Quote:For the last five years, I've been teaching at Bard College as professor of the arts. And each year I get to teach a total of about 24, 25, 26 students. I love the teaching process. I love getting to work with students. I love getting to show people ways to write, show them how to get deeper, how to learn. It's an absolute delight to me.

But you don't get to reach a lot of people. The joy of doing something like MasterClass is going, well, I can say the same things that I would say to them to millions of people because I know that there are millions of people out there who want to write because they come to me and they ask me and they tell me and they ask questions and I try and answer those questions on Tumblr, on Twitter, on my blog. But this just seems like an incredibly efficient way to just say everything that I have to say to everybody.

What I'm trying to do in this class, and I'm going to mix my metaphors outrageously here, is I want to teach you first of all how to find the tool shed. I want to take you down to the tool shed, and I want to show you some of the tools that are hanging on the walls of a writer's tool shed. And I want to show you what that's for and say that thing there that's a dibber and that's hoe and that's a spade and that's a shovel, and you use them all for different things.

But I also want to show you where the pitfalls are, some of the, yeah, don't do that because if you do that, it'll all just stop. So I want to take you into a lot of the nuts and the bolts and the hoes and the dibbers and the mousetraps and the doomsday devices, and I want to walk you through that safely and have you coming out of that gloriously garbled massive metaphor with actually a rather better idea of how to write than you had than when you started.

In my class, I'm going to tell you that stories are important. I'm going to tell you what stories are. And then I'm going to tell you how to build them, how to make stories, how to make stories that matter. And I'm going to give you some tips, I'm going to give you some exercises, and most of all, I'm going to give you a little push forward that you might not have had. Hello, I'm Neil Gaiman. And this is my MasterClass.