Stir the Plot

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Storytellers get much of their ideas and inspiration from other stories. If handled in a non-sinister manner, those stories are not immediately copied, in whole or in part, but instead sent down into the mind’s basement kitchen, to stew and simmer, along with all of the other stuff already down there, filtering out the good from the bad, the better from the good, adding in a dose of “yes, but I would have done it differently,” until something new and original, and absolutely not a rip off, rises out of the cauldron, ready to become one’s own stories. It’s this same process that makes it so easy to forget where all the individual bits came from. Source: Bill Willingham on Fables vs Once Upon A Time

Storytellers get much of their ideas and inspiration from other stories. If handled in a non-sinister manner, those stories are not immediately copied, in whole or in part, but instead sent down into the mind’s basement kitchen, to stew and simmer, along with all of the other stuff already down there, filtering out the good from the bad, the better from the good, adding in a dose of “yes, but I would have done it differently,” until something new and original, and absolutely not a rip off, rises out of the cauldron, ready to become one’s own stories. It’s this same process that makes it so easy to forget where all the individual bits came from.

Source: Bill Willingham on Fables vs Once Upon A Time

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neil-gaiman: “You write. That’s the hard bit that nobody sees. You write on the good days and you write on the lousy days. Like a shark, you have to keep moving forward or you die. Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. “A dry-stone wall is a lovely thing when you see it bordering a field in the middle of nowhere but becomes more impressive when you realise that it was built without mortar, that the builder needed to choose each interlocking stone and fit it in. Writing is like building a wall. It’s a continual search for the word that will fit in the text, in your mind, on the page. Plot and character and metaphor and style, all these become secondary to the words. The wall-builder erects her wall one rock at a time until she reaches the far end of the field. If she doesn’t build it it won’t be there. So she looks down at her pile of rocks, picks the one that looks like it will best suit her purpose, and puts it in. “The search for the word gets no easier but nobody else is going to write your novel for you.” It’s NaNoWriMo, and it’s that time of the month again. Read the whole thing at http://nanowrimo.org/en/pep/neil-gaiman

neil-gaiman:

“You write. That’s the hard bit that nobody sees. You write on the good days and you write on the lousy days. Like a shark, you have to keep moving forward or you die. Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

“A dry-stone wall is a lovely thing when you see it bordering a field in the middle of nowhere but becomes more impressive when you realise that it was built without mortar, that the builder needed to choose each interlocking stone and fit it in. Writing is like building a wall. It’s a continual search for the word that will fit in the text, in your mind, on the page. Plot and character and metaphor and style, all these become secondary to the words. The wall-builder erects her wall one rock at a time until she reaches the far end of the field. If she doesn’t build it it won’t be there. So she looks down at her pile of rocks, picks the one that looks like it will best suit her purpose, and puts it in.

“The search for the word gets no easier but nobody else is going to write your novel for you.”

It’s NaNoWriMo, and it’s that time of the month again. Read the whole thing at http://nanowrimo.org/en/pep/neil-gaiman

Filed under NaNoWriMo Neil Gaiman inspiration writing reblog