Neil Gaiman is the author of the best-selling adult graphic novel of all time, Sandman, a multiple New York Times best-selling author (for Good Omens with Terry Pratchett, Coraline, and American Gods, among others), the screenwriter for film and television series based on his work, Neverwhere and the upcoming MirrorMask, and has won practically every award in existence short of the Nobel Peace Prize. Tori Amos even writes songs about him. Two of his newest works are the upcoming Sandman: Endless Nights, the first Sandman comic in seven years, and The Wolves In the Walls, a children's story with artwork by Dave McKean. With these in mind, we talked about the weather in Minneapolis:
Keith Daniels: How long do you have?
Neil Gaiman: I think we've got about 35 minutes. The main thing is two small girls who think they need to be taken out for ice cream.
KD: [laughs] So you're at home right now.
NG: I am at home right now. It's a wonderful thing to be.
KD: You've been traveling all over for the last month or so.
NG: I have, and the rest of the year is every bit as bad. So.. it's good to be home.
KD: What's the most important thing for you to do when you get home after being on the road?
NG: After hugging the kids, and checking in with the cats... walking around the garden. I love just sort of wandering around, unless it's the depths of winter, which, out here in the Midwest means everything is covered with snow and nobody goes anywhere.
KD: Where do you live?
NG: Out near Minneapolis.
KD: That's surprising. Usually when people move to the U.S. you think of them going to New York, or California.
NG: Well, if somebody had actually explained the whole Minneapolis thing to me before I moved out... The trouble is, being English, I didn't quite understand the concept of winter. We have winters in England. It's cold and for a few days water falls from the sky as white powdery stuff, it's miserable. If the English don't know what winter is, who does? Actually, I discovered that there are whole acres of cold. There's an entire world of cold that I hadn't even dreamt of.
KD: ...and Minneapolis has them all.
NG: It really does. Every now and then you get a really good year, and snow starts to fall in December, and it starts to melt in March. You've had a three month long snowy winter, and that's kind of fun. But, there have definitely been a couple since I got out here when the snow started falling in October, and it decided to seriously get into the whole melting business in May. Where spring and summer happened in half an hour and it's over with.
KD: How's MirrorMask coming along?
NG: Well, as far as I know... terribly, terribly well. All of the live-action stuff has been shot, and all of the blue screen stuff has been shot with live actors. Now, Dave has a nine-month period where he gets to build... basically build virtual worlds, and build quite a few virtual characters. One of the really strange parts of this movie is just the idea that there are characters who still haven't been cast yet. We've shot the entire movie, but who's going to voice some of these strange animated characters? They haven't been cast; nobody's even been in to do any lines yet.
KD: Do you have any say in the matter?
NG: On the live-action stuff, almost all of the casting was Dave's. I think all of the casting was Dave's. I came in and helped break a deadlock on one character, because there was one actor that the top brass were not sure of. Dave seemed to think he was funny, but nobody on the L.A. end seemed to think so. Dave played me a few of the audition tapes, and we got to [this actor's]. The big TV at Henson's wasn't working, so Dave and I are watching it on this tiny screen on a camera where they're playing it through, with headphones, and we'd taken one earpiece each. At precisely the same moment we start laughing at his line delivery, and I just sort of marched down to the office of the Powers That Be and said, "He is it. You will not get anything better." They said "Oh. Okay, if you both think that." and they cast him that night. On the strange voices, I've been fairly helpful in drawing up lists and making phone calls; mostly just because Dave was incredibly busy shooting the movie. That was something that I could actually make some suggestions on.
KD: Now that you've had several movie projects based on your work... when you begin to write something new, are you ever thinking about what it would look like on film? Does that affect your creative process?
NG: Yes, but in the wrong way. When I sat down to write American Gods it was almost as a reaction against the fact that I'd been writing film scripts and film outlines for, more-or-less, the previous decade, and I really was so sick of a hundred page story with a set up in Act One, and a problem in Act Two, all hope is lost, and then a resolution in Act Three. Part of the joy is going "Okay, I'm now in my novel. This is my book. I have supreme power here." It was the idea of writing this book that was huge and lumpy, and had short stories in it, and the plot didn't do what the plot of a movie would do, and there was too much in there. Then, when you thought it had ended, it hadn't, and when you thought I'd forgotten something in the plot they came out of nowhere in the end. That was enormously fun, and of course that's now proved a headache for my agent. [laughs] I keep getting major sorts of producers and directors and stars saying "Oh, American Gods is such a great book, and it's a bestseller, and we want the film rights. How do we turn it into a movie?" And we go "I don't know. Just throw half of it away I suppose." I keep saying to anybody who says "Turn it into a movie." that they should turn it into a ten-hour miniseries or something. Actually film the whole thing. But I don't think it really does [affect my creative process], they don't really feed back into each other. When I'm writing a book I think of it as a book, and tend to hope that somebody else will have the problem of writing a screenplay that will somehow spiritually stay faithful to whatever I've done, while factually... doing all sorts of strange things to it.
KD: Two of the new books that you have out are The Wolves In the Walls and Coraline. I think it's interesting that you started writing books for young-adults, or children, at a time when your kids are older. Most of your children are almost grown, right?
NG: Well, two of them are. I still have a small one. In fact, it was Maddy, she's 8, going on 9... I started Coraline in about 1990 or '91 for my daughter Holly, and there's an old English saying, which is "The shoemaker's family goes barefoot." I mentioned this as I went around Europe being interviewed, and I found that every language has an equivalent saying, including "The knife-maker's family eat with wooden fork." I think that's a Polish one which I rather liked, or was that Italian? Could've been Portuguese. Anyway, the trouble is, if you're doing something for your family it tends to come in last, and Coraline came in last because nobody wanted it, nobody was yelling for it. It didn't seem like a book that was being written for any other purpose than to amuse Holly, and I was writing in my own time. Around about 1992 I ran out of my own time, after moving to the States, so then there was a period of about four or five years where I managed about seven pages. It really was Maddy getting born in '94 and then me just sortof realizing that if I didn't get a move on she'd be too old for it. [laughs] That's what actually spurred me back into Coraline, and into finishing it. I finished it, and I handed it in, it went on to be this international bestseller, and I went "Gosh, I should've finished that ten years earlier."
KD: You've said that children read Coraline as an adventure, while adults find it terrifying.
NG: What is weird is that ten year olds don't. I didn't know this was going to happen when I wrote it; it was more something that we discovered empirically once the book had come out, and was being tried out. Teachers would say "I read this and I got up at 3 o'clock in the morning walking around the house and turning on the lights, but I read it to my class and they thought it was hilarious." I think a lot of it, I could be wrong, but this is just sortof trying to figure out after the fact, I think a lot of it is because kids and adults are reading a different book. When adults read that the Other Mother has black buttons for eyes they go "Oh, that is so scary. That is so weird. The eyes are the windows to the soul. You can't see them. The idea that these buttons have been sewn on is horrifying." It has echoes of the idea of pennies on the eyes of the dead... all of this kind of stuff. When kids read about black button eyes they go "Oh, that would be cool to draw!" and they draw pictures of the Other Mother with black buttons for eyes. When adults read about Coraline, a pre-teenage girl, she's probably somewhere between 7 and 9, going up against ghosts and things of horror and so-forth they are reading a book about a child in danger, and it's a really scary, strange, and upsetting thing for an adult to read about a child in danger. All of your protective impulses come out. Also, adults know that I'm a dangerous psychotic. I could easily do something absolutely awful to this child. Kids don't worry about that. They, on the whole, seem to trust me. They don't look on it as a book about a child in danger, they look on it as a book about somebody who is fairly competent and fairly bright having an adventure going up against something bad, but it's a ghost train or a roller-coaster ride. They know that I'm not going to do anything horrible and they're going to come out safe at the other end. My favorite of all those moments was somewhere on one of the European tours that I did earlier this year. I wish I could remember which stop it was, but I did Portugal, Spain, Holland, Poland, Italy, France, Belgium, and Denmark. It all sort of blurred after awhile, but there was somebody who told me she was reading it to her 8 year old son and got rather upset, and nervous, and freaked-out, and her son patted her on the hand and said "It's okay, it's only a story." Which I thought was a very reassuring place to be. Kids understand that. Kids are really good at fiction.
