The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Non-Fiction

by Neil Gaiman

So we wrote an outline for our proposed book of quotations, and knowing Kim, and knowing me, he finished his half of the outline before I started to write mine.

It did not matter that I was much too young for the stories: I knew that they were beyond me, and was not even slightly troubled by this. The stories made sense to me, a sense that was beyond what they literally meant. It was in SF12 I encountered concepts and people that did not exist in the children’s books I was familiar with, and it delighted me.

Futures are huge things that come with many elements and a billion variables, and the human race has a habit of listening to predictions for what the future will bring and then doing something quite different.

What speculative fiction is really good at is not the future, but the present. Taking an aspect of it that troubles or is dangerous, and extending and extrapolating that aspect into something that allows the people of that time to see what they are doing from a different angle and from a different place. It’s cautionary.

The joke in the 1950s went that in the old days you could tell who was home by seeing if the lights were on; now you knew who was home by seeing who had their lights off. The televisions were small and the pictures were in black and white and you needed to turn off the light to get a good picture.

A young reader, finding this book today, or the day after tomorrow, is going to have to imagine first a past, and then a future that belongs to that past.

Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.

I love how broad Ray Bradbury’s definition of a book is at the end, when he points out that we should not judge our books by their covers, and that some books exist between covers that are perfectly people-shaped.)

in 1957 when Sputnik brought space down to earth

self-consciously suspicious of its own brilliance,

I learned that sometimes what you do not understand, what remains beyond your grasp in a book, is as magical as what you can take from it.

I remember the joy of getting a postcard from Isaac Asimov telling me that he couldn’t tell the good from the bad in his works, and giving me blanket permission to quote anything of his I wanted to.

‘I want to do a scene in Helena’s school,’ I’d say. ‘Can’t do it,’ Dave would explain. ‘Too expensive. We’d need the class, and a teacher and kids as extras,’ and then, seeing my face fall, he’d add, ‘but we can make the world crumple up like a piece of paper, if you want. That won’t cost us anything.’

I’ve seen most of the film cut together, and am continually delighted by how far it is from what I’d imagined it was going to be,

Of course it was frightening. More or less. I watched the good bits from behind the sofa, and was always angry and cheated and creeped out by the cliffhanger in the final moments.

But I was taking other, stranger, more important lessons away from my Saturday tea-time serial. For a start, I had become infected by the idea that there are an infinite number of worlds, only a footstep away. And another part of the meme was this: some things are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside. And, perhaps, some people are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside, as well.

These days, as a middle-aged and respectable author, I still feel a sense of indeterminate but infinite possibility on entering a lift, particularly a small one with blank walls. That to date the doors that have opened have always done so in the same time, and world, and even the same building in which I started out seems merely fortuitous – evidence only of a lack of imagination on the part of the rest of the universe.

You don’t have to believe me. Not now. But I’ll tell you this. The next time you get into a lift, in a shabby office building, and jerk up several floors, then, in that moment before the doors open, you’ll wonder, even if only for a moment, if they’re going to open on a Jurassic jungle, or the moons of Pluto, or a full-service pleasure dome at the galactic core . . . That’s when you’ll discover that you’re infected too. And then the doors will open, with a grinding noise like a universe in pain, and you’ll squint at the light of distant suns, and understand . . .

I like film. I am not very good at writing for film yet, which is what keeps me interested in it.

back in 1986 I was commissioned by the Sunday Times Magazine, in England, to do a feature article on comics. I interviewed a number of people for it – Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Dave Sim, Brian Bolland and many others. I worked incredibly hard on it – this was going to be the first major national article promoting comics as a medium in England. I sent the article in to the gentleman who had commissioned it, and heard . . . nothing. Not a sausage. So, after a couple of weeks, I rang him up. He sounded oddly subdued. ‘How’s the article?’ I asked. He told me that he had a problem or two with it. I suggested that he tell me what the problem was. I could rewrite it, get it better. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it lacks balance.’ ‘In what way?’ ‘These comics.’ He paused, then spat it out. ‘You seem to think they’re a good thing.’

We’re living in what the Chinese curse described as interesting times, and I like that.

The panel discussion consisted of marketing reps from all the major publishers of the time, someone from Diamond, someone from Capital, and, right down at the end, more than a little bemused, was me.

And then they talked about other things, racking, and pricing and bar codes again – and I began to wonder just what I was doing there. Steve Gursky, who was presiding over the shebang, might have thought the same thing. ‘We have a creator here, remember,’ he told the assembled retailers. ‘Does anybody want to ask the creator anything?’

