All language subtitles for MasterClass Neil Gaiman Teaches The Art of Storytelling - 03Sources of Inspiration

You know, for all writers, you kind of

have a compost heap. And if any of you

are not gardeners, kitchen people, um

the compost heap is where you throw all

of the garden and the kitchen rubbish,

the food scraps. You throw it all on the

compost heap and then it rots down and a

year or so later you look around and you

just have this lovely brown stuff that

you can put on the garden out of which

flowers and vegetables will grow. And

I think it's really important for a

writer to have a compost heap.

Everything you read, things that you

write, the things that you listen to,

people you encounter, they can all go on

the composty and they will rot down and

out of them grow beautiful stories. I

think the thing that

you don't understand especially as a

young writer when people talk about your

influences

is the tendency is simply to go and look

at

the things like the thing that you do

and point to them. So it's easier for me

probably to point to Tolken and Dunin

and James Branch Kabell to Ursula Leguin

or or PL Travers and say well I do stuff

like this and I can point to those

people

and what you don't necessarily point to

is the stuff that does what you do but

is in a different kind of field or a

different kind of area entirely.

My wife writes songs, she makes music,

she performs.

And what's important to her is emotional

honesty, is truth. And she was probably

in her late 30s before she realized that

in all of the lists of influences that

she would give when people would say,

"What are your influences?" And she'd

talk about The Cure or Leonard Cohen.

She'd talk about punk bands. She'd talk

about all of these things that she

loved. She'd never talk about Judy Bloom

because Judy Bloom was an author who she

read when she was 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and

an author who changed her and went in

really deep and talked about honesty and

gave Amanda the things that she wanted.

For me, I never talk about Lou Reed.

Lou was huge for me. And one of the

reasons he was huge for me is he would

write these songs that were like three

minute novels.

There was a story in there even if you

weren't quite sure what it was and it

was compressed

and it was very very heightened because

anything that happens with music is

always incredibly heightened

and the choice of words in a song is so

important because you don't have very

many. So watching how Lou wouldn't tell

you what to feel, wouldn't tell you how

he felt,

that the emotion would actually be

almost pulled out

of the song, but it will be there for

you to interpret yourself was probably

huge. It's something that I still love

doing when I write is I would much

rather not tell you how to feel about

something. I would rather you just felt

it. I will tell you what happens. And if

I leave you crying because I just killed

a unicorn.

I'm not going to tell you how sad the

death of the unicorn was.

I'm going to kill that unicorn and I'm

going to break your heart. That was

something I think I learned from Lou. So

your influences

are not necessarily the things that you

think they are. And your influences,

you person watching this who I'm

teaching, I'm instructing, you're

listening to me, remember that. Remember

that your influences are all sorts of

things and some of them are going to

take you by surprise. But the most

important thing that you can do

is open yourself to everything.

One of the things that's really fun as a

writer

is subverting expectations. And one of

the places as a young writer and frankly

as an old writer, as a crusty, grumpy,

aging writer, um that's great to do

is to take apart a story that you're

familiar with and inspect it new. See

how it ticks. See what makes it work.

Look at the things that

um people take for granted

a lot of the time.

If you look at something that you're

very very familiar with, but just look

at it as if it's the first time, turn it

round, examine it from odd angles,

suddenly it can open up into a story.

Snow White might have been the very

first ever story that I remember

reading. It was certainly one of the

first books I ever had was a beautiful

illustrated Snow White. So I

I've known that story since I was 2 3

years old. I must have read in that time

perhaps a thousand different versions of

Snow White. But reading it the

thousandth time,

I stopped and thought, you know,

it's a pretty strange story.

I mean,

what kind of person

has hair as black as coal, lips as red

as blood, skin as white as snow, and

gets to lie in a coffin

for a year and then get up and they're

fine again?

And what kind of prince

rides past

on a horse and says, "Hey, that girl in

that coffin, she's gorgeous. Can you

bring her back to my castle?"

Cuz that's kind of weird, too.

And all of a sudden, I'm looking at

something which is a story that I've

looked at a thousand times

as if I've never seen it before. And I'm

going, well, this if you view it from

over here, you're telling a story about

a vampire princess

and a necrophile prince.

And actually, if you tell that story,

then

the heroine

of the story has to be

her stepmother, who obviously was doing

everything she possibly could to save

the kingdom and protect everybody from

her terrible, terrible, dangerous

daughter.

That's a story.

So,

what I'd love for you to do

is

take a folk tale you're familiar with.

Take a fairy tale, a story that's that's

owned by the world.

Take that story

and then just turn it around. Try and

look at it for the first time.

See

where the bits are that don't quite make

sense. See where

it could be

completely reinvented and then write

your own take on it. Try and make the

people people.

