Neil Gaiman demystifies writer’s block

Who hasn’t been there? The blank page. The blinking cursor. The author’s horrifically empty torture chamber: writer’s block.

Neil Gaiman  in a snuggly sweater

Well, according to Neil Gaiman, best-selling author of the Sandman comic book series, Coraline and many more super-imaginative works of fiction, writer’s block is just as much a fiction as anything else that pours out of an author’s mind. In this fascinating interview on the Goodreads website, he talks about how his ambition as a writer has evolved over the years and offers these pearls of wisdom about the dreaded you-know-what (shhhh… don’t say it out loud or it might come true!):

Writer’s block is this thing that is sent from the gods—you’ve offended them. You’ve trod on a crack on the pavement, and you’re through. The gods have decided. It’s not true. What is really true is you can have a bad day. You can have a bad week. You can get stuck. But what I learned when I was under deadline is that if you write on the bad days, even if you’re sure everything you’ve written is terrible, when you come to it tomorrow and you reread it, most of it’s fixable. It may not be the greatest thing you’ve ever written, but you fix it, and actually it’s a lot better than you remember it being. And the weird thing is a year later when you’re copyediting and reading the galleys through for the first time in months, you can remember that some of it was written on bad days. And you can remember that some of it was written on terrific days. But it all reads like you. Fantastic stuff doesn’t necessarily read better than the stuff written on the bad days. Writers have to be like sharks. We keep moving forward, or we die.

So on that note, here’s a toast to all the other authors out there: have lots of fun over the holiday season and then sit at your desk and work. Cheers!

Photo credit: Lvovsky via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND

Where do you get your ideas?

This is a question that authors get asked a lot. I’ve thought about my own creative process before and produced unsatisfactory answers like, “They just come to me,” “When I’m in the shower,” or “I dreamed up my second book. Seriously, it literally came to me in a dream.”

But today an idea popped into my head as I was making my lunch. So that just proves that I have ideas because I’m hungry. No wait, that’s not it. This idea was about having ideas. And what I realized was that ideas come from reading a lot of non-fiction, be it news articles, books, scientific studies or bathroom graffiti:

Thought-provoking bathroom graffiti.

Here’s why non-fiction can provide the inspiration for fiction: it’s because the human brain is wired to make connections and produce those sought-after eureka moments. That’s why human beings are so successful; our evolutionary advantage is that we can create solutions to problems. Of course “divine inspiration” is the non-scientific explanation for this phenomenon…

Even invertebrate animals come up with ideas based on their surroundings, so people definitely can (even those who lack backbones). The key thing is the fuel. Reading fiction might produce ideas – and it’s definitely important to read a wide range of fiction to learn about craft and style – but it’s all-to-easy to consciously or subconsciously fall in love with another author’s idea and simply reproduce it with a twist. Truly original creation comes from the juxtaposition of unrelated information that sparks something new.

Reading extensively is essential for any author, whatever their level of experience, but I would argue that while immersion in the very best fiction can provide stylistic inspiration, unique ideas are sparked by non-fiction. Maybe even by blog posts…

Photo credit: Chris Blakeley / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND

A great story is a great story…

Read about the amazing success story of Romanian author Eugen Chirovici (EO Chirovici) who published 10 novels in his native country with some success, then moved to Britain with his family three years ago and is now likely to earn seven figures from his first English-language novel.

The article I’ve linked to makes it sound like Chirovici’s success is out of the blue, but a little research shows this to be far from the truth. His non-fiction works have already been published in the US, he’s a member of the Romanian Academy of Sciences and holds three (!) honorary PhDs in Economics, Communication and History.

I’m a big fan of Vladimir Nabokov (be sure to read the Alfred Appel annotated version of Lolita first), and Chirovici is another Eastern European author who also goes to prove that English doesn’t even need to be your first language if you have imagination, storytelling ability and, oh yeah, maybe a touch of genius.

Margaret Atwood: “You can cheat by increasing the type size”

Great interview with Margaret Atwood in today’s Guardian.

50,000 words!

I reached a milestone in book 3 of the Embodied trilogy yesterday. Also got so excited while writing a particularly dramatic scene that I was yelling at myself to type faster!

Ten tips on writing

I just found this great list of writing tips while doing some publishing research while taking a break from writing the final book in the Embodied trilogy while drinking Guinness from time to time. Jandy Nelson, author of YA novels I’ll Give You the Sun and The Sky is Everywhere, just about nails it.

Jandy Nelson’s list of must-do’s for authors

If your writing implement looks like this, you haven’t applied the ten tips properly.

Photo credit: zen / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA

 

 

How the mind creates when you’re doing other things

As I’ve mentioned somewhere on this blog before, the name of my last book came to me in a dream. This quick read in this week’s Guardian explores the creative differences between writers who pre-plan their books (such as Michelle Paver) and those who wing it (such as John Boyne). It turns out that no matter which method you choose, your mind is working away in the background like a helpful little pixie. Or maybe like a beaver. Or a colony of termites. Anyway, the bottom line is, when you create, you aren’t really aware of everything that’s going on in your brain. And I like that.

Your brain on termites.

