My Writing Life: Neil Gaiman
"I imagined a writing career to be one of joy and wonder because you’re putting down the words and it’s magic but sometimes it's as glamorous as ditch-digging."
Neil Gaiman writes prose, poetry, film, journalism, comics, song lyrics, and drama, including American Gods, Good Omens and the Sandman comic book series, which have been turned into TV series. He’s won many awards, including the Newbery and Carnegie Medals, the Hugos, Nebulas, the World Fantasy Award, Bram Stoker Awards, Locus Awards, British SF Awards, British Fantasy Awards, Geffens, Mythopoeic Awards, and numerous others.
1. Who are the authors that got you into writing?
The authors that got me into writing would all have been authors who made it look fun and interesting. Reading C.S. Lewis was probably the first time I realised there was an author behind the word as C.S. Lewis put comments to the reader in parentheses. Roger Zelazny, American fantasy and science fiction writer, made writing look fun. He’d do goofy ambitious things brilliantly and I’d go I want to do this. Harlan Ellison, fabulist, gadfly and general glorious angry wit - I don’t know if it was Harlan’s stories so much as the introductions and the afterwords, and what he would put in about the writer’s life, and I would read it and I’d go, I want to be one of those; maybe I am one of those and I just have to write and find out. And I’d probably throw in Ursula Le Guin. Ursula would write these beautiful stories and I’d want to do that and then she’d write about writing in a way that made me want to do that too.
Writing is like trying to dance on a wall while people throw bricks at you.
2. What is the one thing you wish someone had told you before you started your writing career?
The one thing I wish somebody had told me before I started my writing career is that it’s not always fun. I imagined a writing career to be one of joy and wonder because you’re putting down the words and it’s magic, and what I didn’t realise is that if you’re writing a novel, it’s the same day, day after day. You have your story to tell and you have to keep telling it. Sometimes it’s as glamorous as ditch-digging and you still have to keep doing and maybe tomorrow it’ll be fabulous. And also, that there is no difference at the end of the day between the stuff you did when everything felt magical and you felt like you were writing with diamonds dripping from your fingers and the days when it felt as glamorous and interesting as trying to dig that ditch with a really bad headache. One day, eighteen months to two years from now, you’re going to be looking at the manuscript and you’re going to remember that some of it was written on good days and some of it was written on bad days and you have no idea which was which because it reads like you.
I remember standing in front of an audience and saying, “F*** I’ve got a Hugo!”
3. What is the most underestimated challenge about being a professional writer?
I think there are challenges to being a professional writer that were not on my list of things I thought I’d ever have to worry about when I started writing. Back ache is an amazing one. You sit there writing for hour after hour and your back hurts. You go out there and you sign books and maybe you will find yourself signing ten thousand books a day and what that means is you’re going to be icing your hands every night and by week three your hand is going to look like a rubber washing up glove that someone has partially inflated.
4. What was the proudest moment of your writing career?
The proudest moment of my writing career would be my first Hugo Award. I got it for American Gods. I was one hundred per cent certain that I wouldn’t get it -there were lots of amazing books on that shortlist. So I’m sitting there happily in the audience, not having written a speech, not even a list of thank yous, because I knew I wasn’t going to win. And then they called my name. I went up on the stage and I remember standing in front of an audience and saying, “F*** I’ve got a Hugo!”
Writing is an incredibly precarious profession. I’m really grateful that there are organisations like the RLF out there helping authors in need.
5. What is your typical writing day like?
I wish I had a typical writing day. The last time I had a typical writing day I was probably in New Zealand writing Good Omen Season 2. A typical writing day would be after delivering my small son to school I’d come home, I’d start writing. I’d have lunch and get back to writing. And I’d write until it was time to get my small son from school and after that, I’d write as much as I could. And that was a really easy writing day, because I was in New Zealand and everybody else on the planet was somewhere else and probably asleep.
These days my typical writing days are people trying to get hold of me, people trying to ask me questions; I have things to watch and approve and people waiting to talk to me and all of the urgent emails that have come in, and all of the absolutely urgent emails, and all of the emails if you do not answer this within the next half hour emails that have come in, and you try and do all that stuff while writing. It’s like trying to dance on a wall while people throw bricks at you.
Why is the work that the RLF does so important?
Writing is an incredibly precarious profession. I’m a successful writer, I’m one of 2, maybe 3 % of professional writers who earn their living by writing, from their books. So 97 - 98 % of us don’t, and in addition to that, we get old, we go out of fashion, we go out of print. It can be incredibly painful to realise that authors you grew up on, authors who were important to you, whose books were important to you, who you believed to be woven into the fabric of literature, sometimes even of society, have been forgotten and they need help. It can be one bad day, one car crash, one fall in the street, one small incident, which can leave an author penniless, in trouble, needing help, so I’m really grateful that there are organisations like the RLF out there helping authors in need.
Some pages are written on bad days, for real.
Thank you so much for this piece.❤️
I like the bricks, Neil. I'll keep that image in mind! [We've got a convenient wall].