ideas and crafting your work, that is the real reward.
The biggest problem of success is that the world conspires to stop you doing the thing that you do, because you are successful. There was a day when I looked up and realised that I had become someone who professionally replied to email, and who wrote as a hobby. I started answering fewer emails, and was relieved to find I was writing much more.