Photo credit: Gnilenkov Aleksey / Foter / CC BY

 

My imaginary boss will be happy

I don’t have a boss. Apart from my 6-year-old daughter, of course. And although that might sound like a wonderful situation to be in, a boss is by definition someone who tells you to get things done. So when it comes to writing a novel, which is a notoriously procrastinationary (if that was a word) process, having a boss would be great because he or she would counter your inbuilt procrastinationism (if that was a word) by telling you that you have a deadline to meet, and that deadline is August 8th, you lazy procrastinator (hey – that actually is a word!).

Fortunately, the source of my novel writing is my imagination, so it’s pretty easy for me to cook up an imaginary boss. He/she is a cross between Spider-man’s J. Jonah Jameson and my 6-year-old daughter; a terrifying combination of shouty and pouty. Due to his/her haranguing and guilt-tripping, I have actually managed to meet the deadline my imaginary boss set for me back in April, and have completed a first draft of Starley’s Rust, the sequel to my Young Adult novel Silent Symmetry, and therefore the second book in the Embodied trilogy.

Here’s a photo of the draft. The two smudges at the bottom of the screen are the words The End.

 

Of  course my imaginary boss will soon be watching over me with an iron fist and cute ponytail as I try to meet my next deadline: publishing by the end of the year, maybe even in time for Spendmas. Which is definitely a word where my 6-year-old daughter is concerned.

Vacation over, work begun…

Things have been quiet on this blog recently. A little too quiet.

That’s because I was away on vacation in a land where the internet is almost non-existent. And while I was there I made a ton of notes for the second and third books that follow Silent Symmetry in the Embodied trilogy. “What kind of notes?” I hear you ask. (Yes, I sometimes listen to the voices in my head!) Well, a lot of backstory. Character progressions. Some plot. And a new race of beings that I hadn’t anticipated creating but who may turn out to be more fascinating than the Embodied themselves.

I already outlined my new writing strategy in a recent post. Now that I’m back at my desk, I’m undertaking the planning process for Book 2, Starley’s Rust and Book 3 (whose name won’t be revealed until after the publication of Book 2). That means that I’ll be spending a bit less time writing this blog. Fun though it is to connect with friends and readers, I need to get the work done. It’s going to be a long process and it may be another year before Starley’s Rust sees the digital light of day. There may be some teases and excerpts along the way. That’s the advantage of having the skeleton of both books mapped out ahead of the actual writing – I can rely on the fact that the parts I’ve already written are 99.9% sure to end up in the final version.

In the meantime, here’s a photo as a clue to where I went on vacation. Is it symmetrical? Good question…

Can a flower with five petals be symmetrical?

Photo credit: John B. Dutton

A Symmetrical Strategy

Writing is a novel is super-duper easy. Oh wait, I got my words wrong. Writing a blog post is a breeze. No, that’s not even true. Okay, forget writing for a moment. The other night I was reading a bedtime story to my 5-year-old daughter when I was suddenly struck by the amount of cross-hatching in the illustrations. At first glance, the drawings of a little boy and his bear were fairly simple. I’d read the book several times to her and never paid much attention to the artwork, but for some reason that night I focused in on the cross-hatching, which is the technique for creating shaded areas in a drawing through the use of repeating lines. The length and spacing of the lines determine the amount of shade perceived by the eye at a distance. This drawing of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre is a straightforward example.

Shakespeare probably just winged it: no planning, no plotting, and no rewrites. Riiiight…

The little bear in the story got lost one night when he was picked up in a swooping owl’s claws. The drawings of the moon, the owl and the bear in the nighttime sky were filled with cross-hatching far finer and subtler than in the Globe illustration here. I stopped reading for a few seconds and marvelled at the amount of time it must have taken the artist to produce such an effect. I thought to myself, I could never, ever have the patience to sit there and draw line after line with no margin for error. Then my daughter elbowed me with an impatient “Daddy!” and I boomeranged back from my reverie, acutely aware that parents aren’t supposed to space out in the middle of a bedtime story.

What does all this have to do with writing a novel? It’s all about the work involved. I sometimes forget that stringing together a bunch of words, then painstakingly going back over them and replacing some of them or changing their order is just as daunting for non-writers as creating a complex illustration would be for me. It’s hard. It’s often kind of annoying. And sometimes you get stuck. (Quick joke: part of my next novel is set in Paris and I’m worried that I might suffer from writer’s bloc.)

What does all this have to do with me writing a novel? Well, I promised I would publish the sequel to Silent Symmetry in “late 2013”. Now I realize that my writing strategy was wrong and I’m going to have to break that promise. Fortunately for my reputation, authors are notorious for breaking promises; we literally make things up that aren’t true for a living.

I don’t mind allowing readers a peak behind the creative curtain, so here’s my new writing and publication strategy for books two and three of the Embodied trilogy. Instead of planning, writing and rewriting book two, Starley’s Rust, then spending the time and effort it takes to publish and market it properly before embarking on the creation of book three, I’m going to plan and write books two and three back-to-back, then rewrite, publish and market book two. Once that is on the Kindles and iPads of a bunch of readers, I’ll rewrite, publish and market book three. This will allow me to more effectively control both the overall flow of the story and each book’s release date. This doesn’t just help me, it will also, crucially, give my readers a more fulfilling experience because, a) the books should be better; and b) readers of book two won’t have to wait nearly as long to read the conclusion of the trilogy.

So what we’re really dealing with here is some delayed gratification. Fortunately, I’m not illustrating my books too, or the delay would be far, far longer than the gratification!

Photo credit: Futurilla / Foter / CC BY-NC