All fiction has to be as
honest as you can make it. This, I believe. This may not be true for
every other writer out there. It may not be true for
any other writer there. But it's true for this writer. You have to make it
as honest as you can, because that's what
people respond to. As far as I'm
concerned, any success I have achieved, as a
writer of fiction, I have achieved because I am
an honest writer of fiction, because my people are
real people, because you care about them. The hardest time for
me was starting out as a very, very young writer. I wrote short stories,
and I sent them out to places that could
conceivably publish them. And they all came back. And I looked at the stories,
which went out and came back, and went out and came back. And I thought, OK. Well, one of two
things is true here. Either I'm not good enough, or
I don't understand the world. I don't-- there's
stuff I don't get, and there's stuff
I need to know. And I thought, OK. So as of today, I am now
a freelance journalist specializing in the
world of publishing, and fantasy, and
science fiction. And I decided I was a
journalist because I thought, that gives me license
to ask questions. It gives me license to
go out into that world and meet everybody, find
out who everybody is, find out what they do, and find
out how they read, to learn. And then I got invited to
my first writers' workshop. It was the Milford
Writers' Workshop. And I was sitting there with
a bunch of fantastic writers, like Gwyneth Jones, and Diana
Wynne Jones, and Mary Gentle. And I realized
very, very quickly that my reactions to stories
were things like, I like this. I don't like this. Or, this is good. That wasn't their reaction. They were responding to
stories on a much deeper level. They were reading
different stories than what I was reading. And I realized I was reading
the stories as an audience. And they were reading
stories as craftspeople, as people who built these
things, as people who did this. And I also realized I was wrong. I was wrong if I
wanted to be a writer. And they were right. And that experience, more
than anything else, I think, changed me. And it changed me
mostly because I realized that, in order to write
fiction, I needed to be honest. Up until that point, I had
a facility with voices. I could do, essentially,
impressions of other writers. I could write things that
felt kind of like things that other writers would have
written and written well. But I didn't have
anything to say. And that wasn't
because I hadn't lived. That was because I
wasn't really prepared to say anything true
about who I was. I didn't want to be judged. I didn't want people
reading any of my stories to know who I was,
or what I thought, or to get in too close. And I realized that
if you're going to write, if you're going
to be a successful writer, at least if you're going to
be the kind of writer who did the kind of stuff
that I was going to do, you had to be willing to do
the equivalent of walking down a street naked. You had to be able to
show too much of yourself. You had to be just a
little bit more honest than you were comfortable with. And if people
judged you, if they felt they knew
who you were, that was just something that you
were going to have to live with. And what was strange is,
once I started doing that, and I was expecting to
be judged, or shunned, or people's opinions, or to
have to deal with things, what I discovered was,
actually, their opinions were, we really like this. We love this story. That's a good story. It felt huge. It felt personal. And I realized that's because
I was being honest about me. And some things, when
you get really specific, apply to so many of us. So that was how I
took my darkest period and eventually turned it around. [MUSIC PLAYING]