KD: You started out in journalism, and then you went into comics -- had the best selling adult comic of all time, and then best-selling novels, then TV, movies. How important is it to you, when you move into a new medium, to do work that is among the best in that medium? To do "excellent work" like you said in a recent speech?
NG: It's always important to do excellent work, but what I tend to do first is something crap to start off with. I'm still learning, and that, to me, is the important bit. I'm never going to go into a new medium going "Hey, I am now going to break all the rules, rewrite what people think, and I'm going to win all the awards." and stuff like that. I tend to go into new media going "I have no idea what I'm doing. Let me make some mistakes and learn from them, and then let me do something different next time and make some new mistakes." If I have any sort of philosophy, it's probably something like that. I'm getting to the point now where I'm fairly satisfied with the last two screenplays I wrote, actually, the last three screenplays I wrote I'm quite happy with: MirrorMask, Death: The High Cost of Living, and The Fermata, which I did for Robert Zemeckis. [The Fermata] is a very, very strange film, which he wanted me to do adapt for him. It's a novel by a man called Nicholson Baker that is essentially a pornographic novel about somebody who can stop time and undress women. Bob Zemeckis decided he really wanted to make a film of it, and approached me. I said it was un-filmable and "No.", and then he came back to me several years later and said, "Please." Then I looked at it and said "Okay, I think I have some ideas, and I had a wonderful time writing it." I think my first screenplay would've been the one I did for Good Omens with Terry Pratchett in about 1990 or '91. So I think it took me ten years to actually become fairly good at writing screenplays.
KD: Why is having an online journal important to you, and why do you keep it going?
NG: Madness. Lunacy. It started out with a very, very specific goal. When you look at a film that has a writer in it there's a point where they tend to go into montage. You see the writer, he writes something, types the words "The End", and he pulls that last sheet of paper out of the typewriter. Then the screen goes all fuzzy and you see the thing coming up on the screen "#1 Bestseller", and I thought... nobody who isn't an editor or a writer knows very much about the process of what happens next. I thought, with American Gods, that there was a really interesting process that was going to go on, and it almost had a plot because we were going to find out: was this going to be a bestseller? What was going to happen? I thought it would be fun to take people backstage. So, I started the journal very quietly. We opened the website, it was AmericanGods.com I think at that point, and I just had a page with a photo of me on it, and it was a so-so countdown thing. We didn't announce it,or advertise it, or do anything, really, we just sortof started it. The "we" here is Harper-Collins [publishing] and myself. I found that I enjoyed it an awful lot. I enjoyed writing these little essays, and then I knew why I was writing it: it was to take people backstage. That was February through to September of 2001, and it took us through publication, and it took us through the tour, and through September the 11th. Then I looked around in September and I realized that by that point we had 20,000 people who were reading it, and I thought that was an awful lot. When I made noises about wrapping it up people immediately started grumbling, and I had really enjoyed... there was a level of immediacy that I loved. Just the fact that if something was coming out, if something was happening, if something was going on, I could talk about it, and I could talk about it immediately. The September the 11th stuff happened, and it was very good being able to have that journal at that moment, that connection with people. So I thought, "Oh, I'll keep it going for a few months." It's now been going for two and a half years, which in Internet time means I was blogging with the dinosaurs. The stegosauruses saying "Damn Livejournal has collapsed on me again." I still don't know how long it has for this world. I love doing it, but I am also starting to get more and more aware that I haven't written a novel since I've had the journal. I've written other things but I've not written a novel, and I need to write a novel. I may very well close down the journal while I'm writing a novel, because it works best for me just to go off and write and not have distractions, answer as little email as possible, and do as few interviews as possible. I suspect that the journal... the terrible thing about the journal is that it can make me feel like I'm working when I'm not. I can put together a really long, funny, entertaining "This is what I did today." or "This is what's going on." or "Here's some great links.", and I walk away with the pride of having written something cool.
KD: ... and then you feel like you've written for the day.
NG: And then I feel like I've written for me for then, especially when I've gotten carried away and wrote a thousand or two thousand word thing. I really feel like "Hey! Look! I did my writing!" and that can be a problem. Now, of course, we're in this weird world where we have 200,000 people reading this thing every month - and I thought 20,000 was a lot! Plus we're getting more because 1,400 people subscribe to it through Livejournal, and of them we have at least 4,000 people reading it. When Livejournal went mad and weird a few months ago, and people on Livejournal clicked on the page to see what was going on we suddenly had 4,000 more people reading it. An awful lot of people actually read this thing, many of whom, I have to add, have no idea who I am as a writer -- do not read my books, have no interesting comics, but just sortof know that this is one of those places you can go on the web each day where something interesting is probably being said. [laughs]
KD: One idea that recurs in a lot of your work is the idea that there's this whole other world going on around us that we don't realize. The gods walking among us in American Gods, things like that. Where did that idea come from, for you?
NG: Fuck knows. Really, in some ways it's just how I see the world. I've always assumed that whoever you are and whatever you're seeing, you're seeing the tip of an iceberg, and I think as a metaphor it's true for people too. There's a line in Sandman, in A Game of You, where I said, "People are worlds." People have worlds inside them, and we see a tiny bit on the surface. I also think it's true that cultures have worlds, and I also think it's true that cultures have magic. Part of the desire, for me, when I was writing American Gods was to try and give readers an idea of how strange it was for me coming to America, and the world that I saw when I first moved out here. If you live in America, you tend to take America for granted just as a goldfish takes the water in the pool for granted, and the idea that this could be a strange, weird, and magical place is something that might not occur to you. The same really goes for London. For me, London is Neverwhere. There's always this feeling of weird, magical stuff happening out on the edges. There's always this feeling to me of this mysterious world going on underneath, and a lot of it is just trying to put that feeling into words, and how successful I am I don't know. If it's a repeating theme, it's probably a repeating theme more because that's how I see a world than because I set out at the beginning to go "Right, I shall find a theme and it shall repeat." It's always embarrassing. I'm now to the point where I've written enough that people write these theses and these Masters thingies and they give them to me, and I look at them and they go "Ahh, Repeating Themes. The Use of Space as Metaphor in the Work of Gaiman." I don't want to read this stuff! I had to talk to a class of university students in Bologna, and the professor got up and talked about what I do, and repeating themes, before I was to talk, and it was quite worrying! Not only had she described the last couple of books that I'd written, she'd described fairly accurately the next two books I planned to write. [laughs] I'd been so proud of myself, because I'd thought they were so different from anything I'd done before, and then realizing... no, they're exactly what she's describing. It was very strange. It gave me pause.
KD: When you return to the U.K., now, do you see things in that culture that you took for granted while you were living there?
