Neil Gaiman’s Charming, His Works Compelling
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Irresistible dark villains. Compelling netherworlds. A remarkable ability to enter the mind of children. That’s Neil Gaiman’s charm as a writer.
It’s hard not to be charmed by him as a writer with his irresistibly dark villains, compelling other-worlds, and remarkable ability to enter the mind of children. It’s even harder not to be charmed by Gaiman as a person. That’s what I learned while attending Coraline, Sandman: Books and Imagination: A Conversation with Neil Gaiman on May 2, part of the PEN World Writers Festival.
“If you’re somebody for whom I just disappeared behind a pillar,” Neil Geiman said, “you may want to move, or, you may want to keep the pillar and remember me always as a strange talking pillar, which would be unique, if nothing else.” Picture by Hannah Levine.
The Great Hall at Cooper Union was packed with a 300-plus, mixed crowd of all ages, all shuffling to find seats to be able to see past the grandiose Romanesque pillars that surrounded the stage. Gaiman arrived promptly at 1 p.m., smiling under his wiry hair, full black suit and boots. “If you’re somebody for whom I just disappeared behind a pillar,” he said, “you may want to move, or, you may want to keep the pillar and remember me always as a strange talking pillar, which would be unique, if nothing else.”
The conversation began with a Q&A led by Caro Llewellyn, Director of PEN voices, as question cards circulated for the audience’s personal questions. She briefly introduced Gaiman, though it was clear the enthusiastic crowd was already quite familiar with his work, which includes The Sandman comic series, Stardust, New York Time’s bestseller American Gods, Anansi Boys, and the now film-ified and play-ified Coraline, among other masterpieces.
Referring to Gaiman’s most recent novel, The Graveyard Book, which just won the prestigious Newbury Medal for children’s literature, Llewellyn said “that book made me miss my subway stop once, and cry in public on another occasion.”
When Llewellyn asked Gaiman his feelings about winning the Newbury, he spoke of his first introduction to the award, as a seven-year-old boy who adored Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. “The front of the book had a Newbury Medal,” Gaiman said, “and I didn’t know what the Newbury Medal was, but A Wrinkle in Time had it, so it had to be good.”
The Newbury is awarded annually to books intended for children, though Gaiman said there was argument online as to whether the Medal “should be an award for books that kids enjoy, or an award for books that were good for them. The last few awards had been for books that were good for them, but that you couldn’t really get them to read at gunpoint.”
Gaiman jokingly described himself as “a feral child raised by librarians.” On school holidays, young Gaiman would be dropped off by his parents on their way to work, occasionally “carrying a very embarrassed bag of sandwiches,” which he would scarf down before entering – he felt it was inherently wrong to eat sandwiches in a world of books. “I read my way through the children’s library,” he said.
Even at 10 years old, Gaiman dreamed of becoming a writer. “I had a daydream,” he said, “mostly a daydream during organized sports – you know, when a large, hard, wet leather ball would hit you on the side of the face, coming straight out of nowhere, when you were thinking something perfectly interesting, which is what I was doing.” In Gaiman’s reoccurring daydream, he fantasized about an alternate universe “exactly the same as ours except that Tolkien had not existed and had not written Lord of the Rings.” Gaiman would get an adult to type the book out for him so that the publisher would accept it. He would then murder the adult.
Gaiman said he typically writes a radio play every three or four years, and would make these ventures the focus of his career if they wouldn’t leave his children “on the streets, begging for pennies.” Original Picture by Hannah Levine.
After Gaiman’s comical childhood anecdotes, Llewellyn shifted gears to his beginnings as a journalist. He referred to his first book, a profile on the band, Duran Duran, as a “dark secret.” When he was approached by a music publisher to write a book, Gaiman said he was, at first, excited by the prospect. However, when the publisher told him he would not get to write about a band he actually enjoyed, like The Velvet Underground, and instead had to choose between “Barry Manilow, Def Leppard, or Duran Duran,” he was less enthusiastic.
When the publisher went into liquidation before he could get paid, Gaiman said he had “learned a valuable lesson” about writing for the sake of monetary gain. “I spent three and a half months writing something that I didn’t want to read,” he said. “If the book had been successful, I may have written cash-in rock books for the rest of my career.”
Luckily, Gaiman instead explored his childhood aspiration – to become a comic book writer. Gaiman recalled “Career Day” back in grade school, when he and his classmates were pulled from German class to speak with career advisors about their chosen profession. “When I was called in, I said, ‘I want to write American comics.’” There was a really, really long pause and then the advisor said, ‘Have you thought about accounting?’”
There were many aspects of the comic form that appealed to Gaiman, especially the unchartered territory it allowed as a relatively new genre. “There were things people hadn’t tried,” he said, “so I got to do the equivalent of going into the jungle swinging my machete.” Writing Sandman, Gaiman said he did things that “weren’t against the rules because no one had ever thought to make those rules.”
Now that the perception of comic books has changed, with graphic novels such as Watchmen making their way onto Time Magazine’s 100 Greatest Novels list, Gaiman said he feels nostalgic towards the more difficult days when the literary world was hesitant to acknowledge the form. Gaiman was working as a journalist in 1986, the year that Maus, Watchmen, and Dark Knight came out – a very exciting time in comic history. After extensive interviews and a lot of time spent perfecting an article on the phenomenon, Gaiman said his editor at Sunday Times Magazine felt it “lacked balance.”
