Do you find that, in the beginning, it was difficult to trust yourself to know that it may take a thousand words or five thousand or ten thousand, but you were able to trust yourself to know that you would wind up with a satisfactory ending?
I still don’t.
I’m so glad to hear that…
For me, when you’re actually writing, the actual process of sitting and writing tends to divide into two emotional states and that’s pretty much it. There’s the “Why am I doing this? Every word I write is shit” and the “God, this is brilliant. This is so funny. This is so cool. I have to ring everybody up and tell them what I’ve just written.” It’s very rare that I get to write anything that’s in the middle. What I’ve also discovered though over the years is that people ask, “How do you get through writer’s block? How do you write something worthwhile?” and you have to say, “Well, a lot of it is that if you write something that isn’t very good today, you can look at that tomorrow and say, ‘This isn’t as bad as I remember’ and ‘That only needs this sentence fixed and a joke in here and a line there and it works just fine. I don’t know what I was so worried about.’” You can put on your editing head rather than your writing head and fix something. Very often, the fixing process is very easy and very fun.
Are you a big polisher?
Yes, but I’m also a big leaver-alone. There’s a story I wrote for an anthology that’s coming out later this year called Gargoyles or something like that. I wrote a story called “How Do You Think It Feels?” which I wrote really before it was ready. It was one of those stories where I had a central idea and I promised that I’d do this story for the anthology. I wrote it and I didn’t like it, but I didn’t have it because it was written and because I’d promised them a story for their anthology. Since then, I’ve done two complete redrafts on it. One of which took it from the first person into the third person. One of which I added a huge amount of stuff. I still wasn’t ready to let it go into Smoke and Mirrors, the collection. So, I wound up not putting it in there and will probably give it one more major going over and an ending that I’m happy with before I let it out again because it wasn’t quite right. If it’s not right, then I will keep going back and polishing it and fixing it until it is. Also, there just has to come a point where you shrug and say, “Yeah, it’s good enough for jazz. Let’s move on and do the next thing.” I know too many writers who spend ten years on a novel trying to get it right and they wind up, in the end, with a two hundred and fifty page book and they’re completely happy with every word – or rather, they’re not but somebody wrenched it away from them and published it – I look at it and go, “But you could’ve written all this other stuff in the same time and it wouldn’t have been that much worse.” [laughs] With watching those people when I was a younger writer growing up watching older writers, you get it to the point where you’re happy with it, where it can earn its own living, as it were, then you go off and do something else because there also comes a point with most stories where you can no longer touch them because it was written by a different person. The person who wrote it was no longer you. You’ve aged. You’ve had a different life experience. Your perspectives and viewpoints have changed. There are things in Angels and Visitations… I couldn’t touch any of them. I couldn’t change any of them. Even the bad ones, I couldn’t change.
Is that because to touch them again would completely change them?
Well, the only way to do it would be to sit down and start again with the same idea and see where it would take me this time. There’s story called “We Can Get Them For You Wholesale,” which is about this young man who accidentally brings on the apocalypse by talking to a firm of contract assassins. That I still look at and the style sets my teeth on edge, in so many places the plotting is lumpy and you can see that it is written by somebody with very little life experience. If I wrote it again today it would work differently, except people love that story and it’s been adapted into like five different student films. People have done it on film, people have done it stage. It won an Eisner Award a few years ago when somebody else adapted it to a comic. I sort of look at it and say, “Well, people like it. I’ll put it in the anthology.” I wouldn’t write it now, but, then again, it was fifteen years ago or whatever that I wrote it.
How often do you write something and, at mid-point, you say, “This is just not happening.”
