1) “If you’re only going to write when you’re inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you will never be a novelist — because you’re going to have to make your word count today, and those words aren’t going to wait for you, whether you’re inspired or not.”

Novel writing is a long and arduous process and if you’re constantly waiting for inspiration to strike, you’ll never finish your book. Gaiman encourages writers to write even when they aren’t inspired- set a daily word count goal and make sure you meet it every day. Eventually, you’ll stumble your way into inspiration.

2) “Tell your story. Don’t try and tell the stories that other people can tell. Because [as a] starting writer, you always start out with other people’s voices—you’ve been reading other people for years… But, as quickly as you can, start telling the stories that only you can tell—because there will always be better writers than you, there will always be smarter writers than you… but you are the only you.”

Although you should absolutely read other writers that you look up to or admire, it can be easy to accidentally take on their voices instead of your own- especially when you’re a new writer. Try your best to learn to distinguish your own voice and figure out what’s unique about it. Because that’s a large part of why people will read your books.

3) “Write more. And remember that everyone who writes anything good wrote a lot of bad stuff first. You are learning, be kind to yourself, just as you would be kind to anyone learning to do something hard, like juggling or ballroom dancing or surgery.

Learn from your mistakes, and get better, and one day you’ll write something you won’t loathe. (Also, it’s fine to dislike something you’ve written. But don’t dislike yourself for having made it.)”

This last line here is especially important for writers to keep in mind. Writing can be a constant uphill battle with your own self-esteem. It’s extremely difficult to critique your writing without also critiquing yourself since they’re so closely attached. Don’t hate on yourself just because you wrote a bad line- every great writer has written plenty of them.

4) “On the whole, anything that gets you writing and keeps you writing is a good thing. Anything that stops you writing is a bad thing. If you find your writer’s group stopping you from writing, then drop it.”

If you find yourself in a writing slump, try to identify what’s causing it. Eliminate the cause as best as you can because the writing should come first. You may think that writer’s group you joined will help you stay on task, but if it’s only making you more nervous since you have to share your writing with others then it needs to go.

5) “Show [your story] to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that it is. 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.”

Unless your friends are editors, they have no business ‘playing editor’ with your manuscript. What Gaiman is saying here is that, when you’re having friends examine your work, you want them to be doing so from a reader’s POV. If they identify an area where they feel something is ‘off’ or didn’t quite make sense, you should reexamine that area. If they were confused, other readers likely will be as well. But once they step over the line and start bossing you around about your work without the expertise of an editor- simply tune them out.

6) “If you like fantasy and you want to be the next Tolkien, don’t read big Tolkienesque fantasies – Tolkien didn’t read big Tolkienesque fantasies, he read books on Finnish philology. Go and read outside of your comfort zone, go and learn stuff.”

Although we’d still advocate for brushing up on authors you want to emulate, Gaiman makes an excellent point here. Most great fantasy/sci-fi authors found inspiration for their world-building from mythology or something outside of that genre. It could jump-start some inspiration if you branch out and study some history, philosophy, or anything outside of the genre you’re working within.

The post Neil Gaiman’s Writing Tips appeared first on Dorrance Publishing Company.

Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Cycle

“The biggest piece of advice that I can give you is that if you’re going to be in any creative profession, you should turn all of the no’s that you’ll hear – and you’ll get a lot of them – into ‘not yet,’ instead… if you assume that those ‘no’s’ mean ‘not yet,’ that means you just have to try harder and look more impressive the next time…”

Being in any type of creative field can involve a lot of rejection. Our books are like our babies, so putting your baby out there into the world and having it rejected can be a truly depressing process. Stiefvater encourages writers to put a positive spin on the rejections they receive and to use them as learning opportunities instead of fuel for a weekend-long Netflix and ice cream binge.

Victoria Schwab, This Savage Song

“Just to be brave. I think the first thing you have to realize is that you have to put yourself out there, and rejection is part of the process and it’s kind of a part that you should embrace because it never goes away.”

Everything about novel writing is about putting yourself out there. Not only are you putting yourself out there in terms of representation, but any good novel is incredibly personal and close to home. Don’t let the fear of rejection keep you from digging deep when it comes to writing your book and, equally as important, don’t let the personal nature of your novel keep you from putting it out into the world.

Kiran Millwood-Hargrave, The Girl of Ink and Stars

“Just keep going, keep that initial inspiration that you had in your head, and just write until you get to the end— then make it better!”

As we’ve said before, one of the toughest things about writing is to push through and avoid critiquing yourself as you write. Millwood-Hargrave’s advice is to push through until the end and ignore that voice in your head telling you to make changes. Once you have it all down on paper, then go back and make the improvements your book needs.

E. Lockhart, We Were Liars

“You know that old piece of advice: ‘Write what you know’? It doesn’t mean write about a young person who likes to write. It doesn’t mean write about your school, or your neighborhood, or your community. It means: write what you know is emotionally true. You can write about Mars. You can write about werewolves. You can write about medieval knights. You just have to understand the emotional truths of your story.”

As Lockhart states, the phrase ‘write what you know’ doesn’t mean you have to have gone through everything your protagonist is going through in order to write about it. Instead, it simply means you have to be able to understand how it would feel for someone like your protagonist to go through the events of your story.

Veronica Roth, Divergent

“I think everyone’s got a little teenager inside of them still, and you just have to work to help yourself access that teenager…Every now and then I find myself having a character make a decision that feels very adult without having them earn it, and I have to go back and make sure I’m letting the characters make mistakes they would in real life at that age, like a parent.”

As an adult writing YA literature, it can often be difficult to put yourself back into the mindset of being a teenager. As Roth suggests, you have to access your inner teen and allow your protagonist to be a teen- with all of the mistakes, emotional insecurity, and turmoil that comes with it.

David Levithan, Every Day

“The defining characteristic of YA literature is emotional truth…Even if we’re not the same as the characters we read, they are all dealing with things—issues of who they are, who they should be, what they should and shouldn’t do—that we all deal with, in their own ways. With The Hunger Games, even if we will never be in Katniss’s shoes, the decisions she makes make emotional sense to us—even when she makes the wrong ones.”

As with all literature, the backbone of YA lit is emotional truth. No one wants to read a book about teens that you’ve written as whiny and annoying- especially teens themselves. You need to be able to look back on the younger generation, their level of maturity, and give them believable emotional struggles that truly matter. Your reader should be looking at these characters thinking ‘that’s something I struggle with’ or ‘I remember when I struggled with that’ not ‘this character is stupid for worrying about [insert stereotypical problem here]’.

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