NG: Oh, I think you always do. It's really weird now, because I've been away for ten years, going back a lot, but I'm still reading the U.K. papers, because you can online, and listening to English radio. I wind up in a position where I definitely don't feel American, but I also know that I'm not quite English anymore. My life has just dissolved into a general state of "You aren't from around here, are you?" [laughs]
KD: What was your research like for American Gods? It feels like you took a road trip.
NG: I did! It was funny, because I had a lot of ideas for what I wanted to do for American Gods, so I got to sortof fold eight years of having lived here, which I then counted as research, but I also knew the various patterns of the journey people were going to be taking in the story. For example, I'd plotted out this scene in a deserted motel long before I actually discovered that at the precise center of America, on the 11 in Kansas, there is an abandoned motel.
KD: Now I have some member questions for you.
NG: Ask me your member questions! I love the idea of doing this for Suicidegirls.
KD: Where did you hear about the site?
NG: One of those magazines, Bust or the other one, the nouveau-feminists things, had a whole article on it about a year ago, and I remember reading it and going "Oh! That looks really sensible and cool. I like that. Empowering porn, what a cool idea." Then I went and looked at the site and saw smart people having fun talking, and great interviews. I was impressed by the Barry Yourgrau pieces, because I've always liked him as a writer. He really writes like dreams feel. Just knowing it was there was fun. A few months ago I checked in for the first time since then, wondering if there were more Barry Yourgrau pieces, and saw that you had the Roger Avary interview, and the Henry Selick interview, all these things, so I shopped out the link on my site and Suicidegirls promptly did the same. That was fun, talking to people from there, and so I was perfectly happy to be interviewed.
KD: You did some work for Penthouse, right?
NG: Oh yeah, when I started out as a starving young writer, being the stuff that wasn't porn in the English, incredibly soft-core, porn magazine, was what put food on my table. It paid my rent. It bought me my first typewriter. There was a remarkable freedom. I loved it, because there was this idea, particularly... I think I wrote for Penthouse, wrote for Knave. Knave was the one I wrote the most for, but there were several others. There was always this lovely idea that because people were only buying the magazine for the naked ladies and the rude letters, you could put anything else you liked in there. So I was doing interviews with anyone I wanted to. I did the first major interview with Alan Moore. I did Douglas Adams, Terry Jones, and a mad English poet called John Cooper Clark. I interviewed science-fiction writers, and cool, strange people. Anyone I wanted to meet.
KD: That's exactly what I do. [laughs]
NG: What you're doing is what I did circa 1983, '84, '85, only it wasn't on the web, and it was great. I had a book review column, and a film review column, and spent my early twenties in London meeting everybody that I wanted to meet and seeing every film I wanted to see and reading every book I wanted to read, and all for nothing, and when people asked me what I did I looked at them proudly and said "I'm a pornographer", although I never actually was.
KD: You mentioned Alan Moore; I've read that he worships an ancient Roman snake god. Do you worship anything?
NG: No, but I think that if I did... I can't really worship ancient Roman snake gods because Alan has now cornered that market. There's the trouble. Alan gets in there and he does it so well that anybody coming in later... It's why I've never grown a serious beard. If I grew a serious beard people would just look at me and go "Oh, he's doing Alan Moore." If I announced that I was going to start worshipping a 4th century B.C. Babylonian camel god people would just say, "Oh, he's doing Alan."
KD: In the last year there've been quite a few comic book movies, but they're mostly superhero movies. What do you think about that?
NG: Well, they are mostly superhero movies, but what happens is people don't notice the ones that aren't, and don't think of them as comic book movies; things like Ghost World and American Splendor, the new Harvey Pekar movie. Then there are all these movies that happen under the radar that really are comic book movies, but nobody notices, like Men In Black, and things like that. What do I think? Not a lot, really. The most interesting thing for me is that there's an almost 1:1 success ratio of the recent movies between how faithful they are to the spirit of the comic and how successful they are, which fascinates me. All of the places where they dumb them down or change them are generally where they fail.
KD: And it's great that people can now say that someone "dumbed down" a comic.
NG: I love that. I love the fact that all the complaints about League of Extraordinary Gentleman were from journalists. God! Journalists! Journalists saying "While the comic book is smart and wonderful, they've kindof dumbed it down and made it stupid." And I was like "Yes!" What is interesting is not that that hasn't happened before, that's been happening going back to Flash Gordon, or whatever, but the fact that somebody noticed is magic. The fact that a lot of the journalists complaining about The Hulk movie were complaining about all of the things Ang Lee had done where he thought he knew better. All of the things Sam Rami did right I felt like Ang Lee did wrong. In the Rami film [Spiderman] the first thing that happens is that he gets bitten by a spider. Yes! Then stuff happens and then he's Spiderman. You go to a Hulk film, you know that two minutes into the film Bruce Banner needs to be trying to rescue this kid out on the Gamma-ray testing field, get caught by the Gamma-ray bomb, and turn into the Hulk. That's what has to happen a few minutes in, and it doesn't. You just get this interminable movie, and he doesn't turn into the Hulk until halfway through; even then you're going "Why did I get all that plot and what the Hell was that about?" The places where they change things are the places where things tend not to work. Having said that, I think the biggest reason comic books are so successful in Hollywood is that studio execs do not have imaginations, and they're not very good at extrapolating. So if they have pictures, they're sortof like storyboards, and they can see things without having to imagine too hard, so they get very happy.
KD: In Smoke and Mirrors, the story "The Goldfish Bowl", you say that some of the story is true. Which parts?
NG: Oh... let's see. Large chunks of that story are true, and most of it is based on the experiences that Terry Pratchett and I had working on Good Omens in the early '90s. They put us up at the Chateau Marmont, and, I must say, I love the Chateau Marmont. The Chateau Marmont these days is this weird old goofy 1920s Hollywood hotel, and it's where I tend to stay whenever I'm in Los Angeles because I like it there, and they like me there, and we get along. It's nice to have somewhere that's just sortof the place that you go and you don't have to learn where everything is, and they make allowances for my faults and I make allowances for theirs. That was the 1991 Chateau Marmont, it's been renovated since then, where your feet stuck to the orange carpeting in the lobby with a sortof glooping tacky noise and you looked at your feet, and everybody to whom you said "I'm at the Chateau Marmont" would say "Oh, you know that's where John Belushi died?" The first time you would say "No, I didn't." and after that you would say "Yes, I did." Everybody would tell you different stories and I wanted to get that in, and then I sortof piled in dozens of other weird Hollywood experiences that'd happened to me between then and the time of writing the story, which I think was about '95. It was actually a very good thing to write if only because it meant that when I decided to go back and do more Hollywood stuff in the later '90s I'd keep talking to execs who had read that story and were terrified that if they misbehaved I'd put them in another story. They'd always start off the conversation "Oh, I read that story of yours. We hope you won't have an experience like that here. Ha. Ha." That was very good, put them on their best behavior.
KD: Don't let Neil stay at your hotel or he'll write a story about it.
NG: [laughs] Exactly. Then he'll write a story about the meeting. The kinds of things that are said in those meetings [in "The Goldfish Bowl"] are all pretty much accurate summations of the kinds of things you will hear said in Hollywood meetings. Non-Hollywood people tend to read that story as satire, and Hollywood people tend to read it as reportage.
KD: What do you think when you see people with tattoos of your work?