Not a lot. Occasionally, life will distract me. There is a half finished children’s book called Caroline that I really have to get down and finish it before I’m too far away from the person who wrote the book. It’s this strange, scary little book for little girls and I started it when Holly was five or six and she’s twelve now. I figure I should finish it before Maddie gets too old to read it. I haven’t given up on it, it’s just life and people are willing to pay me actual money to write tend to take precedence over it. So, there are twenty thousand words of this children’s story sitting on my hard disc. There are very few unfinished things. There are ideas down there that I haven’t done anything with yet. There are old stories sitting in a file from when I was starting that I would never in a million years allow to be published or give anybody to read. I forget who said, “You have a million words of rubbish to get out of the way before you start writing anything decent,” but it’s probably true. I mean, any beginning writer – you should write. I have probably twenty short stories and a fifty or sixty thousand word children’s book that I wrote that I would never show anybody. They were very necessary to write them and most of all it was necessary to finish them which is the thing young writers… At signings and things, writers, or possibly writers-to-be, ask me what the most important advice I can give them. “What would you tell somebody who wanted to be a writer?” I tell them, “Firstly, write” which seems obvious, but isn’t. People want to be writers without necessarily wanting to write or they want to be authors. You have to do a lot of writing before you can author. This month I’m going to two different universities, one in California and one in St. Louis, to give talks. The one in California, they’re actually studying Stardust in a class on the nature of serial fiction. I just feel like, not only should I be awfully old, but I ought to have been dead for a long time. [laughs] Going out to actually address an auditorium of people who want to know what the author thought and why he did this or that. That kind of stuff is fun, but you actually have to do the writing before you can get there. It’s like people want to be film stars without having to act first. So, I tell them that they have to write and then I point out to them that you have to finish what you write. There are so many other people out there who think of themselves as writers, who would love to be bestselling novelists, and have the first five pages of a dozen novels and three or four pages of a couple of short stories in their hands. You have to finish things.
I think that is where the real work is. Even if you look at a best selling author like Stephen King, who’s a good writer, but on the other hand, has a little trouble with his endings falling a little flat. You’ve painted yourself a nice room. Now, how are you going to get yourself out of it without mucking things up?
Steve’s default ending is that he blows everything up which you don’t have to do every time. He’s written enough books where he doesn’t, but there’s always that point, three quarters of the way through a Stephen King book where you notice something has the capacity to explode or burn down. “We’ve found the dynamite cache! I think I can see where this is going.” “The boiler, yes, right, the old boiler is gonna blow.”
That is so funny! [laughs] You’ve been fairly prolific, do you, like a lot of writers, ever wake up in a cold sweat, worrying that the ideas may someday stop coming?
I don’t think there’s anything else you can worry about. Yes, of course. It’s just not the middle of the night. It’s all the time, but, having said that, it’s now been fifteen years and I supposed now I’m kind of at the point where I know that I will never again be as prolific as I was in my late twenties. And I wil
l never again have that instant somebody would say, “Ok, can you do something for this? It’s about So-and-So.” And I’d go, “Yes!” and I’d have the idea right there. Back then, I was like a sailor with his paycheck having been at sea for a long time and he just hits land, spending money everywhere. “You want an idea? Sure, I’ve got an idea! Here ya go!” These days, I’m like somebody who’s been living on land for a while [laughs] and is far more parsimonious with ideas. On the other hand, they don’t stop coming and I do kind of know where ideas come from. Ideas tend to come from things outside that you put together in your head and they come out differently. The most important thing I find is just to go out and get some life. If I worry about ideas not coming, go out and do stuff, go out and chop some wood, go out and go to a big city, go to the theater, go see friends, go do other things and ideas will come. The other thing you learn about ideas is that they come while you are doing other things. That was one reason why Sandman was structured the way it was in terms of being reaching over story arcs, five or ten issues, and then you’d get four or five issues of short stories, which is because while I was working on a big story arc, I’d get ideas for other things I couldn’t fit in. So, I’d table them until when I’m finished. After four or five issues of short stories, where you’re having to make up a new world with every story, the idea of doing something where you’ve already set the scene and you can just sort of keep telling a story becomes very attractive. So, you go and do that for a while.
Lying Awake and Dreaming in a Storyteller’s Field Part 2 – Issue 14
Neil Gaiman continues to be one of the few writers whose work continues to amaze. His prose is a thing of beauty that never sacrifices a sense for story for the way words can roll off the tongue. Many know of his work on DC Vertigo’s captivating series Sandman, but now that the series has more or less ended, readers are becoming more and more aware of his other inspiring projects. In this our second part of a two-part interview, Neil discusses some of the writers he respects, the wonders of poetry, the ongoing legacy of the Sandman and his sister Death (along with people who show up at signings dressed like her), as well as his plans for the future.
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About a year ago, I interviewed Frank Miller and ran down a list of people and got his impression on their work. When your name came up, he said that he thought that you were a ‘very, very skilled writer’ and ‘Boy, does that guy use words well.’ I’m curious, having had something like that said about you, who do you consider to be some comic writers out there that are ‘using words well?’
