Neil Gaiman
As a fan of Sandman since Issue #1, you can imagine how excited I was when the prospect of interviewing writer Neil Gaiman came across my desk. As usual, I did way too much research and sat down to talk with him with a stack of papers before me. Almost immediately, Neil started talking about not only his books and his outlook, but also about the craft of writing. I looked at my stack of papers and all my careful research and tossed it into the trashcan. After all, who was going to cut off one of the most influential writers of this generation when he was giving a virtual Master’s Class on The Craft? Neil was a solid supporter of CN and even gave us a blurb for our Press Kit. As anyone reading this already knows, Neil went on to write some fantastic books and continues to be someone who exemplifies everything right and honest and decent about Dark Culture.
~ * ~
Lying Awake and Dreaming in a Storyteller’s Field Part 1 – Issue 13
~ * ~
His name has become synonymous with fine writing in the comic medium. His reputation as a fiction writer grows with every short story that is published. His work with artist Dave McKean continually forces us to reconsider what the serial art medium is capable of. With his recent forays into television (Neverwhere for the BBC and Babylon 5 for the US market) and his being courted by the Hollywood elite, we may be seeing a more literate and coherent voice in those media than we ever have. There are whispers on the wind that his most popular vision, that of the melancholic Sandman, his sister Death (the original Perky Goth), and the rest of his rather eclectic Family of Endless, may be brought unscathed to the big screen. His name is Neil Gaiman and his is, without a doubt, one of the most original voices to be heard as he spins tale after tale of unbound imagination. In this, the first of our two part interview with Neil, we talk about what it was like growing up, the mechanics of writing, and why it is that Stephen King is continually blowing shit up.
~ * ~
I’d like to start out by getting a brief overview of you, where you grew up, what schooling you’ve had, that sort of thing.
I was born above the tiny grocery store that my father ran in a little English town called Portchester. I grew up mostly in Suffolk, a little town on the zero meridian which I was actually quite fond of because I lived in the western hemisphere and went to school in the eastern hemisphere. I liked that, doing that. It was just a cool thing to know when you are a kid. I wound up sort of one of those booky kids. I was more than a booky kid, I used to carry books everywhere with me. My parents would frisk me before weddings and things like that because they would assume that I had a book on me somewhere. And, at whatever the event I was meant to be going to, family Christmas or whatever, I would probably be found under a table or something reading. I grew up, quite enjoyed growing up…
Was it a good time? Did you have a good childhood and all of that?
Yeah, I suppose. I mean, looking back on it, it was probably fairly idyllic. At the time, it was a childhood, which is to say that most of your grumbles are with a strange lack of power that you have. You’re convinced that you really ought to be ruling the world and you’re not. So, that is what it means to be a kid. I liked it. Although the graphic novels I did with Dave [McKean], Violent Cases and Mr. Punch, the character narrating is very, very close to me and the experiences are fairly close. There’s a story I did called “One Life Furnished in Early Moorcock,” which Craig Russell actually turned into a comic on his own, which is kind of fun, and that was a fairly accurate portrayal of what it was to be me at the age of twelve. I was just a kid who loved books, who loved reading. I was very, very, very bright, but just as lazy. So, it meant that I tended to excel in school in anything I could do without effort and I couldn’t bother with the rest. What was strange was that by the time I woke up one day, looked around, and here I was in my early twenties or whatever, I was convinced for a while that I had absolutely no skills that would ever allow me to earn a living. To this day, I will have conversations with the kids where they’ll talk about something and I’ll start burbling obscurely with this sort of weird mixture of junk culture and autodidactic erudition and they’ll say, “Why do you know that stuff?” “Well, that stuff actually, at the end of the table, winds up paying for your CDs or whatever.” It’s very strange. People ask me about writing and writing courses and things. People who want to be artists, I always recommend they go to art college because, apart from anything else, it gives you a chance to muck around with everything. It gives you a chance to learn whether or not you like doing this, whether you like doing that, so on and so forth. I’m not sure, at the end of the day, when it came down to it, I went off to be a writer and I went off to be a writer partly because of the sheer arrogant idea that I was a writer already. I was a good one and, damn it, the world ought to know. What is scary is, looking back at the stuff I did then, I wasn’t a very good writer. [laughs] At least, I had the arrogance…
Chutzpah counts for a lot…
Exactly. I had the chutzpah and I had this sort of conviction. I still have never seen anybody come out of a writing course or anything necessarily a better writer than they went in. Having said that, when I was in my mid-twenties, one of the most important things I ever did was go to a Milford Science Fiction Writing Workshop at which I was sitting between John Klute and Rachel Pollack, Gwyneth Jones and Lisa Tuttle, fine writers and fine minds, and we were analyzing stories. Every morning we would read a couple of stories and we’d talk about them each afternoon going ’round in a circle. After about a morning and a half of this, I realized that I was not reading the same stories that they were reading. If anything, during that week, I learned how to read, not reading as an audience from the point of view of “I like this” – “I don’t like this” – “I’m enjoying it” – “I’m not enjoying it,” but as a writer. Just sort of looking at the nuts and bolts and that was fascinating. It taught me an awful lot.