NG: Mostly it's an honor. Mostly I tend to see it as an honor. Whatever qualities I had of potentially being weirded-out or potentially being dumbfounded about it went away in about 1990 or '91 when I was doing a signing at Golden Apple in Los Angeles on Melrose. Somebody was in the line right near the front and they asked me to sign their arm, and I did. With a Sharpie it's easier to sign somebody's arm than not. The guy turned up again at the very end of the signing four hours later; he'd gone over and got back in the line, and he'd had my signature tattooed in the meantime. It was so freshly done that it'd just been sprayed with liquid skin, and it was still beading blood. He just wanted to show me, very proudly, that he'd had my signature tattooed on his arm. At that point my weirdness meter just went "Ding!" and it was done. I remember there was a tour I did a few years ago where I did a signing in L.A., and there were two girls who were... if they were 18, they couldn't have been 18 for very long. They were first in the line, and they said, "If we wait till later would you draw on us?" and I said "Sure." So at the very end of the signing, they've hung around for five hours, through 700 people or whatever, and I said, "What do you want me to draw on you?" One of them said she wanted a pirate thing, and the other one said something else, and I did a drawing, in Sharpie, on each of their backs. Then they looked at me and said, "Great! Now we're going to go and get these tattooed." I said, "You haven't even looked over. You haven't even seen if you like them. Do me one thing: do not go to an all-night tattooist now. At least wait until tomorrow morning. It's Sharpie; it'll still be there. At least look in the mirror and see if you want these tattoos." [laughs]
KD: What year did you start noticing that obsessive fan reaction?
NG: It was certainly there by about 1990 or '91. I suppose there was a little of it before, but probably when I did the signing tour for the Season of Mist hardback when that was released. I think that was the summer of '91, although I could be wrong. I would go to these signings and there'd be 500 people at every signing, and there would be people with my stuff tattooed on them, and there would be people who looked like my characters. We weren't quite at the point where anybody associated Sandman with the Goth world, mainly because there wasn't a Goth world at that point, except for a very, very small, cool Goth world that communicated in black & white magazines. '94 was when I first remember people showing up at signings who had hair dyed black, and all black clothes, who looked like they'd be more comfortable in Hawaiian shirts with hair their natural sandy color. That was the first time it'd ever occurred to me that, up until that point, anybody who was at a signing and dressing all in black was probably dressing in black because they'd gone through all the other colors and decided that black worked, and they'd stopped there.
KD: Were you aware of that [small] Goth culture when you started writing Sandman?
NG: Well, bear in mind that when we started writing the comic that it was '87. The English Goth movement had come and gone, sortof following the New Romantics. We weren't trying for a Goth quality, because having that conversation wouldn't have made any sense at that point. It wasn't like there was anything you could point at and say, "Aha, yes, we're doing this." I wanted a set of looks and feelings and part of it was defined by what I was doing, and part of it was defined by what Mike Dringenberg brought to Death. Part of it was just something that was happening in the culture at the time, and so it just sortof spread out. So no, it wasn't like going "Ah, there is this cool movement and we will tap into it." Frankly, the cool movement wasn't going to be there for another five or six years as a visible force, and probably another decade as a commercial force. [laughs] You couldn't have supported a Hot Topic at that point, let's put it that way.
KD: Music always seems to play an important part in your stories. Do you still listen to music as much as you did when you were younger?
NG: Yes I do. Although the music's... I was about to say "the music's different" but actually sometimes it isn't, which is really weird. Having stopped listening to him for twenty years, I've just rediscovered David Bowie, which is very odd. Not only do I love all his old albums, but I also love some of his new stuff. How cool is that? [To himself] What am I listening to currently? There's a really, really cool English singer called Thea Gilmore, who I think is the most interesting singer-songwriter probably since Elvis Costello. She's incredibly young, and incredibly good. Her last album was called Songs From the Gutter. The one before that was Rules For Jokers, and right now she seems to be doing roughly an album every six months; which I don't think anybody in the record business approves of because "She's spreading herself too thin" and blah, blah, blah. She just keeps writing songs and recording them.
She's prolific, and she's really good, and each album is different, and the lyrics are smart. I am such a sucker for smart lyrics. I think that's why I fell in love with the Gothic Archies in 1996 from the Hello CD of the Month Club, which was this weird little thing that They Might Be Giants used to run. Each month you'd get an EP on a CD, and I just remember the Gothic Archies' one arriving.
KD: They've done work for you, also.
NG: They have. It's a mad genius named Stephin Merritt, who's actually not mad, but is a genius. I just remember listening to that, and the combination of bubblegum tunes with these magnificently mournful lyrics. Songs like "The City of the Damned" [sings] "Come along with me to the City of the Damned..." and "Ride the Magic Hearse". Then I hunted down everything else that Stephin Merritt had done, and discovered the Magnetic Fields, and the Future Bible Heroes, the 6ths, and these various other strange incarnations. Which was nice, because I was listening to the Magnetic Fields before the Magnetic Fields were cool. I'm very lucky now, because people give me too much music. When I'm on the road people give me music, and the only thing that gets confusing then is sometimes trying to hunt down what the music is that they've given me. You're never quite sure if it's something they've recorded themselves, or if it's something they think I should know.
KD: Why do you think it is that people, when they have a connection with an author, have that urge to give them presents?
NG: It's a very, very weird experience having an author that you've made a connection with, because you feel on some levels that you know them really well, and on some levels you do, except they don't know you. For me, growing up, I felt like Harlan Ellison was one of my friends, and somebody who I admired a great deal, and somebody who was brilliant. I lived inside his head and I supposed he must've lived inside mine. Samuel R. Delany, perhaps the same, although with Harlan you had that weird confessional, or explanational, element around the stories which meant that you always felt very close to him. Ray Bradbury is somebody who [could] write a short story which actually felt like it was a part of me. There are Bradbury stories imprinted on my DNA. So there is a level of connection. Then it gets weird, because all of a sudden I'm meeting Harlan, I'm meeting Ray, and even weirder meeting Samuel R. "Chip" Delany and discovering he was as much a fan of mine as I was a fan of his. I actually got quite offended, "No, no, no, you can't be. I'm the Samuel R. Delany fan. Shut up." It's a weird process, and people do know you, or at least they know part of you, and they know something about the talent. Sometimes you've written a story that changed the way that somebody saw the world forever. It may not be anything to do with how good the story was, and an awful lot to do with that person needing to meet that idea at that point in their life. But you've done something huge and important for them. I try and explain to people how the signings work... I did an interview with Publisher's Weekly, and he was kindof amazed, because people turn out for my signings in numbers that almost no authors get. Lots of much better selling and more famous authors don't get the numbers that I get. He said, "Why do they come?" and I said, "Well, mostly I think they come to say 'Thank you'". Yes they'd quite like something signed, but for sixty or seventy percent of them the having-something-signed is an excuse to get into that line so they can say "Hello" and so they can say "Thank you" for writing something that mattered to them.
KD: Have long have you been married?
NG: God, about twenty years now.
KD: What do you think the secret is to keep a marriage going that long?
NG: In my case, I think that it mostly has to do with the fact that there's always stuff I'm completely crap at. Like dealing with the real world. Division of labor, I think, is probably what works best for us, because I think in every partnership I think you get one person walking along the ground holding the string and one person sortof floating in the air. Mary is really good at doing things that I... it's not that they terrify me, they just sortof feel not part of my universe. Like speaking to the people at the bank, talking to accountants, dealing with tax people, about which I feel about as comfortable as if somebody'd said "You have to deal with aliens". Actually, I think I'd feel a lot more comfortable dealing with aliens. So, she does all the real stuff. Everything that happens in the real world, she makes it happen. Then I get to go off and daydream and make things up and write them down, and that kind of works.
