You hear this sort of thing about a few public figures, and you believe them
to be true for the most part. But no matter how sweet his reputation, someone
for whom you have an immense amount of respect for their mastery at their craft,
the first moment you meet them brings into being an emotional cocktail of abject
fear, awe and the overwhelming desire to hug them.
Neil Gaiman knows that about his fans, and rather than smirking about it or
shrugging it off, he finds it endearing. This, even beyond his manner of dealing
with people, is the mark of a truly nice guy. He's been a fan. He knows the
drill. He eradicates the fear by speaking to them, human to human, with one
thing in common: knowing the positive energy from certain places in the dark.
He mentioned in The
Onion that signing things had become a bit "routine."
"Particularly, that’s much more in the context of a giant signing tour.
It was a 21 city, 30 signing tour where most nights you’d be signing for 3-500
people,"' he explains. "I was doing things like the readings chiefly
to give myself a certain amount of fun, because simply signing can get kind
of wearing. There’s only so many times you can say 'Gwendolwyn, what a lovely
name, how exactly do you spell it?' or whatever...staring at people’s belt-buckles..."
The kinship that fans feel toward him is not lost on Gaiman. "There’s
a particular 'Brotherhood' out there," he says. "It's like one of
those 'Vonnegut-ian karasses'. I go on the signing tours, and book store owners
come up to me afterwards and say, 'I don’t get it. Your fans are so nice. And
yet the stuff you come up with, some of it is rather dark. And we kind of expected
the kind of people who come out for Clive... the sort of scary ones... or the
ones that come out for Stephen King, who can be kind of scary, and your guys
are just so sweet!' and I go, 'Yes, I’m very lucky.' I just did a signing tour
where there were seven and a half thousand people. There was one guy grumpy.
He wanted to get 6 things signed, and the limit was 3, and I wound up doing
5, and I said, 'Look, I really can’t sign all this, it isn’t fair to all the
other people.' And he got grumpy. That was it. One guy got grumpy out of seven
and a half thousand people."
"I honestly can’t think of any unpleasant fan experiences I’ve had. People
come up to you and say they love what you’ve written, and thank you. What’s
not to like? Occasionally, I feel embarassed for them. It gets weird, when you’re
at a signing, and you get some girl of unutterable and unearthly beauty. Sort
of supermodel-level girl, and she faints. And you go around and ask 'Are you
alright? Are you alright?' and you think on the one hand 'This is really cool!
This girl of unutterable supermodel-level beauty just fainted!' and then you
go 'Yes, but she’d never really notice me on the sidewalk.'
His ability to jump in the fray and deal with hundreds or thousands of people
during his signing tours and emerge unscathed may be because of his calming
nature. Because he speaks quietly, he is spoken to quietly. He commands attention
because you feel as though he is sharing a secret. In reality, he's spreading
his innate ability to find peace, which comes through in his writing. In describing
his work spaces at his home in Minnesota, he gives a hint as to why his writing
is so, well, dreamlike.
"There are three different places that I write, on the whole, leaving
out things like airplanes and hotel rooms. The one that I actually get the most
work done in, is a little octagonal gazebo-thing at the bottom of the garden,
overlooking the woods, a hundred yards away from the house, which has nothing
in it but a desk, a chair, a heater, a little CD player, and a dictionary. I
think there may be a Chicago Manual of Style up there too, from the last time
I took it up there to do some proofreading, forgot to take it back. And a view
over the woods. It's completely boring, and that’s probably the place that I
get the most stuff done. There’s no phone line up there, if I take the computer
down, or a notebook down, there’s nothing else to do. My only rule is that if
I’m there, I can either do nothing, or I can work. So, I can sit there for 15
minutes and stare out the window, and after that you get bored, so you may as
well start writing. So there’s that. There’s my real office, which is a basement
office. Its just walls, and walls, and walls of dusty old books, and some not
so dusty and not so old. And a big old desk, with a computer on it, and piles
of CD’s, and currently a large goldfish tank which has migrated down from the
bedroom. The big indulgence down there is just books, and a 50 CD changer. So
I stick 50 CDs in there, and I press random and that’s it. The other place I
write... when it gets late, I tend to come upstairs, and just sort of sit in
the sitting room, where there’s a television, and an old wood-burning stove, some
shelves of videos, and its sort of more comfortable, on the same floor level
where everybody’s asleep, so I sit there, and write a little on a computer on
me lap, and make stuff up. The Jerry Springer show is going in the background."