Alan Moore. I think Alan at his best is better than any of us and Alan at his worst is better than most of us. So, if we’re talking comics, Alan is a genius.
I’m still unsure as to why he’s doing the kind of things he’s doing lately.
I wouldn’t want to speak for Alan. I think that he’s putting the kind of enormous effort that would go into something like Big Numbers or a Watchmen or whatever, that kind of level of effort and dedication is going into his fiction and, to some extent going into Supreme, but I also think that Alan is, these days, much more capable of dividing himself than he used to be. One of the things I admired about Alan’s work when I first came across it, was that he would take something like the Carebears and Alan would do a five page Carebears script and you’d look at it and, with all the force of this amazing mind doing this five page Carebears script and you’d say, “Wow, I never realized that the Carebears had this brilliant social commentary.” He isn’t necessarily doing that now with everything he does except, I think, Supreme is just marvelous. I’m really enjoying what he’s doing with that. Mike Carlin, the DC Superman editor said, “Well, that’s the best Superman comic that’s currently coming out.” Further than that, you’d have to talk to Alan. I loved his novel, Voice of the Fire, and I’m really looking forward to his next one which will probably come out sometime in the next century.
Is there anyone else?
I think Clive Barker is a beautiful writer. I love what Clive does with words particularly in his shorter fiction when he’s just like a miniaturist, every word sits there and resonates. They’re like wine glasses that when you touch them with your finger, and they begin to hum, just crystalline and beautiful. I love Jonathan Carroll’s stuff. I think I love his stories and I love the attitude of the place the stories come from. Remarkable writer. I really, really still enjoy Gene Wolf. Gene Wolf is probably the finest science fiction or fantasy writer out there. John Crowley. Of dead writers, my favorite is still James Branch Cabell, an American writer of the early twentieth century who said that a man writes fine sentences for the same reason he enjoys playing solitaire. He writes amazing sentences. Occasionally a bit smug, but gorgeous writing. G.K. Chesterton who wrote too much, but could always bring a little magic to a sentence. You think, “How did you do that?” It’s like watching a master sleight of hand artist. A couple of months ago, I wound up in Las Vegas for the day. I was signing copies of Neverwhere at the Compuserve booth at the Comdex computer show. That evening, I went to see Penn and Teller and the day before I’d actually seen Penn and Teller because they were appearing in my episode of Babylon 5. I wrote an episode of Babylon 5 recently and they were in that, so I got to meet them. I bumped into Penn in the lobby and he said, “Hey, come backstage.” So, I’m hanging out with them backstage and they introduced me to their friend Jamy Ian Swiss who is a close up card magician. He’d been doing his act all day long at Comdex for people, giving away cards and things, but they persuaded him to do this routine for me. It was amazing. It was wonderful. It was to card magic what the Atlantic Ocean is to wet. It worked. What was wonderful was picking a card any card and knowing that I was choosing a card at random, and knowing that it was always the one he was giving to me. “This is great! This is as good as it gets for close-up card magic.” People like Chesterton are like that. They can do things for you. The illusion happens and you don’t care how it was done. It just works. There’s an author named Hope Mirrlees whose stuff I love. She wrote one novel called Lud in the Mist, a strange sort of fairy tale that has been out of print for ten years and she’s been dead for twenty. She wrote it in the twenties and it came back into print as one of those Ballantine adult fantasy novels. I look at that novel and try to figure out how she did it and what exactly she did. A lot of what I love these days is poetry too. I always figured, especially with comics, that a lot of the techniques one is using in captions and word balloons entail the techniques of poetry because you have this relentless economy. You have only so many words you can use, only so many words you can fit on a page, only so many balloons, blah-blah-blah-blah. You may as well try to make every word and every sentence do two or three different things. A lot of the techniques I use would be, essentially, the techniques of poetry where you’re packing an awful lot into a very small space.