Did you find that, now that you’re able to spot the nuts and bolts, it made you a freer writer or more conscious one?
Well, it’s hard to tell because, when I’m writing, I’m not a conscious writer. When I’m writing, you open somewhat a window to the back of your head and let the light shine out onto the page or not. It’s kind of strange because as you write more and more, it gets harder and harder to read fiction. It’s like being a professional stage magician. You may be sitting in the same audience that everybody else is, but you’re not seeing the same show. You are admiring how a thing is done or the way it is done, but you’re not necessarily that worried about whether or not the girl is going to be cut in half. Those few writers who can occasionally get me to worry about if the girl really is going to be cut in half this time I still find are worth their weight in gold because it gets really hard to read fiction. You wind up, and talking to other fiction writers, I get the impression that most of them have this too after a while anyway, you wind up getting the same buzz you got from fiction from non-fiction and going places and researching things. Most of the books that I’ve been reading for the last few months have been books, generally speaking, about the Restoration, about Restoration characters. People like John Aubrey, Isaac Newton, and so on and so forth, John Driden. And you wind up getting the same kind of buzz that you got from fiction from that knowing that it’s all going to go in and come out somewhere as a story.
Do you find that as you read fiction you see opportunities that you would have taken that the author didn’t?
Sure. And, every now and again, one will take them and go off and do a story with them. Sometimes I won’t. That’s just how I would have done them. That’s just how an author’s head works. The same goes for film. You wind up getting bored with a film and just rewriting it in your head, creating a new one.
Do you prefer writing comics or writing fiction?
What I like doing best in the whole world is telling stories.
You can tell.
And I don’t really mind what medium they’re in. I love comics because you have a
lot of control over the reading experience, on a number of different levels. And, because I get to do the equivalent of laughing at my own jokes. I can pick up a comic I’ve written and enjoy it. I can’t read a story that I’ve written and enjoy it. I just look at it and go, “What is that comma doing there?” On the other hand, I don’t feel like, currently anyway, writing comics does not feel like an adventure anymore. So, other stuff I’m doing feels more adventurous just because I spent twelve years writing comics and wound up, at the end of that, having won every award it was possible to win for writing comics and a few that it wasn’t. Having set a bundle of new standards, having created new lines, and having, by the end of the ounce, selling Superman and Batman which was great fun. It didn’t really feel like I had anything to prove. Whereas as I still haven’t done a TV or a film project I’m happy with. I still haven’t written a novel I’m happy with. I’ve written some short stories that I’m happy with… So, that stuff is still terra incognita. I can go out there with my ax and, with any luck, go off and do a few things that other people haven’t done.
Your work seems so well researched. How important do you feel proper research is for a writer and the writing?
I think it’s terribly important, but I also think that most writers spend their lives doing research. There are not that many things that I will necessarily go out and specifically research. I’m researching intensively for the next novel, but that’s because much of it is a historical novel. What is important is that it’s sort of like homeopathy – know your stuff and then you forget it, know an awful lot of it and then dilute it down and somehow that will transmute itself into the work. I figure if I know what I’m talking about, it will convince, even if other people don’t have to know who these people are or what this detail is or that this really is true or this did really happen or whatever. I think that’s deeply important because that, somehow, makes the whole thing come true. Having said that, you can get into research as an end in itself and that’s definitely not what I like. I remember when I was doing the serial killer convention episode of Sandman, and this was before serial killers were hip, and you could see the whole hipdom of serial killers coming over the hill, and that was really what I wanted to write my kind of story about. “This isn’t hip. This isn’t cool. It isn’t clever.” As they used to say to me in school, “Now, Neil, that’s not funny. It’s not clever. And nobody is the slightest bit impressed.” So, when I did that, I went out and bought a bunch of books on serial killers, read all these little biographies, and then, when it got to the point where I felt that I could actually think like a serial killer, “This is where the urge is. This is where the necessity comes from. This is the driving force. This is the rationalization. These are the justifications. This is how the whole thing works.” Then, I stopped researching, went away and wrote the story.
I find that even the most uneducated audience, and I’m choosing my words carefully here, has an inherent ‘bullshit detector’ and if it’s not happening and believable for you, it’s not going to happen and be believable for the reader.
I think that’s true for all real writing. You have to believe it and the place where you don’t believe it is where the magic doesn’t work. You have to care about these characters and that, not even in terms of research, that’s in terms of the people in your stories. It was always very important to me that I believe in them and I believe in them as much as I possibly could which is the more I believed in them, the more anybody else could.
I think the same thing applies to the message that you’re trying to get across. It’s the difference between writing from your heart and writing as an exercise. If you don’t believe in what you’re trying to say, and it’s a mechanical thing, people can spot that a mile away. It happens so often now because so many people are writing for hire.
Agreed. I don’t know what else I can say about that one.
Since we’re on the subject of writing, I’m very curious because, myself, as someone who would like to think of himself as a writer, I wonder about what it takes for you when you sit down at the computer, what is the process by which the words come spilling out through your fingers?