Neil Gaiman's online journal, along with news on his latest works, and a complete bibliography, can be found at
Thanks also go to Fortissimo, , , Apathyactivist, PipGoesToHel, Antenna, and Quest for their questions which were used, in whole or in part, in this interview.
Keith Daniels: How long do you have?
Neil Gaiman: I think we've got about 35 minutes. The main thing is two small girls who think they need to be taken out for ice cream.
KD: [laughs] So you're at home right now.
NG: I am at home right now. It's a wonderful thing to be.
KD: You've been traveling all over for the last month or so.
NG: I have, and the rest of the year is every bit as bad. So.. it's good to be home.
KD: What's the most important thing for you to do when you get home after being on the road?
NG: After hugging the kids, and checking in with the cats... walking around the garden. I love just sort of wandering around, unless it's the depths of winter, which, out here in the Midwest means everything is covered with snow and nobody goes anywhere.
KD: Where do you live?
NG: Out near Minneapolis.
KD: That's surprising. Usually when people move to the U.S. you think of them going to New York, or California.
NG: Well, if somebody had actually explained the whole Minneapolis thing to me before I moved out... The trouble is, being English, I didn't quite understand the concept of winter. We have winters in England. It's cold and for a few days water falls from the sky as white powdery stuff, it's miserable. If the English don't know what winter is, who does? Actually, I discovered that there are whole acres of cold. There's an entire world of cold that I hadn't even dreamt of.
KD: ...and Minneapolis has them all.
NG: It really does. Every now and then you get a really good year, and snow starts to fall in December, and it starts to melt in March. You've had a three month long snowy winter, and that's kind of fun. But, there have definitely been a couple since I got out here when the snow started falling in October, and it decided to seriously get into the whole melting business in May. Where spring and summer happened in half an hour and it's over with.
KD: How's MirrorMask coming along?
NG: Well, as far as I know... terribly, terribly well. All of the live-action stuff has been shot, and all of the blue screen stuff has been shot with live actors. Now, Dave has a nine-month period where he gets to build... basically build virtual worlds, and build quite a few virtual characters. One of the really strange parts of this movie is just the idea that there are characters who still haven't been cast yet. We've shot the entire movie, but who's going to voice some of these strange animated characters? They haven't been cast; nobody's even been in to do any lines yet.
KD: Do you have any say in the matter?
NG: On the live-action stuff, almost all of the casting was Dave's. I think all of the casting was Dave's. I came in and helped break a deadlock on one character, because there was one actor that the top brass were not sure of. Dave seemed to think he was funny, but nobody on the L.A. end seemed to think so. Dave played me a few of the audition tapes, and we got to [this actor's]. The big TV at Henson's wasn't working, so Dave and I are watching it on this tiny screen on a camera where they're playing it through, with headphones, and we'd taken one earpiece each. At precisely the same moment we start laughing at his line delivery, and I just sort of marched down to the office of the Powers That Be and said, "He is it. You will not get anything better." They said "Oh. Okay, if you both think that." and they cast him that night. On the strange voices, I've been fairly helpful in drawing up lists and making phone calls; mostly just because Dave was incredibly busy shooting the movie. That was something that I could actually make some suggestions on.
KD: Now that you've had several movie projects based on your work... when you begin to write something new, are you ever thinking about what it would look like on film? Does that affect your creative process?
NG: Yes, but in the wrong way. When I sat down to write American Gods it was almost as a reaction against the fact that I'd been writing film scripts and film outlines for, more-or-less, the previous decade, and I really was so sick of a hundred page story with a set up in Act One, and a problem in Act Two, all hope is lost, and then a resolution in Act Three. Part of the joy is going "Okay, I'm now in my novel. This is my book. I have supreme power here." It was the idea of writing this book that was huge and lumpy, and had short stories in it, and the plot didn't do what the plot of a movie would do, and there was too much in there. Then, when you thought it had ended, it hadn't, and when you thought I'd forgotten something in the plot they came out of nowhere in the end. That was enormously fun, and of course that's now proved a headache for my agent. [laughs] I keep getting major sorts of producers and directors and stars saying "Oh, American Gods is such a great book, and it's a bestseller, and we want the film rights. How do we turn it into a movie?" And we go "I don't know. Just throw half of it away I suppose." I keep saying to anybody who says "Turn it into a movie." that they should turn it into a ten-hour miniseries or something. Actually film the whole thing. But I don't think it really does [affect my creative process], they don't really feed back into each other. When I'm writing a book I think of it as a book, and tend to hope that somebody else will have the problem of writing a screenplay that will somehow spiritually stay faithful to whatever I've done, while factually... doing all sorts of strange things to it.
KD: Two of the new books that you have out are The Wolves In the Walls and Coraline. I think it's interesting that you started writing books for young-adults, or children, at a time when your kids are older. Most of your children are almost grown, right?
NG: Well, two of them are. I still have a small one. In fact, it was Maddy, she's 8, going on 9... I started Coraline in about 1990 or '91 for my daughter Holly, and there's an old English saying, which is "The shoemaker's family goes barefoot." I mentioned this as I went around Europe being interviewed, and I found that every language has an equivalent saying, including "The knife-maker's family eat with wooden fork." I think that's a Polish one which I rather liked, or was that Italian? Could've been Portuguese. Anyway, the trouble is, if you're doing something for your family it tends to come in last, and Coraline came in last because nobody wanted it, nobody was yelling for it. It didn't seem like a book that was being written for any other purpose than to amuse Holly, and I was writing in my own time. Around about 1992 I ran out of my own time, after moving to the States, so then there was a period of about four or five years where I managed about seven pages. It really was Maddy getting born in '94 and then me just sortof realizing that if I didn't get a move on she'd be too old for it. [laughs] That's what actually spurred me back into Coraline, and into finishing it. I finished it, and I handed it in, it went on to be this international bestseller, and I went "Gosh, I should've finished that ten years earlier."
KD: You've said that children read Coraline as an adventure, while adults find it terrifying.
NG: What is weird is that ten year olds don't. I didn't know this was going to happen when I wrote it; it was more something that we discovered empirically once the book had come out, and was being tried out. Teachers would say "I read this and I got up at 3 o'clock in the morning walking around the house and turning on the lights, but I read it to my class and they thought it was hilarious." I think a lot of it, I could be wrong, but this is just sortof trying to figure out after the fact, I think a lot of it is because kids and adults are reading a different book. When adults read that the Other Mother has black buttons for eyes they go "Oh, that is so scary. That is so weird. The eyes are the windows to the soul. You can't see them. The idea that these buttons have been sewn on is horrifying." It has echoes of the idea of pennies on the eyes of the dead... all of this kind of stuff. When kids read about black button eyes they go "Oh, that would be cool to draw!" and they draw pictures of the Other Mother with black buttons for eyes. When adults read about Coraline, a pre-teenage girl, she's probably somewhere between 7 and 9, going up against ghosts and things of horror and so-forth they are reading a book about a child in danger, and it's a really scary, strange, and upsetting thing for an adult to read about a child in danger. All of your protective impulses come out. Also, adults know that I'm a dangerous psychotic. I could easily do something absolutely awful to this child. Kids don't worry about that. They, on the whole, seem to trust me. They don't look on it as a book about a child in danger, they look on it as a book about somebody who is fairly competent and fairly bright having an adventure going up against something bad, but it's a ghost train or a roller-coaster ride. They know that I'm not going to do anything horrible and they're going to come out safe at the other end. My favorite of all those moments was somewhere on one of the European tours that I did earlier this year. I wish I could remember which stop it was, but I did Portugal, Spain, Holland, Poland, Italy, France, Belgium, and Denmark. It all sort of blurred after awhile, but there was somebody who told me she was reading it to her 8 year old son and got rather upset, and nervous, and freaked-out, and her son patted her on the hand and said "It's okay, it's only a story." Which I thought was a very reassuring place to be. Kids understand that. Kids are really good at fiction.
