Just be mindful that famous authors can get away with a bit more self-indulgence than the rest of us,. It sounds simple, but Gaiman says the single most important piece of advice he got was to finish every story he started, even if he knew it would never see the light of day.
Think about it. If you never get past the opening of a story, how will you ever learn to develop your characters? How will you learn to control pacing? How will you learn how to create a satisfying ending? Source for image. He is the author of The Fantasy Workbook. Then read on! Buy The Fantasy Workbook Example: Gaiman describes his novella The Ocean at the End of the Lane as a pseudo-autobiography because, while none of the stories events actually happened to him, the character he wrote is a version of himself at 7-years-old.
Exercise: Be brave and inject your work with something of yourself, of what you believe to be true about the world. Then, he waits. Example: Gaiman began writing The Graveyard Book after seeing his son riding his trike through a graveyard.
Exercise: Like, Gaiman, always be on the lookout for inspiration from your own life and thoughts. Example: Stardust is written in the voice of a narrator who knows everything about the characters and their world—and who even likes to add in their own funny aside.
Exercise: Write a story wherein the narrator is just as much a character as any of the named characters. A fairy tale, folktale, myth , or legend. Then he tries to see the story with fresh eyes, by looking at it as literally as possible, with as few preconceived notions as possible.
Finally, he rewrites that story in a slightly different context and with his reimagined version of the events. Example: Gaiman gives the example of Snow White : A queen tries to keep a prince from awakening a dead princess with a kiss.
The results will surprise you, I promise! Put A Fantastical Twist On A Familiar Place Gaiman claims to always begin his stories by outlining the major elements of his fantasy world, then he researches the real-world analogs to elements in his stories. Example: American Gods seems like it takes place in the US, but Gaiman says this is actually not true.
Exercise: Begin each scene by describing the setting in lush detail; introduce each character with a description of their appearance from head to toe. Is this approach antiquated? Also, yes. Neil Gaiman is credited with being one of the creators of modern comics, as well as an author whose work crosses genres and reaches audiences of all ages. He is listed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of the top ten living post-modern writers and is a prolific creator of works of prose, poetry, film, journalism, comics, song lyrics, and drama.
Audiences for science fiction and fantasy form a substantial part of Gaiman's fan base, and he has continuously used social media to communicate with readers.
In , Gaiman became one of the first writers to establish a blog, which now has over a million regular readers. In , Gaiman joined Twitter as neilhimself and now has over 1. Gaiman's books are genre works that refuse to remain true to their genres. Gothic horror was out of fashion in the early s when Gaiman started work on Coraline Odd and the Frost Giants , originally written for 's World Book Day, has gone on to receive worldwide critical acclaim.
The Wolves in the Walls was made into an opera by the Scottish National Theatre in , and Coraline was adapted as a musical by Stephin Merritt in American Gods has been released in an expanded tenth anniversary edition, and there is an HBO series in the works.
He produced Stardust , Matthew Vaughn's film based on Gaiman's book by the same name. Like Vladimir Nabokov in Lolita … [he] charts the peculiarities of small-town USA with a foreigner's relish and curiosity.
Seven years later, Gaiman released an extremely well-received novel for children, The Graveyard Book The plot is typically outlandish and ghoulish. After the grisly murder of his entire family, a toddler wanders into a graveyard where the ghosts and other supernatural residents agree to raise him as one of their own. Gaiman has said that the setting of the book is partly inspired by the gothic and ramshackle Abney Park cemetery in North London.
But it was also the product of a long gestation. As I watched him happily toddling I would think about how incredibly at home he looked. I thought that I could do something like The Jungle Book with that same equation of boy, orphaned, growing up somewhere else, but I could do it in a graveyard. I had that idea when I was 24 years old. All the better for reading at bedtime, though, and what's lost in forward momentum is more than made up for by the outrageous riches of Gaiman's imagination.
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Neil Gaiman. Born: Hampshire.
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