@neilhimself on Writing All fiction has to be as honest as you can make it. This, I believe. This may not be true for every other writer out there. It may not be true for any other writer there. But it’s true for this writer. You have to make it as honest as you can, because that’s what people respond to. As far as I’m concerned, any success I have achieved, as a writer of fiction, I have achieved because I am an honest writer of fiction, because my people are real people, because you care about them. The hardest time for me was starting out as a very, very young writer. I wrote short stories, and I sent them out to places that could conceivably publish them. And they all came back. And I looked at the stories, which went out and came back, and went out and came back. And I thought, OK. Well, one of two things is true here. Either I’m not good enough, or I don’t understand the world. I don’t– there’s stuff I don’t get, and there’s stuff I need to know. And I thought, OK. So as of today, I am now a freelance journalist specializing in the world of publishing, and fantasy, and science fiction. And I decided I was a journalist because I thought, that gives me license to ask questions. It gives me license to go out into that world and meet everybody, find out who everybody is, find out what they do, and find out how they read, to learn. And then I got invited to my first writers’ workshop. It was the Milford Writers’ Workshop. And I was sitting there with a bunch of fantastic writers, like Gwyneth Jones, and Diana Wynne Jones, and Mary Gentle. And I realized very, very quickly that my reactions to stories were things like, I like this. I don’t like this. Or, this is good. That wasn’t their reaction. They were responding to stories on a much deeper level. They were reading different stories than what I was reading. And I realized I was reading the stories as an audience. And they were reading stories as craftspeople, as people who built these things, as people who did this. And I also realized I was wrong. I was wrong if I wanted to be a writer. And they were right. And that experience, more than anything else, I think, changed me. And it changed me mostly because I realized that, in order to write fiction, I needed to be honest. Up until that point, I had a facility with voices. I could do, essentially, impressions of other writers. I could write things that felt kind of like things that other writers would have written and written well. But I didn’t have anything to say. And that wasn’t because I hadn’t lived. That was because I wasn’t really prepared to say anything true about who I was. I didn’t want to be judged. I didn’t want people reading any of my stories to know who I was, or what I thought, or to get in too close. And I realized that if you’re going to write, if you’re going to be a successful writer, at least if you’re going to be the kind of writer who did the kind of stuff that I was going to do, you had to be willing to do the equivalent of walking down a street naked. You had to be able to show too much of yourself. You had to be just a little bit more honest than you were comfortable with. And if people judged you, if they felt they knew who you were, that was just something that you were going to have to live with. And what was strange is, once I started doing that, and I was expecting to be judged, or shunned, or people’s opinions, or to have to deal with things, what I discovered was, actually, their opinions were, we really like this. We love this story. That’s a good story. It felt huge. It felt personal. And I realized that’s because I was being honest about me. And some things, when you get really specific, apply to so many of us. So that was how I took my darkest period and eventually turned it around. [MUSIC PLAYING] @MasterClass pic.twitter.com/Fgz6qfbchW

— Zoltar SageAdvice 🔮🐲🎲 (@SageAdviceDnD) September 11, 2022

Sometimes you sit down 3 hours before a #dnd session with no ideas, feeling creatively bummed out, and just not prepared to DM… then you have a small idea, just the beginnings of something, that you hope will be enough for the players and it exceeds all your expectations. 🙂

— Sherlock Hulmes – HighRollers Sun @ 5pm GMT (@sherlock_hulmes) October 3, 2021

Then you improvise, I dunno, what’s meant to be a short timefilling encounter with a Geordie pixie or summat and whatever it was you palnned doesn’t get used because suddenly the party have adopted the Geordie pixie and are helping them pay back their student loan or whatever. *sigh*. Nowhere did I say I can't improvise, or don't know how. Been doing this a while and pretty sure I can improv well. But I *like* to prep, I *like* having stuff to tempt the PCs with, and this isn't for just a normal game with mates, this is for a stream that people watch.

— Sherlock Hulmes – HighRollers Sun @ 5pm GMT (@sherlock_hulmes) October 3, 2021

Sorry… I’m not trying to tell you how to do your stuff I’m sharing a past experience in what I thought was a jokey way. You spend time carefully planning and then throw in a random something for colour that the party inevitably grabs onto and hares off after.It's fine mate. I blew up a bit because I get a LOT of bad faith replies trying to brag/tell me what to do, so sorry for that. But at the same time, yeah the jokey/anecdote stuff hits different compared to in-person at the pub, or if I was asking for advice/suggestions.

— Sherlock Hulmes – HighRollers Sun @ 5pm GMT (@sherlock_hulmes) October 4, 2021

Don't only read good books, read terrible ones too. as a prospective reuter i would urge you to not only read good books read terrible books as well because they can be more inspiring than the good books if you’re inspired by a good book there is always the danger of plagiarism of doing something that is too much like that good book whereas a genuinely helpful reaction to a piece of work that you’re reading is jesus christ i could write this um that is immensely liberating to find somebody who is published who is doing much much worse than you and by analyzing why they are doing so badly this will immensely help your own style you will find out all of the mistakes not to make why did this story offend me so much yeah analyze that find out why you didn’t like it find out all of the examples of clumsiness or bad thinking that spoiled the story for you that will probably be a lot more helpful to your career as a writer

Alan Moore teaches Storytelling on BBC Maestrohttps://t.co/lftRhiicP5 pic.twitter.com/sD45kob22t

— BBC Maestro (@bbcmaestro) April 14, 2022