He sits in a garden, pulling weeds. "Every young writer asks me: 'How do I find my voice?' You don't find it. You earn it. Write a million words. That’s the price of admission. The first 900,000 are just practice. Your voice is the sum of everything you’ve ever read, loved, hated, and forgot you remembered. Stop trying to sound like Hemmingway. Sound like you."
"When I was a kid, I didn’t think I was going to be a writer. I thought I was going to be a superhero. Then I realized no one was going to give me X-ray vision, so I decided to build worlds instead." MasterClass - Neil Gaiman Teaches the Art of St...
Cut to a desk covered in index cards. "There are two kinds of writers: architects and gardeners. Architects know every room, every joist. Gardeners throw a seed in the ground and see what grows. I am a gardener. For The Ocean at the End of the Lane , I had a boy, a pond, and an old woman. That was it. The plot came from asking: 'What would happen if...?' But here’s the secret: character is plot. What does your character want more than anything? And what happens if they don't get it?" He sits in a garden, pulling weeds
He leans close to the camera, lowering his voice. "Your job is to be cruel to your characters. Not for cruelty’s sake, but because conflict reveals truth. Put them in a room with their worst fear. For Coraline , the fear was being forgotten, being replaced by a mother with button eyes. That image came from a nightmare. Don’t run from your nightmares. Write them down. They are the keys to the basement of your own mind." Write a million words
"Stories are the only thing we truly own. They’re how we make sense of the chaos. In this class, I’m not going to give you a formula. Formulas kill stories. I’m going to give you a toolbox."