Gaiman asked the editor for an explanation of his criticism. “Well, these comics,” the editor replied, “you seem to think they’re a good thing.”
The first time Gaiman was asked to speak at a university, he met similar roadblocks – the English department boycotted the event, which was instead sponsored by the art department. Gaiman was not offended, however. “I thought that was great,” he said. “It almost made the experience more fun than it is now that universities have Sandman on the curriculum.”
Llewellyn asked Gaiman for his favorite genre to write in, and the audience was visibly surprised by his response. “My favorite medium is the one I do the least,” he said, “radio plays. They have all the immediacy and fun of TV and film, but the special effects budget is unlimited.” Gaiman said he typically writes a radio play every three or four years, and would make these ventures the focus of his career if they wouldn’t leave his children “on the streets, begging for pennies.”
Responding to Llewellyn’s question about the right medium for his ideas, Gaiman said, “Sometimes you know when they turn up.” The Graveyard Book, for example, was a work in progress for 23 years because, at the time its conception, Gaiman felt the idea for the novel was better than he was a writer at the time.
As a 25-year-old journalist, Gaiman said he often scolded his son, Mike, who was 2 at the time, for riding his tricycle in the house. “I took him outside to ride around the graveyard, instead,” Gaiman said, recalling how joyous and “at home” his son looked, despite the dark setting. Watching his son ride happily around the cemetery sparked an idea similar to The Jungle Book, except, instead of being raised by animals, the boy was raised by dead people. This was the seed that eventually blossomed into what is The Graveyard Book.
Asked how he gets himself back into the mind of a child, Gaiman said, “Two-part answer. First part, I have no idea.” The second part was more of a recollection. As a child who loved books, Gaiman was often “pissed off” by adult writers who failed to capture the world through a child’s eyes. Gaiman used Ray Bradbury, an author he idolized, as an example. “I love Bradbury,” he said, “but the stuff that had kid protagonists always left me cold as a kid. They’d forever be putting on their special sneakers and saying, ‘I’m going to run forever!’”
Gaiman said that his routine writing process involves going away “to houses of friends who have too many houses” so that he can write the first chapter. “I just want to go mad for a minute,” he said, describing the weeks he spends writing up a storm, only stopping to sleep when he “can’t think straight.”
When Gaiman does not escape to friends’ houses, he seeks out more peculiar silent spaces. One unique writing experience was the 14 days he spent writing American Gods in a Las Vegas hotel. The hotel staff got a kick out of him writing a novel, he said. It is rare that anyone goes to Vegas to write – it is equally as rare that anyone stays in Vegas for more than a few days.
After Llewellyn read an audience member’s question about Gaiman’s villain-writing process, he introduced the “met-them-at-a-party rule” he applies to all of his characters, regardless of whether they are villains or heroes. “The most important thing about characters is that I would want to spend time with them,” he said. “I may not want to be them, but if I met them at a party, would I want to stay and talk to them, or would I just say, I’m going to get something from the kitchen’ and then flee?
Gaiman said that the inspiration for his surreal villains sometimes comes from real life. Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar, the bad guys in Neverwhere (which happens to be the book that broke me out of my I-don’t-read-Sci-fi bubble when I was in middle school), lived in Gaiman’s head years before he found “a book to put them in.” The frightening duo was inspired by two creepy gentlemen who briefly walked past Gaiman on a deserted street. “One was small and oily. The other was tall and dead faced,” he said. “It was one of the scariest things that ever happened to me, with no rationale … I remember breathing a sigh of relief that they got past me and I was still alive.”
Another audience member asked about Gaiman’s interactions with comic book artists, and how the creative collaboration works. “Every relationship is strangely personal,” he said. He tries to write a manuscript that is “essentially a letter” to the artist he is working with. “The most important thing when writing comics,” Gaiman said, “is to find someone [an artist] you trust,” then “play to their strengths and minimize their weaknesses.”
While writing The Sandman series, Gaiman said he adopted the practice of calling his artistic collaborators to say “tell me what you like to draw. Tell me what you don’t like to draw. Tell what no one has ever let you draw.” This process alone, Gaiman said, would sometimes generate a story.
The final question of the afternoon elicited roaring laughter from the crowd. An audience member asked Gaiman whether he had realized that he was sitting in a position reminiscent of Morpheus, the beloved hero in his Sandman series. Gaiman acknowledged that he often pours aspects of himself into his characters, but also joked that he had no way of predicting that in his “old age,” his hair – “the most random hair in the universe” – would grow to so closely resemble his protagonist.
The Q&A ended with Gaiman’s apologies in advance for “the most efficient and soulless book signing I will ever do.” But although a scheduled evening flight to France prevented him from schmoozing at length with his fans, the audience members left Cooper Union with a sense that they had gotten to know Gaiman on a personal level. His anecdotes charmed us in an intimate way, and also proved what we already knew walking in: Gaiman is truly gifted at the art of telling stories.