"Jerry Springer’s show is fascinating. It's become as sort of formalized
and ritualized as Japanese Noh Theatre. A gorgeous girl comes out and says she
is cheating on her lover. And they bring out the lover. And the lover turns
out to be either a boy interested in another girl, or a girl interested in another
girl, and then there’s a sudden point where you go 'I’ve got it! They’re all
strippers!' and they come out and they hit each other."
Gaiman's home state, Minnesota, was brought to public attention most recently
because of the election of state Governor Jesse Ventura, a former professional
wrestler. To some, this came as a laughable shock. To Gaiman, the underlying
political motive of the people is clearer.
General opinion in the United States echoes his sentiment. How can you vote
to regulate content on the internet, censoring so-called pornography, and publish
something like the Starr Report?
"I loved that," he laughs. "The fact that you could download
this thing that read like a bad, interminable letter to Penthouse."
"There isn’t an official website. I don’t own control over alt.fan.neil-gaiman,
and the other one neilgaiman.com... It has
been registered, though not by me. The guy said he’d give it to me, if ever
I want it. There’s The Dreaming
website, which is terrific. On the whole, my perspective is, that any essays
anyone wants to put up, any original art, anything like that... any tribute
sites...all that kind of stuff, I have no trouble with at all. I like the fact
that people are inspired, I like the fact that they put the stuff up. Once every
couple of months, I waste an evening and search around, and go and look at what’s
there, and so on and so forth. Then I go 'Why? They’re all mad!' and then I
don’t go and look for another 4 months. So there’s that.
"I do get worried and concerned when stuff of mine starts to slip into
the public domain, and when people put up stories and poems. I try to explain
'No, don’t do that, don’t go there... don’t post a story by me...' I just agreed
to have a poem put
up, which is the first time I’ve done this in years, on the Endicott
Studio site, Terri Windling approached me to put up a poem. I said, 'yeah,
but only if you make it really, really hard to cut and paste the text, for people
to put up on their own websites.' I got a little concerned about a year ago,
when I discovered that BabyCakes had become one of these pieces of unattributed
e-mail postings - stuff people put up on their websites as an anonymous cool
thing that somebody sent them, and they sent to their friends. My assistant
wound up spending 4 or 5 days just doing search engine stuff for lines from
BabyCakes and tracking down websites, sending them e-mail saying 'This
is not an anonymous piece of text, it's by Neil Gaiman, it's from this book,
it's got this copyright information. We’re not going to be churlish enough to
tell you to take it down, but we want a copyright notice. Know that you are
using this by permission." It really does trouble me. The whole web and copyright
thing troubles me. It troubles me that there are whole books that have wandered
into public domain because somebody put them up. And then you talk to people
and they say 'Information must be free!' and its like 'No it mustn’t! This is
where I get my living from!'"
"And frankly, we’re in an information economy. That’s why its not free.
It isn’t, and it shouldn’t be. For a while, it really pissed me off. And I didn’t
like it that you’d go to poetry sites, and someone would have put up one of
my poems, occasionally introducing mistakes of their own into them. Just because
it goes into the public domain, and it's not being protected."
"There’s nothing you can do to stop people who are doing this stuff.
That definitely was something I was not pleased about. But as far as I’m concerned,
anybody can write any essays they want on Sandman, someone wanted to
do Neverwhere fanfiction, I don’t mind about that. Just put a little
copyright notice, say this is inspired by this. I think its the kind of stuff
people would be doing in ‘zines or personally, only I think they’re doing it
for a wider audience, and that’s fine. My only problem is when they take stuff
that I’ve written, type it out, put it up on the web, and very often don’t even
put up a copyright notice. Or, the other thing is, when they’ll steal it from
a website that does have copyright permission, and they’ll put it on their site
without that information, and that worries me."