KD: You started out in journalism, and then you went into comics -- had the best selling adult comic of all time, and then best-selling novels, then TV, movies. How important is it to you, when you move into a new medium, to do work that is among the best in that medium? To do "excellent work" like you said in a recent speech?
NG: It's always important to do excellent work, but what I tend to do first is something crap to start off with. I'm still learning, and that, to me, is the important bit. I'm never going to go into a new medium going "Hey, I am now going to break all the rules, rewrite what people think, and I'm going to win all the awards." and stuff like that. I tend to go into new media going "I have no idea what I'm doing. Let me make some mistakes and learn from them, and then let me do something different next time and make some new mistakes." If I have any sort of philosophy, it's probably something like that. I'm getting to the point now where I'm fairly satisfied with the last two screenplays I wrote, actually, the last three screenplays I wrote I'm quite happy with: MirrorMask, Death: The High Cost of Living, and The Fermata, which I did for Robert Zemeckis. [The Fermata] is a very, very strange film, which he wanted me to do adapt for him. It's a novel by a man called Nicholson Baker that is essentially a pornographic novel about somebody who can stop time and undress women. Bob Zemeckis decided he really wanted to make a film of it, and approached me. I said it was un-filmable and "No.", and then he came back to me several years later and said, "Please." Then I looked at it and said "Okay, I think I have some ideas, and I had a wonderful time writing it." I think my first screenplay would've been the one I did for Good Omens with Terry Pratchett in about 1990 or '91. So I think it took me ten years to actually become fairly good at writing screenplays.
KD: Why is having an online journal important to you, and why do you keep it going?
NG: Madness. Lunacy. It started out with a very, very specific goal. When you look at a film that has a writer in it there's a point where they tend to go into montage. You see the writer, he writes something, types the words "The End", and he pulls that last sheet of paper out of the typewriter. Then the screen goes all fuzzy and you see the thing coming up on the screen "#1 Bestseller", and I thought... nobody who isn't an editor or a writer knows very much about the process of what happens next. I thought, with American Gods, that there was a really interesting process that was going to go on, and it almost had a plot because we were going to find out: was this going to be a bestseller? What was going to happen? I thought it would be fun to take people backstage. So, I started the journal very quietly. We opened the website, it was AmericanGods.com I think at that point, and I just had a page with a photo of me on it, and it was a so-so countdown thing. We didn't announce it,or advertise it, or do anything, really, we just sortof started it. The "we" here is Harper-Collins [publishing] and myself. I found that I enjoyed it an awful lot. I enjoyed writing these little essays, and then I knew why I was writing it: it was to take people backstage. That was February through to September of 2001, and it took us through publication, and it took us through the tour, and through September the 11th. Then I looked around in September and I realized that by that point we had 20,000 people who were reading it, and I thought that was an awful lot. When I made noises about wrapping it up people immediately started grumbling, and I had really enjoyed... there was a level of immediacy that I loved. Just the fact that if something was coming out, if something was happening, if something was going on, I could talk about it, and I could talk about it immediately. The September the 11th stuff happened, and it was very good being able to have that journal at that moment, that connection with people. So I thought, "Oh, I'll keep it going for a few months." It's now been going for two and a half years, which in Internet time means I was blogging with the dinosaurs. The stegosauruses saying "Damn Livejournal has collapsed on me again." I still don't know how long it has for this world. I love doing it, but I am also starting to get more and more aware that I haven't written a novel since I've had the journal. I've written other things but I've not written a novel, and I need to write a novel. I may very well close down the journal while I'm writing a novel, because it works best for me just to go off and write and not have distractions, answer as little email as possible, and do as few interviews as possible. I suspect that the journal... the terrible thing about the journal is that it can make me feel like I'm working when I'm not. I can put together a really long, funny, entertaining "This is what I did today." or "This is what's going on." or "Here's some great links.", and I walk away with the pride of having written something cool.
KD: ... and then you feel like you've written for the day.
NG: And then I feel like I've written for me for then, especially when I've gotten carried away and wrote a thousand or two thousand word thing. I really feel like "Hey! Look! I did my writing!" and that can be a problem. Now, of course, we're in this weird world where we have 200,000 people reading this thing every month - and I thought 20,000 was a lot! Plus we're getting more because 1,400 people subscribe to it through Livejournal, and of them we have at least 4,000 people reading it. When Livejournal went mad and weird a few months ago, and people on Livejournal clicked on the page to see what was going on we suddenly had 4,000 more people reading it. An awful lot of people actually read this thing, many of whom, I have to add, have no idea who I am as a writer -- do not read my books, have no interesting comics, but just sortof know that this is one of those places you can go on the web each day where something interesting is probably being said. [laughs]
KD: One idea that recurs in a lot of your work is the idea that there's this whole other world going on around us that we don't realize. The gods walking among us in American Gods, things like that. Where did that idea come from, for you?
NG: Fuck knows. Really, in some ways it's just how I see the world. I've always assumed that whoever you are and whatever you're seeing, you're seeing the tip of an iceberg, and I think as a metaphor it's true for people too. There's a line in Sandman, in A Game of You, where I said, "People are worlds." People have worlds inside them, and we see a tiny bit on the surface. I also think it's true that cultures have worlds, and I also think it's true that cultures have magic. Part of the desire, for me, when I was writing American Gods was to try and give readers an idea of how strange it was for me coming to America, and the world that I saw when I first moved out here. If you live in America, you tend to take America for granted just as a goldfish takes the water in the pool for granted, and the idea that this could be a strange, weird, and magical place is something that might not occur to you. The same really goes for London. For me, London is Neverwhere. There's always this feeling of weird, magical stuff happening out on the edges. There's always this feeling to me of this mysterious world going on underneath, and a lot of it is just trying to put that feeling into words, and how successful I am I don't know. If it's a repeating theme, it's probably a repeating theme more because that's how I see a world than because I set out at the beginning to go "Right, I shall find a theme and it shall repeat." It's always embarrassing. I'm now to the point where I've written enough that people write these theses and these Masters thingies and they give them to me, and I look at them and they go "Ahh, Repeating Themes. The Use of Space as Metaphor in the Work of Gaiman." I don't want to read this stuff! I had to talk to a class of university students in Bologna, and the professor got up and talked about what I do, and repeating themes, before I was to talk, and it was quite worrying! Not only had she described the last couple of books that I'd written, she'd described fairly accurately the next two books I planned to write. [laughs] I'd been so proud of myself, because I'd thought they were so different from anything I'd done before, and then realizing... no, they're exactly what she's describing. It was very strange. It gave me pause.
KD: When you return to the U.K., now, do you see things in that culture that you took for granted while you were living there?
NG: Oh, I think you always do. It's really weird now, because I've been away for ten years, going back a lot, but I'm still reading the U.K. papers, because you can online, and listening to English radio. I wind up in a position where I definitely don't feel American, but I also know that I'm not quite English anymore. My life has just dissolved into a general state of "You aren't from around here, are you?" [laughs]
KD: What was your research like for American Gods? It feels like you took a road trip.
NG: I did! It was funny, because I had a lot of ideas for what I wanted to do for American Gods, so I got to sortof fold eight years of having lived here, which I then counted as research, but I also knew the various patterns of the journey people were going to be taking in the story. For example, I'd plotted out this scene in a deserted motel long before I actually discovered that at the precise center of America, on the 11 in Kansas, there is an abandoned motel.
