NEIL GAIMAN & DAVE BERRY ON HOW TO WRITE

The ghost of Mark Twain, Neil Gaiman, Dave Berry, and I were playing poker at Meilori's.

Mark grumbled, 

"It is the first day of spring.  I hate spring in Louisiana.  I tell you, Roland, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours here."

The biggest white dog I had ever seen nuzzled a happy Neil Gaiman.  

"Roland, you know what I love most about visiting Meilori's?"

"Being able to hug Cabal again?" suggested Mark.

Neil smiled wide.  "Exactly.  And the fact that no one asks me ...."

A young girl, seemingly all eyes and blushing, sat down opposite him and gushed, 

"Oh where do you get your awesome ideas for your books?"

Cabal rolled his eyes 

and Neil sighed, 

"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."

The girl pouted as if he were holding out on her, and Neil's eyes sparkled.


"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."

Dave Berry looked betrayed, 

"Hey, you told me I had to kiss a virgin goat at midnight while J K Rowling watched all draped in a mysterious monk's robe! 

And to never let my title have anything to do with the insides of the book."

The ghost of Mark Twain patted the hand of the bewildered young girl.  

"Princess, there is only one brief, solitary law for good writing.  It is very easy and simple, Missy.  Write only about things and people folks take a living interest in."

Neil nodded, "Or you could do that."