Neil Gaiman is arguably one of the most creative minds of our generation.

From writing comics and children’s books to television scripts and mythological fiction, Gaiman has traversed a wide landscape of literary fiction. His award-winning books include American Gods, The Sandman, Coraline, The Graveyard Book, and Stardust.

In 2019, Gaiman pulled back the curtains on his writing process and recorded a MasterClass on storytelling. (MasterClass is a subscription program where for $180/year, you can watch high-quality courses from experts in various fields.)

Here are the top 13 lessons I learned from his MasterClass:

1. Use lies to communicate truths

“Fiction stories are one of the most interesting phenomena that human beings have…Stories are part of us, and we convey truth with stories, which is fundamentally the most gloriously giant contradiction that you can ever imagine. What we’re saying is, we are using lies, we’re using memorable lies, we are taking people who do not exist and things that did not happen to those people in places that aren’t, and we are using those things to communicate true things to kids and to each other.” -Neil Gaiman

Gaiman says he writes not only because he enjoys telling stories but because he uses them to articulate things he believes about the world.

For example, he wrote the novel Neverwhere to discuss homelessness and explore the stories of people who fall through the cracks in society. He essentially used the novel as his Trojan horse to communicate the concept.

“If I sat down and said I’m writing a big book on homelessness, the only people who would pick it up and read it would be people interested in a book about homelessness,” says Gaiman. “What I want to do here is write a book about living in a big city. I want to write an adventure, but I want to write an adventure which when people finish reading that story…they’re going to look at the people sleeping in the shop doorways, they’re going to look at these people and they aren’t gonna pretend they’re invisible.”

Sometimes the best way to expose uncomfortable truth is to package it into a novel.

2. Acknowledge your growth areas

“The hardest time for me was starting out as a very, very young writer. I wrote short stories and 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, ‘Okay, well one of two things is true here. Either I’m not good enough or I don’t understand the world, there’s stuff I don’t get, there’s stuff I need to know.’” -Neil Gaiman

Just like every other writer, Gaiman experienced a lot of rejection early in his career. He used that rejection to learn how he needed to improve.

Gaiman learned how to write stronger conflict into his stories, how to create characters that were more vulnerable and authentic, and how to craft stories that made readers keep turning the page.

Everyone has skills gaps. You must learn your gaps before you can fill them, and rejection is a great (albeit painful) way to identify those gaps.

3. Start a compost heap

“I think it’s really important for a writer to have a compost heap. Everything you read, things that you write, things that you listen to, people you encounter — they can all go on the compost heap, and they will rot down, and out of them grow beautiful stories.” -Neil Gaiman

Every successful author, musician, and artist has received questions like “What are your biggest influences?” and “Where do you find inspiration?”

Gaiman says that much of his creative inspiration has come from outside the world of writing. He credits musicians Lou Reed and David Bowie as two of the biggest influences upon his work, and he says that anything can be used as inspiration for writing.

Everything you encounter in life has the potential to influence your work: overheard dialogue in a coffee shop, that song on the radio you can’t get out of your head, the television scene that perfectly depicts the sexual tension of a first date. Don’t limit yourself to only the influences in your genre. Drink from a wide-brimmed glass of creative inspiration.

4. Reveal a little too much of yourself

“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…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.” -Neil Gaiman

If you’ve never read Neil Gaiman before, many of his books could be described as…weird. His book American Gods pits old-world mythological gods like Odin and Loki against new-world “gods” like technology and television. Anansi Boys tells the story of a man finding out his dead father was an incarnation of the spider god Anansi.

When he started out as a young writer, Gaiman worried that the types of stories he wanted to tell would give strangers too much of a view into his soul. Then he realized that’s exactly what readers wanted to see: they wanted him to spill his authentic self onto the page. Once he began doing that, he gained more readers.

Every story contains a snapshot of its creator. Are you refusing to pose for that picture? Give your readers what they want: a story with personality and authenticity.

5. Pay attention to the strangeness of humanity

“People are so much more interesting and strange and more unlikely than anything you could make up.” -Neil Gaiman

When I watch MasterClasses, I take copious notes. As I was writing the above quote while watching Gaiman’s MasterClass, I looked out the window and watched a teenager in a fluorescent yellow jacket ride past on a black unicycle. (I swear to God, I did.)

Gaiman says, “Every little detail that you can steal from the world and smuggle with you into your fiction is something that makes your world more real for your reader.”

Strange people and stories are all around you. You just need to take the time to look for them. Great characters and stories are borne from true characters and true stories.

6. Don’t tell readers how to feel

“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 gonna tell you how sad the death of the unicorn was. I’m gonna kill that unicorn, and I’m gonna break your heart.” -Neil Gaiman

Many professional authors preach “Show, don’t tell.” Even though that advice is commonplace, Gaiman’s unique spin on that advice is more memorable than most.

Create emotion in the scene without dictating emotion. Give readers a reason to care about the characters and the events they read, and their emotions will follow.

7. Get the bad stories out of your pen

“I think as a writer, and especially as a young writer, your job is to get the bad words out, the bad sentences out, the stories that aren’t any good yet. And you don’t ever get them out going, ‘I’m gonna write a really bad story now. I just have to get this out.’ You think it’s a great story, you think it’s a great idea, you think it’s good at least — and it may be — but the most important thing is just you got it out.” -Neil Gaiman

Writing requires a little bit of ego. Hitting “publish” is a writer’s implicit way of saying they believe their words are worth someone’s time to read.

But as Gaiman reminds us, we often learn as we go that we aren’t as good as we think we are. And that’s okay. Writing is about growth — not perfection.

Leverage your self-confidence. It will give you the gumption to publish your work. But then surrender your ego to the reality that your writing still has a long way to go.

It is only through the continual act of hitting publish that you can develop, learn, and grow. Get out the bad stories. Listen to reader feedback to learn how you missed the mark. Then tweak and publish your next story.