One of the most common questions to a writer revolves around how they got
into the business, how they knew that this is what they wanted to do. A writer
will generally have a point at which they put to rest the suspicion that they
aren't really good enough. Neil's experience was slightly different.
There are some that would say that Neil Gaiman is at least cow-sized. We tell
him so. "I appreciate the enormousness of that," he says, smiling.
But one cannot argue with the fact that he's hot property. His books are bestsellers,
his short stories are treasured, his worlds inspire other writers and artists,
he is sought after, admired, lauded, awarded, honored and generally well loved.
You'd be hard pressed to find someone that has read his work and doesn't like
it. This is the sort of thing that make people's heads swell.
"It's stuff I would have taken very seriously when I was 18, or 20. It's
stuff that, having spent a whole career doing this, that I take much less seriously.
If this stuff had happened to me when I was young, I would have attributed it
to some particular virtue on my part. These days, I tend to regard it as a kind
of fortune. I write the kind of stories that I would like to read, that nobody’s
writing. So, I write them with an audience of me in mind. I’m very lucky, because
people like to read the kind of stories that I like to write. There are at this
convention alone, probably, I can think of at least 4 writers who are far finer
writers than I am. Much better writers, much more flexible writers, much more
really impressive writers who do not catch the public’s taste in what they do,
in the same way that I do. Technically they’re better than I am. I’m really
lucky. I no longer go, as I would have gone when I was much younger 'Look, its
because I’m such a great writer. I’m cool.' It's because I write stories to
entertain me and other people out there like the kind of stories I do. I’m lucky.
It doesn’t have that 'Look at me, I’m so clever!' quality, if that makes sense.
And that’s without wishing in any way to minimize myself as a writer. I think
I’ve written a couple of short stories that were probably as good as anything
anyone has read. Particularly with Stardust I’m very pleased because
I actually wound up writing the book that I set out to write."
"It's so rare. Here I have this thing, that didn’t exist when I started,
and wanted to exist when I finished. On the other hand, I’m just about to start
a new book which is terrifying. I know the emotion, I know the kind of territory,
but I have no idea how it's going to work, or whether it's going to work."
He smiles, seemingly incredulous. "People keep giving me money for it!"
People keep giving him money for it because he is good at what he does. A
Neil Gaiman story can be appreciated on a very basic, emotional level. You read
it once and come away affected in some profound way. Then you read it again
and find another level, and yet another. As a reader grows and their tastes
mature, Neil Gaiman stories grow with them. Hidden meanings, allusions to other
mythos, other works, the changeable world.
A character in the book that initially appears incidental will have surfaced
later on with more importance.
"Exactly, and knowing the shape of things. And that was a joy. That was
something I loved doing."
Gaiman's way of writing in levels is a technique that he shares with Shakespeare.
There is a lot of scholarly speculation on how these levels are meshed in such
a seamless manner. Is it deliberate to the extent of methodical placement? Is
it incidental in the writing process? Is it layed down layer by layer like a
cake?
"It’s a road trip. What you do, is that you know that you are going to
New York, and that you are starting in Atlanta. And you know roughly the places
that you’re going to have to stop on the way, you know some of the things you
want to see, and you know that there’s the biggest ball of twine in the world...
You don’t necessarily know how long the journey is, you might pick up a hitchhiker
at some point...who turns up again at the end, and so forth. But you know where
you’re going, and the people in the back of the car don’t. So you have a major
advantage over them. There." He pauses. "I think my metaphor has gone
to pieces."
In much the same way that incidental characters were taken from Shakespeare's
Hamlet and given their own story in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern are Dead, incidental characters from Neil's world of The Dreaming
have been lifted and written about.
"Cait Kiernan’s done it a few times, Peter Hogan, just taking a line
of Sandman, or a character we came up with for 5 panels, and doing their
story. I think it could be fun, although, I also think that sometimes a lot
of the power of these things gets lost. You could write a great novel, and someone
may well have done, of Lady Macbeth. Her story. How did she get to there. Let’s
have Lady Macbeth tell her story, from her birth, to what did her mother do
to her, to what was it like growing up in Scotland, what turned her into this
evil grasping bitch you see in Macbeth. It would make a great novel. On the
other hand, in some ways, it might end up diminishing Macbeth."
