This.

I believe this may not be true.

Fit every other writer out.

That 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 off fiction I have achieved because I'm an honest writer of fiction because my people are real people because you care about them.

The hardest time for me was starting out.

It's a very, very young writer.

I wrote short stories and I sent them out to places that could conceivably published them.

And they all came back and I looked at the stories which went out and came back and went out.

We came back and I thought, OK, well, one of two things is true here either.

I'm not good enough.

Oh, I don't understand the world.

I don't this stuff I don't get this stuff I need to know.

Okay.

So as off today, I am now a freelance journalist specializing in the world of publishing on 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 where everybody is.

Find out what they do, Find out how they read, toe learn.

And then I got invited to my first writers workshop.

There was the Milford Writer's Workshop, and I was sitting there with a bunch of fantastic writers like Gwyneth Jones and Diana Wynne Jones, Mary Gentle on DDE.

I realized very very quickly that my reactions to stories with things like I like this.

I don't like this So this is good.

That wasn't their reaction.

They were responding to stories on a much deeper level.

They were reading different stories 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.

These people who did this on I also realized I was wrong.

I was wrong if I wanted to be a writer and they were right on DDE.

That experience, more than anything else I think, changed me on it.

changed me mostly because I realized that in order to write fiction, I needed to be honest.

Up until that point, I had I had a facility with the voices.

I could do essentially impressions of other writers.

I could write things that felt kind of like things that are the 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 waas.

I didn't want to be judged.

I didn't want people reading any of my stories to know who I waas or what I thought.

I want to get in too close.

And I realized that if you're going too right, you're gonna be a successful writer, least if you're gonna 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 the 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 Andi.

If people judged you if they felt they knew who you were, that was just something that you were gonna have to live with.

And what was strange is once I started doing that when I was expecting to be judged or shunned, or or people's opinions that I have to deal with things and what I discovered was actually their opinions.

Were we really like this?

We love this story.

That's a good story.

It felt huge, felt personal on.

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 tended around.