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Fantasy writer Neil Gaiman's advice to an aspiring author

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Taken from the blog of fantasy writer, Neil Gaiman.

joseph-the-mop asked: I have been trying to write for a while now. I have all these amazing ideas, but its really hard getting my thoughts onto paper. Thus, my ideas never really come to fruition. Do you have any advice?

Neil Gaiman replies:
Write the ideas down. If they are going to be stories, try and tell the stories you would like to read. Finish the things you start to write. Do it a lot and you will be a writer. The only way to do it is to do it.
I’m just kidding. There are much easier ways of doing it. For example: On the top of a distant mountain there grows a tree with silver leaves. Once every year, at dawn on April 30th, this tree blossoms, with five flowers, and over the next hour each blossom becomes a berry, first a green berry, then black, then golden.
At the moment the five berries become golden, five white crows, who have been waiting on the mountain, and which you will have mistaken for snow, will swoop down on the tree, greedily stripping it of all its berries, and will fly off, laughing.
You must catch, with your bare hands, the smallest of the crows, and you must force it to give up the berry (the crows do not swallow the berries. They carry them far across the ocean, to an enchanter’s garden, to drop, one by one, into the mouth of his daughter, who will wake from her enchanted sleep only when a thousand such berries have been fed to her). When you have obtained the golden berry, you must place it under your tongue, and return directly to your home.
For the next week, you must speak to no-one, not even your loved ones or a highway patrol officer stopping you for speeding. Say nothing. Do not sleep. Let the berry sit beneath your tongue.
At midnight on the seventh day you must go to the highest place in your town (it is common to climb on roofs for this step) and, with the berry safely beneath your tongue, recite the whole of Fox in Socks. Do not let the berry slip from your tongue. Do not miss out any of the poem, or skip any of the bits of the Muddle Puddle Tweetle Poodle Beetle Noodle Bottle Paddle Battle.
Then, and only then, can you swallow the berry. You must return home as quickly as you can, for you have only half an hour at most before you fall into a deep sleep.
When you wake in the morning, you will be able to get your thoughts and ideas down onto the paper, and you will be a writer.
Crazy old ape
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Don't know why I haven't noticed this before. I've been a fan of Neil Gaiman for years (since the early days of his classic Sandman comic). Gaiman is very supportive of new writers and frequently writes and speaks on the craft of writing. He's also done a course on storytelling for Masterclass. It's not free ($120 for a single course, $20/mth. to subscribe to their entire library), but if you have some spare change laying around and want to learn how to tell a story from someone who knows a thing or two about it, it may be worth the time and cash. I haven't taken it but those who have speak well of it.

https://www.masterclass.com/classes/neil-gaiman-teaches-the-art-of-storytelling

There are some other writing-relevant courses there, including a creative writing course taught by Margaret Atwood (Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments, Madd Addam trilogy, and many, many more) and one on writing short stories by the marvellous Joyce Carol Oates.

A mighty warrior meets an unusual challenger. The Last Challenge of Jadek Prynn.