I’m one of those people who poetry befuddles. I look at it and think, “You know, this should have a profound impact, but, for some reason…”
One of the problems with poetry, I think, is there is a lot of crap poetry around. Poetry is like good food or good wine, it is very necessary sometimes to have it prepared right and to have it as good as it can be and go, “Oh, I get it!” It’s like sushi. If your first introduction to sushi is something in a supermarket ready made meal counter and you get this rice that tastes a little like rice pudding with a bit of dead fishy stuff on it and you eat it and you say, “Oh, that’s sushi. Right. I don’t like sushi.” You can then generalize the rest of things. You need the best of something. Have a really good wine and then you go, “Oh, I get it. That’s wine, right. That’s what the fuss is about. This is sushi. This is so and so, yes, right. I get it. OK, that’s a good ice cream” and from there you can compare the rest. Then you can look at things and go, “Oh, well, that was really horrible wasn’t it?” I find that a lot with poetry. Most people who think they don’t like poetry have been forced to read too much bad poetry by their friends. It’s much better to si
t somebody down, “Here’s some good poetry. Go and read that.” They can work their way back from there.
I’m interested in a couple of the people that you’ve worked with. Terry Pratchett on Good Omens. What was behind the decision to work with him on that project? Was he someone you’d always wanted to work with?
The trouble with Terry and Good Omens is that, these days, he is Terry Pratchett and I am Neil Gaiman and these are huge important things. I mean, in England, Terry is probably one of the top twenty writers in the country in terms of sales, if not quite possibly in the top ten. At the time, Terry was this guy who had written a few books and had a small fan following and I was this guy who just started writing this thing called Sandman and a few people liked it. We’d known each other for five years. I was a young journalist and interviewed him when his first Discworld book came out. I was his first interviewer and we’ve been friends ever since. He’d ring me up and run ideas by me. I’d ring him up and run ideas past him. I’d written the first five thousand words of a project that I’d called William the Antichrist immediately after I’d finished the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book, Don’t Panic. Then, I sort of put it aside, and I’d put it aside partly because I said, “If I do this, I will be pigeon-holed as a funny writer forever” and once they have you in the funny writer box, you’re not really allowed to do anything else. They don’t like it. So, I put it aside and I showed it to some friends, and one of the friends was Terry. He rang me up about a year later and he said, “Hey, that thing, are you going to do anything more with it?” I said, “No plans to do anything more with it at present.” He said, “Look, would you sell it to me or could we write it together? I know what happens next. I’d love to work on it and I want to do something that isn’t a Discworld novel.” So, I said, “Well, let’s work on it together” for I was no fool. I felt very much like a journeyman chair maker or something, an apprentice to somebody who has made a lot of chairs. I’d be in there and writing… I actually did a word count recently, because I keep hearing from various people different accounts of how much of that book Terry wrote and how much I wrote. I discovered that a grand total of forty-seven thousand words of raw copy were generated by me. Then again, that raw copy was mucked around with by Terry and I went around and mucked around with his stuff and then we went and did another draft and we wrote it. It got to the point toward the very end, I remember when we were proofreading, it was at one point where Terry turned to me and congratulated me on a joke I’d put in. I said, “I was sure that was one of yours.” [laughs] By the end of it, there were places where the text seemed to be spontaneously melting down and writing itself. It was fun. I was up to my eyeballs in stuff at the time and, at the time, I was fairly nocturnal. So, at three o’clock in the morning, no matter what I was doing, I would stop it and I’d do a hundred and fifty to three hundred words of Good Omens and then I’d go to bed. I’d wake up in the morning and there would be a message from Terry on my answering machine saying, “Get up! Get up you bastard! I’ve written a good bit!” I’d phone him up and he’d read me what he’d written that morning and I’d read him what I’d written the night before and we’d make each other laugh. That was the entire idea of Good Omens was to just make each other laugh. We didn’t know, this seems silly now and it almost seems, in retrospect considering who we are now, but bear in mind that we were not these people in 1989, if we were going to be able to sell it. I remember having this conversation with Terry. We were three quarters of the way through, maybe a bit further on, the end was in sight, and we were going “How long is it going to take us in all. It’s going to take twelve weeks” or whatever – it actually took nine weeks – “We can afford twelve weeks. If it doesn’t sell, then we had fun doing it. I don’t know, maybe we can print it up and give it to friends.” It was a labor of love and it was done as a labor of love and that’s one reason why there will never be a sequel. Given the numbers that Good Omens has sold around the world, it’s legitimately a best seller, given that, given the interest there would be in a sequel, you’re talking about people in expensive suits and very, very, very thin watches and briefcases would have to talk for six months before me and Terry were allowed in the same room to write.
Carpe Noctem Interviews - Volume 1 Page 9