The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Non-Fiction

by Neil Gaiman

I believe that repressing ideas spreads ideas.

I believe I have the right to think and say the wrong things. I believe your remedy for that should be to argue with me or to ignore me, and that I should have the same remedy for the wrong things that I believe you think.

You’re also finding out something as you read that will be vitally important for making your way in the world. And it’s this: THE WORLD DOESN’T HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS. THINGS CAN BE DIFFERENT.

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.

Pause, for a moment. Just look around this room that we’re in. I’m going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. It’s this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it might be easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on. This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, in this city, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things. They daydreamed, they pondered, they made things that didn’t quite work, they described things that didn’t yet exist to people who laughed at them.

You are on a speakerphone with at least fifteen teachers and librarians and suchlike great, wise and good people, I thought. Do not start swearing like you did when you got the Hugo Award.

I was now writing about being a parent, and the fundamental most comical tragedy of parenthood: that if you do your job properly, if you, as a parent, raise your children well, they won’t need you any more. If you did it properly, they go away. And they have lives and they have families and they have futures.

In the eighties, as a young journalist, I was handed a thick pile of bestselling romances, books with one-word titles, like Lace and Scruples, and was told to write three thousand words about them. So I went off and read them, with initial puzzlement and then slow delight as I realized that the reason they seemed so familiar was that they were. They were retellings of fairy tales,

Hallowe’en was a secret, back then, something private, and I would hug myself inside on Hallowe’en, as a boy, most gloriously afraid.

The story was inspired loosely by something the Abbé Mugnier had once said – that he believed that there was a Hell, because it was church doctrine that there was a hell. He was not required to believe that there was anyone in it. The vision of an empty Hell was one that fascinated me.

The joy of writing Sandman was that the territory was wide open. I wrote it in the world of anything goes: history and geography, superheroes and dead kings, folktales, houses and dreams.

it is the function of imaginative literature to show us the world we know, but from a different direction.

(Fairy tales, as G. K. Chestertonfn2 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.)

It was a retelling of the story of Snow White, from the point of view of the wicked queen. It asked questions like, ‘What kind of a prince comes across the dead body of a girl in a glass coffin and announces that he is in love and will be taking the body back to his castle?’

we also realize, as the queen is imprisoned inside a kiln, about to be roasted for the midwinter feast, that stories are told by survivors.fn3

Ask me with a gun to my head if I believe in them, all the gods and myths that I write about, and I’d have to say no. Not literally. Not in the daylight, nor in well-lighted places, with people about. But I believe in the things they can tell us. I believe in the stories we can tell with them. I believe in the reflections that they show us, when they are told.

It’s bigger than you are. So you try to make sense of it. You try to figure it out – something which it resists. It’s big enough, and contains enough contradictions, that it is perfectly happy not to be figured out.

and Shadow stretched uncomfortably on his prison cot,

Once I read the name, it made me smile - it really fits there!

But you should wear a bulletproof vest, anyway. Remember, I’m pregnant,’ she points out, in case I have forgotten. ‘And our child will need a father more than a martyr.’

I weigh my options. On the one hand, possible death by gunfire. On the other, definite embarrassment. ‘That’s okay,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll be fine.’

Gérard Biard, the editor in chief of Charlie Hebdo, concludes his speech. ‘Growing up to be a citizen,’ he reminds us, ‘is to learn that some ideas, some words, some images can be shocking. Being shocked is part of democratic debate. Being shot is not.’

I wrote Coraline because, when I was a child, I used to wonder what would happen if I went home and my parents had moved away without telling me.

I had forgotten about the joke. They kept asking me if I knew any ‘four-letter words’ and, while I had not run across that term before, I had an enormous vocabulary, and it was the kind of thing that teachers asked eight-year-olds, so I ran through every word made of four letters I could think of, until they told me to shut up, and asked me about rude jokes and where I had heard them, and to whom exactly I had repeated them.

I had said fuck. ‘You must never ever say that again,’ said my mother. ‘That is the worst thing that you can say.’ She informed me that she had been told that I would have been expelled – the ultimate punishment – from the little school that night, but, because the other boy had already been removed from that seething den of scatological iniquity by his parents, the principal had announced, with regret, that she was not prepared to lose two sets of school fees. And so I was spared. I learned two very important lessons from this. The first was that you must be extremely selective when it comes to your audience. And the second is that words have power.

My father had played the school porter, in an amateur production. He told me that the phrase ‘the happiest days of your life’ referred to your school days. This seemed nonsensical to me then, and I suspected it of being either adult propaganda or, more likely, confirmation of my creeping suspicion that the majority of adults actually had no memories of being children.

For the record, I don’t think I ever disliked anything as long or as well as I disliked school: the arbitrary violence, the lack of power, the pointlessness of so much of it. It did not help that I tended to exist in a world of my own, half-in-the-world, half-out-of-it, forever missing the information that somehow everyone else in the school managed to have obtained.

