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.
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