"You have tiny little hints of [a backstory], but really, the joy of
Macbeth, is that you’re just meeting these people as you go. I don’t know. It
might be a fun book to write."
Neil's ability to create entire mythologies that inspire so many other artists
has paved the way, more or less, for merchandising. Sculptures, t-shirts, posters,
prints, jewelry and more have been created for The Dreaming. It's some of the
most unique merchandise for a comic, but Neil has a favourite.
"Probably the Sandman Arabian Nights statue, holding the crystal
ball. It was the one where I really felt it was more beautiful than it needed
to be. I thought it was wonderful."
"I would probably do two things. One of which is spend some time calling
old friends. Just calling people who I have drifted out of touch with, or don’t
have time to speak to. There are so many people who, on a day to day basis,
I feel guilty for not getting in touch with. But, on the other hand, I don’t
have the 45 minutes to ring and actually sit there on the phone and say 'Okay,
well what’s been happening in your life?' I’d play with the kids, but I do that
anyway. I might just do some drawing, just for my own personal pleasure. I get
to do so little drawing."
On the subject of 'what-ifs', we asked Neil what one thing he would bring
to the United States from his native England. He doesn't miss a beat.
"Radio Four. Although I hear that it's going downhill, currently. But
a really good, intelligent radio station. Good radio with good radio drama,
good radio news, good radio with a budget. NPR irritates and saddens me because
they don’t have a budget, as a result of which, a half-hour news program is
90 minutes of people wittering on because they didn’t have the budget to send
anybody to go and do an interview and then to edit it down properly afterwards.
Things like that. I really miss good radio. When I get to England, the first
thing I do is turn on the radio and pretty much leave it on until I leave."
And if he were to return to England, what would he take back with him?
"If I could take any one thing back to England with me, it would be the
idea of "freedom of speech", the idea of the First Amendment. That, I think,
easily, far and away, would be the biggest thing I’d take back with me. It’s
the one thing, I think it’s the coolest thing that America has, and I think
it’s the most under-appreciated, valuable thing that America has, which is why
I do the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund stuff
that I do."
Neil works extensively in support of the organization that formed using left-over
donations for the legal defense of Lansing, IL comic dealer Friendly Frank,
after his arrest for selling 'obscene comics'. The organization recently came
to public attention for their support of Florida comic artist Mike
Diana, after he was convicted on obscenity charges for his publication,
Boiled Angel. Most recently, Neil has written a collection of essays
and speeches called Gods
and Tulips, from which sales will go to the Comic Book Legal Defense
Fund. He talks about the Mike
Diana case.
"What is scary, is that the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
Mike became the first ever American cartoonist convicted of obscenity. He’s
the first American artist convicted of obscenity for their own work. His sentence
included 1000 hours of community service, $3000.00 fine, he had a 3 year suspended
prison sentence, which he actually served 3 days of, he’s not allowed within
10 feet of anybody under the age of 18, he had to pay for a journalistic ethics
course at his own expense, he had to pay for psychiatric counseling at his own
expense, and he was forbidden from drawing anything that anyone might possibly
consider obscene, even for his own personal use or even when he was on the phone.
The local Sheriff’s Office was ordered to mount raids on his house to make sure
that he was not drawing anything, not 'committing art'. The Supreme Court declined
to hear this. I find this really, really scary. It worries me. It’s the one
case the Legal Defense Fund lost up against the hundreds that we’ve won. And
that one really worries me."
"We got an appeal to the Florida Supreme Court. They permitted him to
go to New York, which is great, because the New York police have much better
things to do with their time than raid somebody’s living quarters to make sure
they’re not drawing."