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

There were things I read as a boy that troubled me, but nothing that ever made me want to stop reading. I understood that we discovered what our limits were by going beyond them, and then nervously retreating to our places of comfort once more, and growing, and changing, and becoming someone else. Becoming, eventually, adult.

I worry when people ask me how to stop their children reading bad fiction. What a child takes from a book is never what an adult takes from it. Ideas that are hackneyed and dull for adults are fresh and new and world-changing for children.

What makes a book an adult book is, sometimes, that it depicts a world that’s only comprehensible if you are an adult yourself.

We look like gods and fools and bards and queens, singing worlds into existence, conjuring something from nothing, juggling words into all the patterns of night.

(though sometimes their lips move, and sometimes they stare into space longer, and more intently, than anything that isn’t a cat);

Diana would talk about her ‘travel jinx’, and I thought she was exaggerating until we had to fly to America on the same plane. The plane we were meant to fly on was taken out of commission after the door fell off, and it took many hours to get another plane. Diana accepted this as a normal part of the business of travel. Doors fell off planes. Sunken islands rose up beneath you if you were in boats. Cars simply and inexplicably ceased to function. Trains with Diana on them went to places they had never been before and technically could not have gone.

Her books took things from unfamiliar angles. The dragons and demons that her heroes and heroines battle may not be the demons her readers are literally battling – but her books are unfailingly realistic in their examinations of what it’s like to be, or to fail to be, part of a family, the ways we fail to fit in or deal with uncaring carers.

Terry is that rarity, the kind of author who likes writing, not having written, or Being a Writer, but the actual sitting there and making things up in front of a screen.

Working with Terry I felt like a journeyman working alongside a master craftsman in some medieval guild. He constructs novels like a guildmaster might build a cathedral arch. There is art, of course, but that’s the result of building it well. What there is more of is the pleasure taken in constructing something that does what it’s meant to do – to make people read the story, and laugh, and possibly even think.

The most recent books have shown Terry in a new mode – books like Night Watch and Monstrous Regiment are darker, deeper, more outraged at what people can do to people, while prouder of what people can do for each other. And yes, the books are still funny, but they no longer follow the jokes: now the books follow the story and the people.

I never minded Dave being an astonishing artist and visual designer. That never bothered me. That he’s a world-class keyboard player and composer bothers me only a little. That he drives amazing cars very fast down tiny Kentish back roads only bothers me if I’m a passenger after a full meal, and much of the time I keep my eyes shut anyway.

well, frankly, these things bother me. It seems somehow wrong for so much talent to be concentrated in one place, and I am fairly sure the only reason that no one has yet risen up and done something about it is because he’s modest, sensible and nice. If it was me, I’d be dead by now.

He is not smart to make you feel stupid. He is smart to make you smart as well.

‘Neil, dear. I think there’s something you ought to know. Listen: to be eccentric, you must first know your circle.’ And I – for once – heard, and listened, and understood. You can fuck around with the rules as much as you want to – after you know what the rules are.

And when I got home I took all the pain and the fear and the grief, and all the conviction that maybe I was a writer, damn it, and I began to write. And I haven’t stopped yet.

Good stuff to read, even if it sometimes skirted the edge of incomprehensibility. I read it as I read all adult fiction, as a window into a world I didn’t entirely understand:

And if they were the ‘New Wave’ I liked it. But I liked most things back then. (‘Yeah, that’s your trouble, Gaiman,’ said Harlan, when I chided him recently for suggesting that someone I like should be sprinkled with sacred meal and then sacrificed. ‘You like everyone.’ It’s true, mostly.)

But hell, no one reads introductions anyway. (Admit it. You’re not reading this, are you?)

‘You’ve got a drummer’s hands, and I’m a man needs a drummer. Together, we’ll go places.’ We went to Goole and Stoke Poges and Accrington and Bournemouth. We went to Eastbourne and Southsea and Penzance and Torquay.

Harlan proceeded to tell them a story about a week in the life of a man who accidentally telephoned his own house, and he answered the telephone.

I wrote this for the Readercon 11 programme book, 1999. It is not to be factually relied on.

I think the most important thing I learned from Stephen King I learned as a teenager, reading King’s book of essays on horror and on writing, Danse Macabre. In there he points out that if you just write a page a day, just 300 words, at the end of a year you’d have a novel. It was immensely reassuring – suddenly something huge and impossible became strangely easy. As an adult, it’s how I’ve written books I haven’t had the time to write, like my children’s novel Coraline.

Some people change. Kids you knew at school become investment bankers or bankruptcy specialists (failed). They fatten and they bald and somewhere you get the sense that they must have devoured the child they once were, eaten themselves bit by bit, mouthful by mouthful, until nothing is left of the smart, optimistic dreamer you knew when you were both young.