KD: Now I have some member questions for you.
NG: Ask me your member questions! I love the idea of doing this for Suicidegirls.
KD: Where did you hear about the site?
NG: One of those magazines, Bust or the other one, the nouveau-feminists things, had a whole article on it about a year ago, and I remember reading it and going "Oh! That looks really sensible and cool. I like that. Empowering porn, what a cool idea." Then I went and looked at the site and saw smart people having fun talking, and great interviews. I was impressed by the Barry Yourgrau pieces, because I've always liked him as a writer. He really writes like dreams feel. Just knowing it was there was fun. A few months ago I checked in for the first time since then, wondering if there were more Barry Yourgrau pieces, and saw that you had the Roger Avary interview, and the Henry Selick interview, all these things, so I shopped out the link on my site and Suicidegirls promptly did the same. That was fun, talking to people from there, and so I was perfectly happy to be interviewed.
KD: You did some work for Penthouse, right?
NG: Oh yeah, when I started out as a starving young writer, being the stuff that wasn't porn in the English, incredibly soft-core, porn magazine, was what put food on my table. It paid my rent. It bought me my first typewriter. There was a remarkable freedom. I loved it, because there was this idea, particularly... I think I wrote for Penthouse, wrote for Knave. Knave was the one I wrote the most for, but there were several others. There was always this lovely idea that because people were only buying the magazine for the naked ladies and the rude letters, you could put anything else you liked in there. So I was doing interviews with anyone I wanted to. I did the first major interview with Alan Moore. I did Douglas Adams, Terry Jones, and a mad English poet called John Cooper Clark. I interviewed science-fiction writers, and cool, strange people. Anyone I wanted to meet.
KD: That's exactly what I do. [laughs]
NG: What you're doing is what I did circa 1983, '84, '85, only it wasn't on the web, and it was great. I had a book review column, and a film review column, and spent my early twenties in London meeting everybody that I wanted to meet and seeing every film I wanted to see and reading every book I wanted to read, and all for nothing, and when people asked me what I did I looked at them proudly and said "I'm a pornographer", although I never actually was.
KD: You mentioned Alan Moore; I've read that he worships an ancient Roman snake god. Do you worship anything?
NG: No, but I think that if I did... I can't really worship ancient Roman snake gods because Alan has now cornered that market. There's the trouble. Alan gets in there and he does it so well that anybody coming in later... It's why I've never grown a serious beard. If I grew a serious beard people would just look at me and go "Oh, he's doing Alan Moore." If I announced that I was going to start worshipping a 4th century B.C. Babylonian camel god people would just say, "Oh, he's doing Alan."
KD: In the last year there've been quite a few comic book movies, but they're mostly superhero movies. What do you think about that?
NG: Well, they are mostly superhero movies, but what happens is people don't notice the ones that aren't, and don't think of them as comic book movies; things like Ghost World and American Splendor, the new Harvey Pekar movie. Then there are all these movies that happen under the radar that really are comic book movies, but nobody notices, like Men In Black, and things like that. What do I think? Not a lot, really. The most interesting thing for me is that there's an almost 1:1 success ratio of the recent movies between how faithful they are to the spirit of the comic and how successful they are, which fascinates me. All of the places where they dumb them down or change them are generally where they fail.
KD: And it's great that people can now say that someone "dumbed down" a comic.
NG: I love that. I love the fact that all the complaints about League of Extraordinary Gentleman were from journalists. God! Journalists! Journalists saying "While the comic book is smart and wonderful, they've kindof dumbed it down and made it stupid." And I was like "Yes!" What is interesting is not that that hasn't happened before, that's been happening going back to Flash Gordon, or whatever, but the fact that somebody noticed is magic. The fact that a lot of the journalists complaining about The Hulk movie were complaining about all of the things Ang Lee had done where he thought he knew better. All of the things Sam Rami did right I felt like Ang Lee did wrong. In the Rami film [Spiderman] the first thing that happens is that he gets bitten by a spider. Yes! Then stuff happens and then he's Spiderman. You go to a Hulk film, you know that two minutes into the film Bruce Banner needs to be trying to rescue this kid out on the Gamma-ray testing field, get caught by the Gamma-ray bomb, and turn into the Hulk. That's what has to happen a few minutes in, and it doesn't. You just get this interminable movie, and he doesn't turn into the Hulk until halfway through; even then you're going "Why did I get all that plot and what the Hell was that about?" The places where they change things are the places where things tend not to work. Having said that, I think the biggest reason comic books are so successful in Hollywood is that studio execs do not have imaginations, and they're not very good at extrapolating. So if they have pictures, they're sortof like storyboards, and they can see things without having to imagine too hard, so they get very happy.
KD: In Smoke and Mirrors, the story "The Goldfish Bowl", you say that some of the story is true. Which parts?
NG: Oh... let's see. Large chunks of that story are true, and most of it is based on the experiences that Terry Pratchett and I had working on Good Omens in the early '90s. They put us up at the Chateau Marmont, and, I must say, I love the Chateau Marmont. The Chateau Marmont these days is this weird old goofy 1920s Hollywood hotel, and it's where I tend to stay whenever I'm in Los Angeles because I like it there, and they like me there, and we get along. It's nice to have somewhere that's just sortof the place that you go and you don't have to learn where everything is, and they make allowances for my faults and I make allowances for theirs. That was the 1991 Chateau Marmont, it's been renovated since then, where your feet stuck to the orange carpeting in the lobby with a sortof glooping tacky noise and you looked at your feet, and everybody to whom you said "I'm at the Chateau Marmont" would say "Oh, you know that's where John Belushi died?" The first time you would say "No, I didn't." and after that you would say "Yes, I did." Everybody would tell you different stories and I wanted to get that in, and then I sortof piled in dozens of other weird Hollywood experiences that'd happened to me between then and the time of writing the story, which I think was about '95. It was actually a very good thing to write if only because it meant that when I decided to go back and do more Hollywood stuff in the later '90s I'd keep talking to execs who had read that story and were terrified that if they misbehaved I'd put them in another story. They'd always start off the conversation "Oh, I read that story of yours. We hope you won't have an experience like that here. Ha. Ha." That was very good, put them on their best behavior.
KD: Don't let Neil stay at your hotel or he'll write a story about it.
NG: [laughs] Exactly. Then he'll write a story about the meeting. The kinds of things that are said in those meetings [in "The Goldfish Bowl"] are all pretty much accurate summations of the kinds of things you will hear said in Hollywood meetings. Non-Hollywood people tend to read that story as satire, and Hollywood people tend to read it as reportage.
KD: What do you think when you see people with tattoos of your work?
NG: Mostly it's an honor. Mostly I tend to see it as an honor. Whatever qualities I had of potentially being weirded-out or potentially being dumbfounded about it went away in about 1990 or '91 when I was doing a signing at Golden Apple in Los Angeles on Melrose. Somebody was in the line right near the front and they asked me to sign their arm, and I did. With a Sharpie it's easier to sign somebody's arm than not. The guy turned up again at the very end of the signing four hours later; he'd gone over and got back in the line, and he'd had my signature tattooed in the meantime. It was so freshly done that it'd just been sprayed with liquid skin, and it was still beading blood. He just wanted to show me, very proudly, that he'd had my signature tattooed on his arm. At that point my weirdness meter just went "Ding!" and it was done. I remember there was a tour I did a few years ago where I did a signing in L.A., and there were two girls who were... if they were 18, they couldn't have been 18 for very long. They were first in the line, and they said, "If we wait till later would you draw on us?" and I said "Sure." So at the very end of the signing, they've hung around for five hours, through 700 people or whatever, and I said, "What do you want me to draw on you?" One of them said she wanted a pirate thing, and the other one said something else, and I did a drawing, in Sharpie, on each of their backs. Then they looked at me and said, "Great! Now we're going to go and get these tattooed." I said, "You haven't even looked over. You haven't even seen if you like them. Do me one thing: do not go to an all-night tattooist now. At least wait until tomorrow morning. It's Sharpie; it'll still be there. At least look in the mirror and see if you want these tattoos." [laughs]
KD: What year did you start noticing that obsessive fan reaction?