Mike Diana's work takes a heavy hand, for which he's suffered a lifestyle
attack on the level of victims of the McCarthy era. It alarms artists, with
good reason. The cause for speculation as to who's next, especially in the realms
of dark fantasy and horror, is a worry that sits in the back of the mind of
anyone who's read the reports. Neil's own work is not quite so heavy handed,
although his perception of the angelic, for example, does not call for gossamer
winged creatures skipping about throwing glitter at everyone. They always seem
to have an "edge" or a dark side to them. This is notable in Season of the
Mists, in the character of Angela that he created for Spawn, also
in "Murder Mysteries" from Angels and Visitations, Good Omens
(which he co-wrote with Terry Pratchett), and even the Angel Islington in Neverwhere.
So are these angels based on his personal belief of what angels are, or what
he would like them to be?
"Neither, really," he says. "Angels always seemed perfect metaphors.
I’m so pleased angels are no longer fashionable. I got really worried there,
when they got fashionable, and it seemed like I had been writing angels before
that, and was waiting for them to be finished. I don’t know what it is with
angels and me. Everytime I write an angel, I say 'Alright, that was the last
one. That was it. I’ve said everything I have to say about angels.' And then,
you turn around, and all of a sudden, I’m doing Neverwhere, and 'Well!
The Angel Islington! Yes, let’s put him in!' They’re kind of like cockroaches.
You just can’t keep them out."
There’s a metaphor.
"I have no particular plans to write any more angels ever, but I’m sure
one day, you’ll turn around, and there’s an angel. But I am pleased that the
whole angel thing is kind of over."
If we could just do away with that one last show..."Touched by an Angel"...
"Or at least if there was equal time response. For every episode of 'Touched
by an Angel' you had an episode of 'Touched by a Demon'..."
As much as we may like to see him write a television show about demonic influence,
Neil is busy with other productions.
"Jim Henson Productions bought Neverwhere. I wrote the scripts
for them. They’re just doing a deal right now with Dimension Films, who are
the SF arm of Miramax, who will actually be financing and making the film."
Since Neverwhere has already been produced by the BBC in England, one
wonders if any of the actors will be used in the new production.
Neil also worked on the U.S. version of the Japanese animation hit Princess
Mononoke, created by Hayao Miyazaki, to be released on October 29, 1999.
Has Neil written any other scripts recently?
"I’ve written a script for 'Snow Glass Apples' called 'Mirror Mirror'.
I was talking to Clive Barker, and it looked
like I was going to be doing whatever the big movie thing I was going to be
doing at the time, and he said well 'Write something small for yourself, just
as a small thing, so you get into practice.' I thought 'What a good idea!' so
I wrote 'Mirror Mirror'. And I got to the end, and I realized I had written
a 35 minute, $4 million movie. And I was like 'Okay, that was a really stupid
thing to do.' So, one day. I hope in an anthology thing like that, I get to
direct and do this thing that I wrote a script for because I really like it,
and I don’t want anyone else directing it because I know what I want it to be.
Most of the other stuff, I’m very happy to just write it, and let somebody else
worry about the details."
And the burning question: what is in Neil Gaiman's pockets?
"I think its very much the usual things that anyone has in their pockets.
Wax lips (a present from Lisa Snellings - she said 'You need wax lips!'), Altoids,
knife... stuff. I haven’t actually cleaned them out from the giant signing tour
yet. So its everything I had at the time."
Neil has written a story based on the sculpture of Lisa Snellings. For more
details, visit http://www.bereshith.com/strange.htm.
For more information about Neil Gaiman, check out our ludicrously vast collection
of links.
Neil Gaiman
is a really nice guy.
"Being
a writer... people like Harlan [Ellison] especially... it's like you have a
personal relationship with this person whom you’ve never met. I’ve known Harlan,
so much longer than I’ve known Harlan," he says. "And you have to
face up to, and not particularly mind the fact that there are people out there
who’ve known you for a very long time. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, and
I do like my fans. And oddly, at this convention, everyone’s giving me a lot
more space than normally, which I find almost odd. Normally at a convention
like this, if I stop moving, if I sit here, people will sort of just start standing
in a quiet line waiting for me to sign stuff, or whatever. That was what was
happening at the last World Horror that I was at 5 years ago. But at this one,
everyone’s sort of..." He makes a "hands off" gesture. "It's
really very sweet of everybody."
Jerry Springer?
