The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Non-Fiction

by Neil Gaiman

My first piece of advice is this: Ignore all advice. In my experience, most interesting art gets made by people who don’t know the rules, and have no idea that certain things simply aren’t done: so they do them. Transgress. Break things. Have too much fun.

Be proud of your mistakes. Well, proud may not be exactly the right word, but respect them, treasure them, be kind to them, learn from them. And, more than that, and more important than that, make them.

Make mistakes. Make great mistakes, make wonderful mistakes, make glorious mistakes. Better to make a hundred mistakes than to stare at a blank piece of paper too scared to do anything wrong, too scared to do anything.

haunted expression of a man one missed deadline away from disaster.

Any extract from a longer work, no matter how well chosen, is simply that: an extract from a longer work: and the real art is the longer work, with a beginning and a middle and an end, often in that order.

He’s sort of smiling, a bit nervously, perhaps pushed both hands deep into his pockets. And being English, he allows himself the highest possible form of praise for the book he’s introducing.

we learned that many British teenagers believe that Winston Churchill and Richard the Lionheart were mythical or fictional, while over half of them were sure that Sherlock Holmes was a real person, just as they believe in King Arthur.

I first read Bram Stoker’s book Dracula when I was about seven, having found it on a friend’s father’s bookshelf, although my encounter with Dracula at that point consisted of reading the first part of the story, Jonathan Harker’s unfortunate visit to Castle Dracula, and then immediately turning to the end of the book, where I read enough of it to be certain that Dracula died and could not get out of the book to harm me. Having established this, I put it back on the shelf, and did not pick up another copy of the book until I was a teenager,

It has been said that the Golden Age of science fiction is when you were twelve years old,

All too often they are tales of failed revelation. In Wells’s world the fruit of the tree of knowledge is not eaten – not because of fear or difficulty, but because of embarrassment – and over and again knowledge or something equally as magical (the secret of making diamonds, an egg that shows us life on Mars, the formula for invisibility) is lost to the world. At the end of many of these stories the world is unchanged, and yet it could have been changed utterly and irrevocably.

A what-if story. In reality Wells’s father lost his shop, his mother went into service. Here is fiction as time-travel, a way to fix the unfixable.

Like a silent comedy, the delight is not in what happens, but in how each event in the chain happens at the perfect moment for it to happen.

The world is not ending. Not if, as Astounding Science Fiction used to suggest, humans are bright enough to think our way out of the problems we think ourselves into.

He was pretty dreadful when he started out: he seemed to have no ear for the music of words, no real sense of what he was trying to do with stories.

Something very much like nothing anyone had ever seen before came trotting down the stairs and crossed the room. ‘What is that?’ the Duke asked, palely. ‘I don’t know what it is,’ said Hark, ‘but it’s the only one there ever was.’

It was filled with magical, wonderful, tasty words. It slipped into poetry and out of it again, in a way that made you want to read it aloud, just to see how it sounded.

When I was a young writer, I liked to imagine that I was paying someone for every word I wrote, rather than being paid for it; it was a fine way to discipline myself only to use those words I needed. I watch Thurber wrap his story tightly in words, while at the same time juggling fabulous words that glitter and gleam, tossing them out like a happy madman, all the time explaining and revealing and baffling with words. It is a miracle. I think you could learn everything you need to know about telling stories from this book.

He does not have a twenty-first-century head. Many characters in historical novels are us, with our point of view, wearing fancy dress. Votan’s dress is rarely fancy. The conceit that all protagonists in historical novels should share our values, our prejudices and our desires is a fine one (I’ve used it myself), and it is much more difficult and much more of an adventure to create characters who are not us, do not believe what we believe, but see things in a way that is alien to us and to our time.

(it is worth observing how many of Photinus’s observations are common sense and utterly wrong

I remember Mike in conversation at the Institute for Contemporary Art trying to explain the nature of fantastic fiction to an audience: he described someone standing in a windy lane, looking at the reflection of the world in the window of a shop, and seeing, sudden and unexplained, a shower of sparks in the glass. It is an image that raised the hairs on the back of my neck, that has remained with me, and which I would find impossible to explain.

His prose is deceptively simple, each word considered and placed where it can sink deepest and do the most damage.

Now, on rereading, I find the clarity of Harrison’s prose just as admirable, but find myself appreciating his people more than ever I did before – flawed and hurt and always searching for ways to connect with each other, continually betrayed by language and tradition and themselves.

He was an astonishing comic writer: he could craft sentences that changed the way a reader viewed the world, and sum up complex and difficult issues in aptly chosen metaphors.

Once, long ago, people thought that heroes were placed in the night sky, as stars or as constellations, after their death.

Every now and again my copy of Art and Artifice, the one Jules Fisher gave me, has disappeared, which means that several times in the last decade I’ve discovered how very hard it is to get a new copy. (Each time I’d given up my original copy surfaced again. I have stopped wondering where it goes when it’s not on my shelves. I probably wouldn’t like the answer.)

I knew nothing of the Moth, but I agreed to tell a story. It sounded outside my area of comfort, and as such, a wise thing to do.

Having a place the story starts and a place it’s going: that’s important. Telling your story, as honestly as you can, and leaving out the things you don’t need, that’s vital.

