The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction

by Neil Gaiman

I believe that ideas do not have to be correct to exist.

I’m going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do.

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

We writers—and especially writers for children, but all writers—have an obligation to our readers: it’s the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were—to understand that truth is not in what happens but in what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.

Albert Einstein was asked once how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. “If you want your children to be intelligent,” he said, “read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”

In the garden shed every kind of strange hoe and spade and trowel and dibber hung, and Mr. Weller alone knew what they were good for. They were his tools. I get fascinated by the tools.

And one learns a lot about compost: kitchen scraps and garden leftovers and refuse that rot down, over time, to a thick black clean nutritious dirt, teeming with life, perfect for growing things in.

Myths are compost.

Cupid and Psyche is retold and half-forgotten and remembered again and becomes Beauty and the Beast.

Anansi the African Spider God becomes Br’er Rabbit, whaling away at the tar baby.

Death of Baldur?”),

Once upon a time, Orpheus brought Eurydice back alive from Hades. But that is not the version of the tale that has survived.

(Fairy tales, as G. K. Chesterton* once pointed out, are not true. They are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated.)

ALL TOO OFTEN I write to find out what I think about a subject, not because I already know.

My next novel will be, for me, a way of trying to pin down myths—modern myths, and the old myths, together, on the huge and puzzling canvas that is the North American continent.

1987 Knockabout Comics book Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament. I was one of a few writers and I retold several stories, mostly from the Book of Judges. One story immediately got us into trouble: an account of the attempted rape of a male traveler to a town, thwarted by a host who offers the rapists his virgin daughter and the traveler’s concubine. A gang rape follows and the traveler takes his concubine’s corpse home, cuts it up and sends a segment of it to each of the tribes of Israel. (It’s Judges 19 if you want to go and look, and it’s pretty noxious.)

And I knew then, as I know now, that things need not have happened to be true.

Terry has been writing professionally for a very long time, honing his craft, getting quietly better and better. The biggest problem he faces is the problem of excellence: he makes it look easy. The public doesn’t know where the craft lies. It’s wiser to make it look harder than it is, a lesson all jugglers learn.