Stephen King, Neil Gaiman and Dan Simmons: On writing
To paraphrase a certain famous someone, ‘Many think they are called; most are mistaken.’
Here are three quotes by three highly successful professional writers. The first, Stephen King, has probably sold more books than most of his fellow horror writers combined. The second, Neil Gaiman, has written novels, comics, film scripts and plays. The third, Dan Simmons, has written novels in about all the genres there are, from mainstream literature and historical novels to horror, SF and straight thrillers. He has won most of the top literary prizes in about all the genres he has chosen to explore.
In other words, whatever you think of the work of these individual writers, they are pros - respected by their fellow writers, the market and sometimes even by the literary critics.
So, when they talk about the craft, you could do worse than pay attention to what they are saying. All three of them have talked and written extensively about their trade. The following three quotes don’t even begin to cover all they have thought, written and/or spoken about this subject but for now these will have to do.
Here’s what Stephen King thinks about writing classes:
I’m often asked if writing classes are any help, and my immediate and enthusiastic answer is always, Yes! Writing classes are wonderful for the writers who teach them and can’t make ends meet without that supplementary income. They are also good places for unattached people to meet, talk about books and movies, have a few drinks and possibly hook up. But teach you to write? No. A writing class will not teach you to write. The only things that can teach writing are reading, writing and the semi-domestication of one’s muse. These are all activities one must pursue alone.
Neil Gaiman is always generous with his time and doesn’t mind answering questions about his own personal (writing) experiences. As he does in the interview from which this quote was taken:
Well, to start off, when I was writing fiction I was failing to sell the fiction that I was writing. I was very young. Although I did not choose to believe at the time that it was anything to do with lack of talent. I thought that it was to do with who I knew and what I knew, and so on and so on and so forth. In retrospect, I’d say that was wrong. Recently, I was talking to a Hollywood producer and he was saying, “Did you ever write a Sherlock Holmes thing?” Well I wrote a Sherlock Holmes thing when I was about twenty and I’ve still got it in a file somewhere. I pulled out the file and started reading the stuff in there and realized that if anybody handed me that stuff now and said “Do I have a writing career in front of me?” I’d say, “Learn a trade.” So that was scary. I was failing to sell stuff and I was getting lots of rejection slips back. I got up one morning and I said, Ok, either I have no talent — which I do not choose to believe for reasons of personal pride — or I am going about this the wrong way. I really don’t know how the world works, so from tomorrow morning I am going to be a freelance journalist. I’m going to learn how the world works and I’m going to learn how publishing works. I’m going to figure all this stuff out for myself. And that was what I did.
Neil Gaiman has a website and has a running diary there, in which he tells his readers what he’s up to and answers their questions and provides links to whatever catches his fancy.
Dan Simmons has his own website too and he also engages with his readers. He is active on the website’s forum, he writes columns there and he has written six essays under the nomer ‘Writing well.’ The following is a quote from the first essay of that series:
Not to belabor the point, but writing for publication is hard. Damned hard. The first thing a would-be professional writer has to learn is how huge – how depressingly near-infinitely colossally horrifyingly hugely huge – the gap is between good amateur writing and real professional writing. Again, not to belabor a metaphor, but it’s roughly the distance between very good Little League baseball and playing for the Yankees. It looks like the same game being played, but in a real way it’s not.
And it doesn’t help that most of education for the last century or so has emphasized that to write, all one has to do is reach down and untap the “creative potential” within yourself. From first grade through too many post-graduate writing programs, much of the emphasis remains on untapping that theoretical creative potential. Let that writer-within-you out, is the theory, and the rest is gravy. Just find your slide and grease it.
[...]
Your teachers and professors have lied to you, my friends. While latent talent and reservoirs of creativity may be absolutely essential ingredients in becoming a real writer, these things can do almost nothing by themselves. They are, by themselves, not worth the proverbial bucket of warm spit.
We all know there are youthful prodigies in mathematics. Indeed, by the age of 30, most true mathematicians are over the hill. If they haven’t made their bones by then, they almost certainly never will.
There are near-infant prodigies in music. (At the age of two, so the story goes, little Mozart would toddle downstairs in the middle of the night and play an unresolved chord on the harpsichord, knowing that his father would have to get out of bed and come downstairs to resolve it.)
There are artistic prodigies such as Picasso. It’s reported that Andrew Wyeth was so proficient in drawing with charcoal when he was about seven that his instructor, his father N.C., banned him from drawing with it for at least a year so he wouldn’t fall behind in learning his skills with other media.
There are no novelist prodigies. None. Nada. Zero. Zip. Zilch.
It’s true that some young people have a better ear for language and innate sense of storytelling than perhaps 99% of the rest of the population, but becoming a writer demands years and decades of experience as a human being – who wants to read anything by even the most gifted callow 18-yr.-old? – and then more years and decades of apprenticeship to the Word.
Discipline. Reading to absorb the skills of writing. Study. Effort. Sweat. Learning. Maturing. More discipline. More study. More reading. More apprenticing. More maturing. More discipline. And then you can start.
As part of that discipline, all writers must read widely and deeply to learn how writers write. It’s that simple. Good instruction can take years off your apprenticeship by helping you ferret out the subtleties of style in other, better writers’ work, help you see the sometimes invisible but always present forms of structure, teach you to perceive the difficulties and triumphs of careful word choice, train you to thread the labyrinths of plotting – and so on and so forth ad infinitum (and ad nauseum).
One way to begin that apprenticeship is to listen to great writers talk about how they do their work.
Now this suggests “rules for writing” and I can hear the multitudes shouting that there ARE NO RULES for writing. That doesn’t turn out to be the case. Just as learning to draw is a requirement before becoming a real artist or learning one’s scales is required before becoming a musician, there are many rules of writing to be absorbed and mastered. It’s only after learning such basics that the artist, the musician, or the writer can afford to “break the rules” – although in truth, experiments in style and breakthroughs in technique in prose fiction, however modern or postmodern, never really break the rules of the basics, any more than moving on to abstraction in oil painting vitiates the need to master basic drawing, perspective, and color theory.
If you enjoyed this post, subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.
