Neil Gaimen on Building Dry Stone Walls

Hey, friends,

I was listening to Neil Gaimen on The Nerdist podcast. It’s a fun listen. Gaimen has one of the better voices and he offered some great advice for writers. Here’s one such passage if you only wait until you’re inspired to write.

If you only write when you’re inspired you may be a very decent poet, but you will never be a novelist. You’re going to have to make your word count. Those words aren’t going to wait for you whether you are inspired or not. You have to write the scenes that don’t inspire you and the weird thing is maybe six months later, maybe a year, you won’t remember the scenes you wrote when you were inspired and the ones you wrote because they had to be written next. The process of writing can be magical…Mostly it’s a process of putting one word in front of another.

Which, of course, led to this:

In Scotland there are people who make dry stone walls and they’ve been making dry stone walls for generations. They have lots and lots of rocks. They put one down and they put another one down and they put another one down that fits. And somehow they create these walls that are absolutely stable just by putting one rock down in front of the other…And that’s how you make a novel.

 

And one more:

People come to me and they say, “I want to be a writer. What should I do?” I say, “You have to write.” Sometimes they say, “I’m already doing that. What else should I do?” I say, “You have to finish things.” You learn by finishing things.

Good, good stuff.