It depends. For me, it’s a continual process of trying to cheat on the idea of not writing, of getting around the function of not writing and I will do it in a number of different ways. Stardust, for example, which I’m enormously proud of, I wrote in fountain pen in beautiful blank notebooks and wrote the whole thing in long hand as a first draft as a way of getting into it, as a way of convincing myself what I did was, in some ways, important and, in some ways, not important. Also as a way of trying to get myself into, what was essentially, an Edwardian mindset. I wanted to write Stardust as if it was being written in about 1918-1919. So, I liked the idea of doing the first draft in fountain pen, writing and being able to kid myself that I was just sort of writing in pen on paper, it doesn’t matter. I can change it all when I get it to the computer screen. Sometimes, it’s a matter of building myself a little – I didn’t build myself, that sounds like I actually went down and did it with the sweat of my brow – I had three nice people who came in and built for me this sort of summer housey gazebo in the woods. I have one rule for when I’m down there which is “I’m either allowed to write or I’m not allowed to do anything…but I’m not allowed to do anything else.” So, I won’t take a book down or can’t sit there doing email or something like that. I can either go down to the summerhouse and sit there and stare out at the… It’s absolutely allowed. I can sit there and stare out at the trees or I can write. The fun of staring out at the trees goes after five-ten minutes. You’ve more or less stared at the trees as much as you’re going to, so you may as well write. The other things that I will do is, if I’ve taken the whole not writing process about as far as it will go, I will go to hotels and I will cash in Frequent Flyer ticket, go to a hotel somewhere that I’m not terribly interested in going, where I don’t know anybody and sit in a hotel room and get something written. That’s only because there is so many other things… These days, we have a three year old, Maddie, the two older kids are twelve and fourteen and I’d much rather play with the kids.
Sure… they got the cool toys…
Yeah. I’d much rather do anything really. It’s so much easier… I did this earlier this year when the Neverwhere script for the Neverwhere movie was due. I just said, “Right, that’s it” and went off to a hotel and two and a half weeks delivered the Neverwhere script. Much of it was fast and easy to write because it had been composting for ages, but it also hadn’t been getting written. I’d go down to the garden and write scenes that weren’t really for the film just because they were scenes I hadn’t written before. So, I will, on occasion, take myself off and just hide and write somewhere where there’s nothing else to do. You get up in the morning, eat a hotel breakfast, get the taste of it out of your mouth, and you write. The most exciting thing I’ll ever do is buy some more CDs when the ones that I’m playing – when you start humming the next track as the one before finishes, it’s time to go out and get some more CDs. I’ve currently just discovered Stephin Merritt who is wonderful and will do all these strange incarnations: The Magnetic Fields, The Gothic Archies and Future Bible Heroes. So, that’s fun, just having discovered somebody new.
Do you find that, once you sit down and you crack open those floodgates, is it impossible to get them closed again? Do you have to finish the particular story before you can go on to something else?
Sometimes, yes, but that’s only for me if it’s a short story. “Snowglass Apples,” which is quite possibly one of the three best short stories I’ve ever written, I wrote in a day. I started writing it on an airplane going off to Texas or somewhere for a few days. I’m sitting on this plane, start writing it, change planes, keep writing it, get to my hotel and I know that the end is in sight. I don’t even get into the hotel room, just sort of sit in the little ante room of the hotel room and just sat there and wrote it and wrote it until it must have been
eleven or eleven-thirty at night just because I didn’t dare stop. I think, very often, stories are like that. Some stories though require… You can’t rush a story and you can’t hurry a story. You can’t get to the end before a story is ready, if you try, you’ll very often end up with an odd or disappointing ending. The most recent story that I’ve written, which is original to Smoke and Mirrors, the new collection, is called “The Wedding Present.”
“The Wedding Present” began years ago, I was at the wedding of some friends and I thought, “I should give them a story as a wedding present” and then I thought of a story and I thought, “Oh, that’s not really story you should give anybody when they get married.” So, I gave them a toaster instead. The idea of the story sort of stayed in the back of my head, and every time somebody would get married, I’d think, “Oh! You should write that story… no, I can’t really can I?” So, finally, I’m writing this introduction to the short story collection and I thought, “Well, I should just do it.” I began writing it under the impression that what I was writing was about nine hundred word fable and I knew exactly everything about it before I began it. What I discovered was writing it was that I really didn’t really know very much about it and I think the story wound up five or six thousand words and it took me four or five days to write. I’d write until I wasn’t quite sure what happened next. I’d stop, then I’d go to bed and I’d get up the next day and normally the next day when I got up, I would know what happened next. I wouldn’t know my way to the end of the story, but I’d know the next bit, so I’d write that. Some of the events in the story took me completely by surprise, except that, in retrospect when it was finished, the entire thing seemed completely inevitable. So, very often, stories demand breaks. You may need that night to sleep on something. You may need a little moment off.
Carpe Noctem Interviews - Volume 1 Page 8