The Moth connects us, as humans. Because we all have stories. Or perhaps, because we are, as humans, already an assemblage of stories. And the gulf that exists between us as people is that when we look at each other we might see faces, skin colour, gender, race or attitudes, but we don’t see, we can’t see, the stories. And once we hear each other’s stories we realise that the things we see as dividing us are, all too often, illusions, falsehoods: that the walls between us are in truth no thicker than scenery. The Moth teaches us not to judge by appearances. It teaches us to listen. It reminds us to empathise.

Riding a train through America I’m seeing a side of the country it prefers to keep hidden: it’s truly the world on the wrong side of the tracks, a world of tumbledown tar-paper shacks, abandoned cars and boarded-up buildings. Now – as I type this – I’m somewhere in North Texas, riding the train through a swamp, watching an eagle circle and the play of light through the dusty leaves.

I think that night may have lasted a thousand years, one for every ocean, and at the end of it I slept on the sofa, rag-doll floppy from the fine red wine, dreaming of the glory of the eighties and wondering why I had never noticed it at the time.

Traveling still now: passing a sudden thunderstorm in the hills of New Mexico; then the stately Californian windmill fields and hills signal that the train is leaving the real America and entering the world of the imagination.

‘Whistling in the Dark’ is what we all wind up doing, after meeting people who are not unkind, but still leave scars.

I named my daughter Holly after Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn, whom I’d discovered in ‘Walk on the Wild Side’. When Holly was nineteen I made her a playlist of songs she had loved as a small girl, the ones she’d remembered and the ones she’d forgotten, which led to our having the Conversation. I dragged songs from her childhood over to the playlist – ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ and ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ and ‘These Foolish Things’ and then came ‘Walk on the Wild Side’. ‘You named me from this song, didn’t you?’ said Holly as the first bass notes sang. ‘Yup,’ I said. Lou started singing. Holly listened to the first verse, and for the first time, actually heard the words. ‘“Shaved her legs and then he was a she” . . .? He?’ ‘That’s right,’ I said, and bit the bullet. We were having the Conversation. ‘You were named after a drag queen in a Lou Reed song.’ She grinned like a light going on. ‘Oh, Dad. I do love you,’ she said. Then she picked up an envelope and wrote what I’d just said down on the back, in case she forgot it. I’m not sure that I’d ever expected the Conversation to go quite like that.

I heard the sound of the Earth turning on mighty hinges, and of stars forming new constellations,

So does the subject of the lyric change for you in retrospect? Sure. Later on I find out what it was really about.

Also, while I don’t understand the process in great specifics, I do understand what talent is, and what a strange thing that is, and I’ve been trying really hard to set up situations in which it can flourish. And that’s the obligation I feel. To try to be true to the talent and make it possible for it to function.

‘Those of us who write fantasies for a living know that we are doing it best when we tell the truth.’

Shortly after it was published, I wound up defending it to a journalist who had loved my previous novel, Neverwhere, particularly its social allegories. He had turned Stardust upside down and shaken it, looking for social allegories, and found absolutely nothing of any good purpose. ‘What’s it for?’ he had asked, which is not a question you expect to be asked when you write fiction for a living. ‘It’s a fairy tale,’ I told him. ‘It’s like an ice cream. It’s to make you feel happy when you finish it.’

And when he heard that another artist had said that he too was going to be drawing trolls, Kittelsen is reputed to have said, ‘He? Sketch trolls? He has never seen a troll in his life.’

He’s not an unrealistic optimist, though. He’s sensible. When we won the World Fantasy Award for best short story, in Tucson in 1991, Charles missed it. He was playing table tennis. This is because he knew that we wouldn’t win (well, it was about as likely as our being elected joint deputy Pope), so he went off to do something sensible instead. (That we won is beside the point in this anecdote.)

his words sing, like those of a poet who got drunk on the prose of the King James Bible, and who has still not yet become sober. Listen

I took particular delight in how well she understood high and low culture, and how comfortably she went between them, seeing them (correctly, in my opinion) not as opposites to be reconciled but as different ways of addressing the same ideas.

got out into the world, I wrote, and I became a better writer the more I wrote, and I wrote some more, and nobody ever seemed to mind that I was making it up as I went along,

And that I would also give you the best piece of advice I’d ever got, which I completely failed to follow.

If you don’t know it’s impossible it’s easier to do. And because nobody’s done it before, they haven’t made up rules to stop anyone doing that again, yet.

I learned to write by writing. I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work, which meant that life did not feel like work.

You need to be thick skinned, to learn that not every project will survive. A freelance life, a life in the arts, is sometimes like putting messages in bottles, on a desert island, and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it, and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or money, or love. And you have to accept that you may put out a hundred things for every bottle that winds up coming back.

I decided that I would do my best in future not to write books just for the money. If you didn’t get the money, then you didn’t have anything. If I did work I was proud of, and I didn’t get the money, at least I’d have the work.

In my case, I was convinced that there would be a knock on the door, and a man with a clipboard (I don’t know why he carried a clipboard, in my head, but he did) would be there, to tell me it was all over, and they had caught up with me, and now I would have to go and get a real job, one that didn’t consist of making things up and writing them down, and reading books I wanted to read.

And after that, the biggest problem of success is that the world conspires to stop you doing the thing that you do, because you are successful. There was a day when I looked up and realized that I had become someone who professionally replied to e-mail, and who wrote as a hobby. I started answering fewer e-mails, and was relieved to find I was writing much more.