I Tried Neil Gaiman's (classic) Writing Routine for 7 Days...Here's What Happened

whether you're reading Neil gaiman's books seeing his movies devouring his graphic novels or watching his TV adaptations it's impossible not to be swept away and Enchanted by the Darkly magical worlds that he creates as an author I have found Neil Gaiman to be a tremendous source of inspiration there was even one point about four years ago before I had even published anything where I had these three audio clips by Neil Gaiman on my phone and I listened to those clips pretty much every morning before I started to write and I found them incredibly useful for helping me start out as a writer fast forward to today and I'm working on my fourth novel right now a book called Kingdom of Dragons and I gotta be honest with you it's feeling like a bit of a slog I am a hundred thousand words into this book roughly 60 of the way through and I feel like I'm at that point now where I the excitement at the beginning has faded I'm still a little far away from the end and all this sort of doubt and uh stress is starting to to creep in with it so what I thought it would try in an effort to reinvigorate and re-inspire myself as I push towards the end of this first draft is to change things up a little bit and to see if I can try to emulate Neil gaiman's writing routine for the next seven days in an effort to kind of reignite that spark within me as I move towards the end of this first draft [Music] [Applause] [Music] based on interviews with Neil Gaiman it seems his writing routine boils down to four key principles the first is to write every day even if it is only a tiny amount he tells this great story about when he was writing Coraline and not having any time to work on that book so what he did is he had a notepad beside his bed and a pen and every single night he would just go and write like three sentences or 50 words before he went to sleep and I think that really shows the power of just doing a very small amount but being consistent with it second principle is to use pen and paper for the first draft Neil says that this allows him to really focus on the quality of the words he's writing down and to think more so that he's not having to edit out a bunch of garbage words in the second draft process usually I write with a keyboard so this will be a totally different experience to write with pen and paper and I'm kind of really excited to see how that affects my writing process Neil's third principle is to find designated distraction-free environments for writing he says that he typically likes to go down to the little gazebo at the end of his garden and right there because there's absolutely nothing he can do in that place apart from right for me I've also kind of got this little gazebo out of my backyard so I'll try to use that and I'll probably also use the local library as well as a bit of a distraction free writing space and most likely I'll end up probably using this room as well but I will try as much as possible to use these other environments so that I can have designated writing zones where I'm doing nothing except going there to write Emil's fourth and final principle and probably the most important one as well is that when you are riding you have permission to do two things the first thing is absolutely nothing you can just sit there and stare off into space and the second thing is right but you can't do anything else and this is interesting because what happens after a while of doing this I assume is that you're going to be bored by just looking off into the distance and you know just staring into space and you actually see writing as a much more fun alternative so those are the four principles that I'm going to try to be following over the next seven days as I attempt to kind of reignite my spark for Kingdom of Dragons let's see how it goes all right so it is day one of this writing challenge or rather night one um I was wondering whether to postpone this until tomorrow because yesterday I got back from this insane hike that I went on in the weekend basically walked 24 kilometers through these grueling mountains I'm super tired today but I think Neil would say you have to write anyway no matter how you're feeling so day one of the challenge starts tonight normally when I'm writing this is my usual setup maybe using my laptop and computer up here or these days I'm using my Freeride traveler a lot more but that is not what I'm going to be using today today I'm going to be using just boring old pen and paper foreign [Music] the process of writing [Music] can be magical it can there are times when you step out of an upper floor window and you just walk across thin air and it's it's absolute not a happiness mostly it's a process of putting one word after another there are people who make dry stone walls and they've been making dry stone walls for generations and the way they make these these dry stone walls is they have lots and lots of rocks and they put one down and then they put another one down that fits and they put another one down that fits they put another they know how to do it and somehow they create these walls that are absolutely stable and they put just by putting one rock down after another and eventually you have a wall and that's how you make a novel thank you okay that is the writing session done I wrote about two and a half pages um in roughly 68 minutes or so at first it was kind of difficult to get back into it because like I said really tied from that hike and also it's been a few days since I've actually ridden because of the break that that hike put on me um but once I got through that kind of initial boredom of not having any music playing which I normally always have music playing in the background I found that I was actually able to focus really well because normally when I have music playing it's very tending to like adjust the volume of it or maybe check the track that's playing because I didn't have any music and I didn't have anything in front of me except the pen and the paper it felt way less stimulating at first and maybe a bit less fun because of that but then once I kind of got through that initial 20 minute period I found that it was very easy to get into that flow State and there was just nothing to really pull me out of it in the same way that music can occasionally have the risk of doing so all in all a very interesting start to the first day of this experiment [Music] foreign [Music] today I feel like I really channeled that piece of advice to write something every day even if it's super small because I probably literally only got down like 50 words today and it doesn't feel like a lot when you're doing it at the time but in hindsight I think it was really useful because it's keeping my story in my subconscious and it means that my brain is telling itself that this is something important to focus on and hopefully it will turn it over when I have a bigger writing session tomorrow it will have some ideas that just added overnight day three of the challenge today probably picked the worst week I could have imagined to do this because her laser eye surgery today which basically has corrected