NG: It was certainly there by about 1990 or '91. I suppose there was a little of it before, but probably when I did the signing tour for the Season of Mist hardback when that was released. I think that was the summer of '91, although I could be wrong. I would go to these signings and there'd be 500 people at every signing, and there would be people with my stuff tattooed on them, and there would be people who looked like my characters. We weren't quite at the point where anybody associated Sandman with the Goth world, mainly because there wasn't a Goth world at that point, except for a very, very small, cool Goth world that communicated in black & white magazines. '94 was when I first remember people showing up at signings who had hair dyed black, and all black clothes, who looked like they'd be more comfortable in Hawaiian shirts with hair their natural sandy color. That was the first time it'd ever occurred to me that, up until that point, anybody who was at a signing and dressing all in black was probably dressing in black because they'd gone through all the other colors and decided that black worked, and they'd stopped there.
KD: Were you aware of that [small] Goth culture when you started writing Sandman?
NG: Well, bear in mind that when we started writing the comic that it was '87. The English Goth movement had come and gone, sortof following the New Romantics. We weren't trying for a Goth quality, because having that conversation wouldn't have made any sense at that point. It wasn't like there was anything you could point at and say, "Aha, yes, we're doing this." I wanted a set of looks and feelings and part of it was defined by what I was doing, and part of it was defined by what Mike Dringenberg brought to Death. Part of it was just something that was happening in the culture at the time, and so it just sortof spread out. So no, it wasn't like going "Ah, there is this cool movement and we will tap into it." Frankly, the cool movement wasn't going to be there for another five or six years as a visible force, and probably another decade as a commercial force. [laughs] You couldn't have supported a Hot Topic at that point, let's put it that way.
KD: Music always seems to play an important part in your stories. Do you still listen to music as much as you did when you were younger?
NG: Yes I do. Although the music's... I was about to say "the music's different" but actually sometimes it isn't, which is really weird. Having stopped listening to him for twenty years, I've just rediscovered David Bowie, which is very odd. Not only do I love all his old albums, but I also love some of his new stuff. How cool is that? [To himself] What am I listening to currently? There's a really, really cool English singer called Thea Gilmore, who I think is the most interesting singer-songwriter probably since Elvis Costello. She's incredibly young, and incredibly good. Her last album was called Songs From the Gutter. The one before that was Rules For Jokers, and right now she seems to be doing roughly an album every six months; which I don't think anybody in the record business approves of because "She's spreading herself too thin" and blah, blah, blah. She just keeps writing songs and recording them.
She's prolific, and she's really good, and each album is different, and the lyrics are smart. I am such a sucker for smart lyrics. I think that's why I fell in love with the Gothic Archies in 1996 from the Hello CD of the Month Club, which was this weird little thing that They Might Be Giants used to run. Each month you'd get an EP on a CD, and I just remember the Gothic Archies' one arriving.
KD: They've done work for you, also.
NG: They have. It's a mad genius named Stephin Merritt, who's actually not mad, but is a genius. I just remember listening to that, and the combination of bubblegum tunes with these magnificently mournful lyrics. Songs like "The City of the Damned" [sings] "Come along with me to the City of the Damned..." and "Ride the Magic Hearse". Then I hunted down everything else that Stephin Merritt had done, and discovered the Magnetic Fields, and the Future Bible Heroes, the 6ths, and these various other strange incarnations. Which was nice, because I was listening to the Magnetic Fields before the Magnetic Fields were cool. I'm very lucky now, because people give me too much music. When I'm on the road people give me music, and the only thing that gets confusing then is sometimes trying to hunt down what the music is that they've given me. You're never quite sure if it's something they've recorded themselves, or if it's something they think I should know.
KD: Why do you think it is that people, when they have a connection with an author, have that urge to give them presents?
NG: It's a very, very weird experience having an author that you've made a connection with, because you feel on some levels that you know them really well, and on some levels you do, except they don't know you. For me, growing up, I felt like Harlan Ellison was one of my friends, and somebody who I admired a great deal, and somebody who was brilliant. I lived inside his head and I supposed he must've lived inside mine. Samuel R. Delany, perhaps the same, although with Harlan you had that weird confessional, or explanational, element around the stories which meant that you always felt very close to him. Ray Bradbury is somebody who [could] write a short story which actually felt like it was a part of me. There are Bradbury stories imprinted on my DNA. So there is a level of connection. Then it gets weird, because all of a sudden I'm meeting Harlan, I'm meeting Ray, and even weirder meeting Samuel R. "Chip" Delany and discovering he was as much a fan of mine as I was a fan of his. I actually got quite offended, "No, no, no, you can't be. I'm the Samuel R. Delany fan. Shut up." It's a weird process, and people do know you, or at least they know part of you, and they know something about the talent. Sometimes you've written a story that changed the way that somebody saw the world forever. It may not be anything to do with how good the story was, and an awful lot to do with that person needing to meet that idea at that point in their life. But you've done something huge and important for them. I try and explain to people how the signings work... I did an interview with Publisher's Weekly, and he was kindof amazed, because people turn out for my signings in numbers that almost no authors get. Lots of much better selling and more famous authors don't get the numbers that I get. He said, "Why do they come?" and I said, "Well, mostly I think they come to say 'Thank you'". Yes they'd quite like something signed, but for sixty or seventy percent of them the having-something-signed is an excuse to get into that line so they can say "Hello" and so they can say "Thank you" for writing something that mattered to them.
KD: Have long have you been married?
NG: God, about twenty years now.
KD: What do you think the secret is to keep a marriage going that long?
NG: In my case, I think that it mostly has to do with the fact that there's always stuff I'm completely crap at. Like dealing with the real world. Division of labor, I think, is probably what works best for us, because I think in every partnership I think you get one person walking along the ground holding the string and one person sortof floating in the air. Mary is really good at doing things that I... it's not that they terrify me, they just sortof feel not part of my universe. Like speaking to the people at the bank, talking to accountants, dealing with tax people, about which I feel about as comfortable as if somebody'd said "You have to deal with aliens". Actually, I think I'd feel a lot more comfortable dealing with aliens. So, she does all the real stuff. Everything that happens in the real world, she makes it happen. Then I get to go off and daydream and make things up and write them down, and that kind of works.
Neil Gaiman's online journal, along with news on his latest works, and a complete bibliography, can be found at
Thanks also go to Fortissimo, , , Apathyactivist, PipGoesToHel, Antenna, and Quest for their questions which were used, in whole or in part, in this interview.
VIEW 25 of 51 COMMENTS
revelation:
This is a great interview, although a bit old: mirrormask opened in 2005. . .
ygritte:
Wow, quite an interesting interview. I like the tour through Neil's head and the epiphany he has on point of view for children and adults in the bit about Coraline is quite intriguing. It was a well led interview.