But tell that story

and then see where you got to. Find out

where it took you.

Use it as a framework or use it as a

mirror or use it as something to bounce

ideas off and see what you get. And the

things that you put into it could be

things that you personally care about.

You can take a story and tell it now in

modern days. You can tell it in a never

neverland time, but just try and make it

yours. Try and make the people breathe

and see what happens.

I think something that's enormously fun

for any young writer um is just thought

experiments,

makeup stories with the people around

you. Um, I highly recommend train

carriages, underground carriages, bus

journeys, anything where you have a

bunch of desperate people that you don't

know.

Then look at them. Throw all of you into

a situation you've never been in before

and start wondering, well, okay, what

would this person do? What would that

person do? You know, the train

is transported to a distant planet.

Somebody in here has a heart attack. Um,

what happens if somebody gets sick? We

get trapped and it goes on for days.

And you just start making up little

stories and you start playing with the

people and realizing that actually

people are so much more interesting and

strange and more unlikely than anything

that you could make up.

So imagining that, go into a coffee

shop, look at the people around you,

listen to what they're saying, listen to

how people talk.

I used to have notebooks filled with

either little overheard conversations or

occasionally just conversations that I

would have with people like bus drivers

where I would go, I don't believe I just

had that conversation. I should write it

down while it's fresh.

And you almost never use actual lines

that you hear or I don't. Um, but

they're still fantastic

as as sort of things to throw on the

compost heap.

If you ask an author, where do you get

your ideas? The author will probably

mock you. Authors have jokes and they'll

say, "Oh, from a little idea of the

month club or from a little idea shop

behind uh Charing Cross." Or they'll

say, "Oh, I get them from my friend." Or

they'll just just be horrible to you.

Um, this is because authors are scared

and we don't know.

And because we don't know and because

we're scared, we lash out and we make

you feel like you asked a stupid

question. You didn't. You asked the big

question. You asked the real question.

Where do you get your ideas is a real

question. Um, and I used to do the funny

answers. And then

many years ago, I went to my daughter's

school

when she was um, you know, seven, eight

years old. And I'm sitting there with

some seven eight-year-olds and they're

asking me about being a writer. And one

of them says, "Where do you get your

ideas?" And I thought, "I can't make fun

of you. you're seven and you have

actually asked the only big important

question.

So I thought I better give you a

straight answer. Um and I thought for a

little bit and I said well really I

think you get ideas

from confluence. Although I probably

didn't use the word confluence because I

was talking to seven-year-olds. I said

you get ideas

from two things coming together. You get

ideas from things that you have seen and

thought and known about and then

something else that you've seen and

thought and known about and the

realization

that you can just collide those things.

And a lot of that

right in the beginning can just be

boredom.

It can be looking out of a window.

It can be I love um going to

junior school and middle school kids

drama. Um you cannot escape. You are

stuck there. You can't take out your

phone. You can't read. You have to

watch. And yet the need to be elsewhere

is such that you know you can absolutely

go off and come up with some fantastic

um ideas for things.

Ideas. two things coming together. For

example,

uh everybody knows

that if a werewolf bites you,

you will become a werewolf when the moon

is full.

That's an idea.

The whatifs, the I wonder weathers, the

places where you go with that can be

things like, well, okay, so what if a

werewolf

bites a wolf?

Would you get a wolf that turns into a

different wolf when the moon is full?

What if a werewolf bit a goldfish?

Would you get a goldfish that became

hairy and came out of its bowl and

killed people the full moon? What about

a werewolf that absent-mindedly started

chewing on a chair?

Would you get a chair that turned into a

wolf? Would this be a chairwolf? Um,

when the moon is full? And at that

point, you're suddenly starting to play

around with that. You're going, "Okay,

so now we get uh bodies

found

with their throats ripped out and in the

mud nearby. You just have the marks of a

chair leg.

You'd have the moment where the great

detective is sitting in the library

as the full moon slowly rises and he's

figuring this out. And just as he starts

to figure it out, he realizes that the

leather chair that he's sitting in is

starting to get hairier and furrier and

it's starting to move. And now you have

something that

you've really got a couple of scenes

there. It's not yet a plot. It's just

moments from a plot. But now you have

something that you could build up from

and you can build up to and you can go,

okay, well, what would happen? What

would have to happen before that in

order to make a story? What happens

after that? Can you shoot a chair with a

silver bullet? Would that work? What

does it do? Does it turn back into a

chair? Um, how do you destroy a chair

that is coming after you up the stairs?

And

you begin to just rethink. And really

that's just confluence. That's things

coming together that you have seen a

thousand times, but you just look at

them in a slightly different way. And

now you have the beginning of a story.