‘As a creator,’ he asked, ‘what’s the difference between creating high-ticket items and low-ticket items?’ I suppose he wanted to be reassured that I was putting that extra three or four dollars’ worth of verbs and adjectives into the high-ticket items. I don’t know.

If your customers are mostly adolescent boys who go away when they tire of childish things, well, make sure they know that there’s life after Spider-Man.

While we’re at it, I’d like you to be happy, healthy and never again bothered by telephone salespeople. May your luggage always be first on the airport carousel, and may your pets never spontaneously combust.

When I go on tour I like to ask people how they started reading my stuff. Mostly it’s word of mouth. Friends tell friends. Friends force friends to sit and read it. And, in a lot of cases, store assistants tell customers they’d like it. Sometimes it’s sexually transmitted.

want you to push the stuff you think is good. Push good children’s comics to children, and good superhero comics to people who like them, and good grown-up comics to adults. I’m really just asking you to think of comics as a reading material. Think of comics as an entertainment. Think of comics as stories. You aren’t selling investment items. You’re selling dreams.

As a writer I think I’d been spoiled by the ‘because I say so’ factor.

If someone sends you a contract, whether you are dealing with it yourself or getting someone else – an attorney or agent or someone – to vet your contracts, remember that absolutely everything is negotiable. In the early days I used to think that contracts were a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. And they aren’t.

And, by the same token, contracts are renegotiable,

Trust your obsessions.

People sometimes ask whether the research or the idea for the story comes first for me. And I tell them, normally the first thing that turns up is the obsession:

You never know what tool you’ll need. Every now and then I’ll set myself writing exercises – types of formal verse, or styles from other times and other places. Sometimes I surprise myself, and wind up with something wonderful. Sometimes I wind up with something that leaves me hoping I don’t die before I get a chance to clean out that directory, because if it were published posthumously, it’d kill me.

as a writer, or as a storyteller, try to tell the stories that only you can tell. Try to tell the stories that you cannot help telling, the stories you would be telling yourself if you had no audience to listen. The ones that reveal a little too much about you to the world.

It’s the point I think of in writing as walking naked down the street: it has nothing to do with style, or with genre, it has to do with honesty. Honesty to yourself and to whatever you’re doing.

Our word tragedy comes from the Greek tragos-oide: ‘the song of the goat’. Anybody who has ever heard a goat attempt to sing will know why.

It is also a tragedy – quite literally. (I was kidding about the goats singing. Actually the singer of the best tragic song got a goat as a prize. I think.)

It shouldn’t work, of course, and it works like a charm.

There is room for things to mean more than they literally mean. That was it. Doesn’t seem that important to you? Not impressed? Convinced you could get deeper, sager advice about writing from a fortune cookie? Trust me. I just told you something important.

Things can mean more than they literally mean. And that’s the dividing line between art and everything that isn’t art.

and, in the finest comic book tradition, everything you thought you knew turned out to be a lie.

(Robert A. Heinlein claimed in an essay in the 1940s, published in Lloyd Arthur Eshbach’s collection of SF writer essays Of Worlds Beyond, that there are only three stories, which we tell over and over again. He said he had thought there were only two, ‘Boy Meets Girl’ and ‘The Little Tailor’, until L. Ron Hubbard pointed out to him that there was also ‘A Man Learns a Lesson’. And, Heinlein maintained, if you add in their opposites – someone fails to learn a lesson, two people don’t fall in love, and so on – you may have all the stories there are.

The locale of Bone is that of the imagination. ‘It is not down on any map,’ as Melville said of the island of Kokovoko. ‘True places never are.’

Here, though, the world they enter is more complex than they – or we – initially perceive it to be. Characters who seem to be introduced for simple comedic effect have huge backstories, until the whole of the Bone tale begins to feel like the tip of an iceberg, or the end of something huge. The joy of Bone is that Jeff Smith knows more than we do.

as if the plot is a sequence of Russian nesting dolls, each of which is paradoxically larger than the one in which it was hidden.

Even when he was given someone else’s idea he would build it into something unbelievable and new, like a man who was asked to repair a vacuum cleaner, but instead built it into a functioning jet-pack.

But what drew me in, in retrospect, was always the storytelling, and, in contrast to the hugeness of the imagery and the impossible worlds, it was the small, human moments that Kirby loved to depict.

In the only issue of Swamp Thing I ever wrote, I brought Brother Power the Geek back down to Earth. Later, with artist Michael Allred, I would retell the story of Prez, from Prez #1, as if it were a synoptic gospel. I love playing with Joe Simon’s toys.

Nobody wants a world of identikit comics. Do the comics only you can do. Tell the stories only you can tell.