"I think
Jesse 'The Body' Ventura happened because people are starting to recognize that
the current two-party system is not terribly viable. I’m fascinated. As far
as I can tell, you have two identical parties to vote from. And when you’re
voting for the lesser of two evils, its like 'Well, these guys would probably
put me in prison camps if they could, and cut off the hands of any woman they
could prove had had abortions, and these guys probably wouldn’t, if they thought
it would lose them some votes. So we’ll probably vote for these guys.' So I
think Jesse 'The Body' Ventura was probably a breath of fresh air at a time
when everybody was very, very tired. Also, its very significant, I think, to
look at the timing of when he was actually elected, which is in the middle of
this whole Lewinsky nonsense. Every other country in the world has politics,
and America has a year and how many millions spent on several blowjobs. It sort
of became the politics of blowjobs, and it became one party who didn’t actually
quite understand that nobody gave a fuck about the blowjobs."
The ugly
side of freedom of information. There are a lot of Neil Gaiman fan sites on
the internet, ranging from information and news to unauthorized presentations
of his work and fan fiction involving his characters. Neil makes it clear that
he appreciates the original work of his fans online.
"I
was very very lucky, because during that time when I wasn’t very good, I was
really, really arrogant. I was talking to a Hollywood producer a couple of months
ago. He was saying, 'Have you ever had an idea for a sort of Sherlock Holmes
thing?' and I said, 'Oh yes, I came up with a great idea for Sherlock Holmes
once, that nobody had done,' and I told him about it. He said, 'Wow, that’s
amazing! Did you ever write any of that down?' I said, 'Yeah, when I was about
19 or 20, I did some pages.' He said, 'Can I see it?' and I said, 'Well sure!
I know where the folder is with that stuff, I’ll go and find it.' So I had my
assistant pull it out, and I sat there and started reading the stuff I was writing
when I was 20, and realizing with a strange, cold, sinking feeling that if any
fan had come up to me and given me this stuff and said, 'Do I have a future
as a writer?' I would have said, 'Look. No. Go into accountancy. Or hotel management.
Go get a real job.' I was crap. But I didn’t know this! So I had this ineffable,
unshakable certainty of my own astonishing brilliance. I thought I was brilliant!
It wasn’t until I started to get fairly good at what I did, that I started to
realize how much there is to know. Its sort of, at the time I was ant-sized'
I believed I was giant-sized, and now that I’m probably sort of mouse-sized
I can look up and say, 'Gee, you can go all the way up to there! Oh my God!'
"
"That’s
part of the fun. Gene Wolfe is one of my favorite writers in the world. Gene
Wolfe defined good literature as that which can be read with pleasure by an
educated reader, and re-read with increased pleasure. And one of the things
that I really wanted to do with Sandman and I like doing with all my
stuff, is to create something that’s lots of fun to read, and has stuff going
on underneath. But if you miss the stuff going on underneath, it doesn’t matter.
Because there’s a story going on on the top, and you have fun with it. But,
the more you know, about the area being addressed, the more stuff you will get.
And if you finish the book, and you go back and come through from the beginning
again, it’s a different reading experience. You will now know things that you
didn’t know before. The shape of the story is going to change. If you read the
whole of Sandman, and you start again, with Preludes And Nocturnes, you
will find you are reading a completely different story than you were reading
the first time."
A prolific writer, Neil's body of work is not only vast, but varied in tone.
It's no stretch to imagine that he is busy all of the time, a notion which is
sadly true. But given one theoretical day off of Neil Gaiman duty, a day to
do absolutely anything he wants - except writing - he does not opt for an adventure
holiday or a spin in a race car like most of the Very Busy. He chooses instead
the simple, vital pleasures of daily life.
"It's
much too early to say. That would depend on the director. The trouble is, frankly,
the only cast member who I would kill to carry over is Paterson Joseph as The
Marquis, who was just magnificent, and who was exactly what I wanted in my head.
I think the problem with that is that The Marquis is a kind of a box-officey
kind of part. The thing you do want to offer to an Alan Rickman, or a Kevin
Kline, or whatever. Because they would do a good job, and bring some marquee
value to it. No pun intended."