my short-sightedness but has left me feeling quite tired and drugged up and also my vision is a little bit foggy but I think the spirit of this challenge is really to have no excuses so I'm gonna get to some writing now and I'll see how I go [Music] the first draft can absolutely go up in Flames it can you can change the age gender number of a character you can bring somebody dead back to life nobody ever needs to know anything that happens in your first draft is you telling the story to yourself and then I'll sit down and type and I'll put it onto a computer and as far as I'm concerned the second draft is where I try and make it look like I knew what I was doing all along [Music] so that was actually a surprise really good session I wrote about three and a bit pages in roughly 56 minutes or so which was way more than I was expecting kind of 20 minutes in I was telling myself oh just half an hour and then you can stop but I'm finding that with this pen of paper method it really seems quite easy to get in that flow state that makes you want to keep going that makes you want to keep writing further than you kind of initially are expecting your energy levels will allow you to there's just something really nice about the Simplicity of it I think that kind of reminds me of when I was hiking recently on the weekend how you're just out in nature there's you know no external stimuli around apart from the people you're with and you're living very simply and it's very basic way of existence but it kind of allows you to disconnect from a lot of distractions and to have more focus and I'm really liking the handwriting I think it's successfully giving me that ability to lose myself in the world of my story and to yeah really get into that lovely deep work state where you can just write and write and write and kind of lose track of the time considering that I was feeling quite groggy before this writing has actually energized me a lot and uh yeah a successful day three of this challenge something that worked for me was imagining that where I wanted to be which was an author and supporting myself through my words imagining that was a mountain a distant Mountain my goal [Music] and I knew that as long as I kept walking towards the mountain I'd be all right and when I truly was not sure what to do I could stop and think about whether it was taking me towards or away from the mountain I said no to editorial jobs on magazines proper jobs that would have paid proper money because I knew that attractive though they were for me they would have been walking away from the mountain and if those job offers had come earlier I might have taken them because they still would have been closer to the mountain than I was at that time I learned to write by writing I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure and to stop when it felt like work which meant that life did not feel like work [Music] I really approached this with the intention of trying to reinvigorate my excitement for Kingdom of Dragons which is the current novel I'm working on and I think it's working like right now I'm walking home from the gym and normally I would be listening to a podcast but instead I got out of the gym and I was like no I really want to be thinking about the next scene that I'm about to write when I get home and it's not something that I probably had when I was working on this story even a few weeks ago so that is a good sign that this uh is really paying off in terms of really exciting me to work on this project new again was saying he would consider 1500 words to be a really good comfortable successful day of writing and 1500 words as a full-time author initially when I heard that I was like that doesn't seem like a lot but I guess it reflects the fact that you need that time in that breathing room in your schedule to do things like this to go for walks around beautiful places to kind of reinvigorate your Creative Energy she just remembered a funny story as I was walking down here about the time that I met Neil Gaiman well sort of this right here is the Perth concert hall and at the start of 2020 Neil gaming came there to give a speech to myself and also to 1500 other people who happen to be in there as well everyone got to write down questions for Neil on these little bits of index paper and I wrote down my question put it in a box along with probably thousands of other questions that people had written never expecting it to be answered and throughout the kind of night he went for about two hours answering all these questions about his writing about his books all the other things and he got to the very end and I had just had such a blast listening to him talk but I didn't care that my question hadn't been answered and he tries to sort through trying to find the last questions that he wants to go through he looks at a couple and says no not that one not that one definitely not that one oh that's a good one and he picks it out and he reads my question and the question I asked him was what is the greatest writing advice lesson that delayed Terry Pratchett taught you so Terry Pratchett and Neil worked on good Omens which is a fantastic book and Terry Pratchett is a phenomenal writer in his own right and him and Neil had this really deep friendship and the answer that Neil gave was really interesting because it sort of ties into stuff I felt with the Kingdom of Dragons he basically said that Terry told him you don't always have to know how the story is going to end you can trust yourself to start the process of writing and you'll find it out as you go along and as you progress towards the end and as the characters reveal who they are and that's something that I kind of kept in mind with Kingdom of Dragons I think when I started writing it I vaguely knew how I wanted it to end but I wasn't 100 certain and as I've kind of gone through the process I've become more and more certain about how it will end but I'm still kind of in doubt over a lot of the details but I trust that by the time I get there I'll be able to figure something out oh and just then it worked I was you know thinking madly about my story for 20 minutes didn't really feel like anything was coming so I sat down and I recorded that little video back there me pointing to the concert hall and then as soon as I moved on from that bang just hit me a really great idea the next scene that made me super excited to write it so I can't wait to get home and uh take a crack at it now and it just goes to show how changing things up like this really really can pay off and make you so much more excited about the story you're writing thanks for watching if you enjoyed this video please consider subscribing and to all you Riders creators and dreamers out there keep going and keep striving I'll see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Jed Herne

Views: 230,670

Keywords: writing, writing advice, writing craft, story, fantasy, author, jed herne, authortube, booktube, wizards warriors words, rob j hayes, dyrk ashton, michael r fletcher, self-publish, indie, grimdark, publishing

Id: TQ_UGzltjjQ

Length: 14min 33sec (873 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 30 2022