Well Hello There All you Happy People
Oh Poop. I have been a bad boy, and have not kept up with my Quotable Neil Blog in a very long while... I have skipped Christmas and New Years, and all tht sweet-sugary stuff that I am sure Neil Gaiman fans will want to have read about...
Unfortunately, something to do with either Neil's Blog or my computer makes it very hard for me to cut and paste text from his entries into mine, and I therefore have been lax in my duties, since so much more work is now required on my part. But I will do my best in the new year to adapt and put more quotes from everyone's favorite, shaggy englishman writer on this page.
Here's a fat juicy one with all kinds of comments on Neil's craft:
--RRNN
“I'm on deadline. Actually it's worse than that -- I'm on deadline on several things, which means I can't simply fall off the earth for a few days and wrap up whatever's late, because there are other things to do as well. (Deadlines sometimes run in packs, damn it.)
So I'm mostly working down at the bottom of the garden, not doing much email, my phone turned off. (This is being typed by me in bed before getting up in the morning, while also on the phone, and put together from an unfinished blog post from the last few days.)”
-- Neil Gaiman 08/29/06
“I've been published in Fantasy and Science Fiction, and in Realms of Fantasy (who reprinted "Troll Bridge" in their early years). There are a few magazines that published me over the years that don't exist any longer. I haven't dealt with the others out there currently, because I don't write enough short stories, so cannot speak for popularity or respectedness or payment rates and speed of payment (most writers I know rate the latter two conditions before the former).As a general rule, though, a short story writer should probably send her work to anyone who will both pay for and publish it. Making a list of all possible places who would publish it, from most desirable to least, is always good. And then, when it comes back from the first one she sent it to she should send it to the second one on her list, and she should repeat the process, moving down the list, until someone sends her an acceptance letter and a cheque.”
-- Neil Gaiman 08/29/06
“It's nice to learn that I'm a perverse romantic. Spread out all over the kitchen table in a drafty kitchen I was mostly worried that the collection of stories was all rather depressing.
Also nice to learn that I'm a neo-goth-pulp-noir author. Next time anyone asks me what kind of an author I am, I can finally tell them. I wonder if there are any other neo-goth-pulp-noir authors out there. We could form a society or something.”
-- Neil Gaiman 07/11/06
“I wrote the words "The End" today, out in my little writing cabin (actually I wrote my name and the date) on page 306 of the leather-covered book in which I've been writing Anansi Boys. (Although I did 102 pages in another notebook when I was in Ireland.) Which doesn't mean the book is done -- more that, if this were a patchwork quilt, I've now cut out all the squares. Now I have to sew it all together -- there's around 42,000 words still untyped which now need to be typed and moved around and changed and polished and thrown away. But I know the shape of it, and I know it all ends on a beach, and with a song, and I know what happens in Basil Finnegan's meat cellar, and where Fat Charlie got the lime from. So that's all right.”
-- Neil Gaiman 12/31/04
“I think I wrote most of Act 3 of the thing I'm doing with Penn Jillette in about two utterly mad days and nights. (I am very unshaven, and the white of one eye has gone bright red, so I look really scary and vaguely manic.)
"When we do Letterman," said Penn, today, "I'll tell him it took us eight years."
Of course, it sort of did. We had the idea for this shortly after we first met properly, on the Babylon 5 Episode I wrote, "Day of the Dead", in 1998. It then took us four years to track down who controlled the rights, and another four years to find the time to get together and do it. And our eventual solution was that we don't have time to do it so we may just as well put it on our calendars and do it anyway, which was what we did.
So today we took everything he wrote, everything I wrote and everything we wrote and we stitched it together, and were astounded that it came to about 128 pages of film script -- which is probably about 8 pages beyond where it should be, but I do no doubt that once it's been trimmed it'll run to about 120 pages.
Deadlines. One down. Five or six or seven to go.”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/03/06
“I don't know that I can be objective. On the one hand, in a country of, what, nearly 300 million people, there are a few hundred novel writers, if that, who support themselves only though writing fiction, maybe another few hundred, at most a thousand, who completely support themselves scriptwriting for films and TV, and at a guess somewhere around 50 people who support themselves writing comics. And as someone who is earning more than a decent living wage from all three fields, I know I'm in a tiny, very very lucky minority.
On the other hand, it really is 90% just showing up and doing the work, and doing it as well as you can. (I remember one comics writer, now long gone from the field, telling me I was an idiot for spending 3-4 weeks on a Sandman script. She'd figured out how much her time was worth, and never took more than 24 hours to write a single issue of a comic. On the other hand, all the Sandmans have stayed in print, in trade paperback, for year after year, and have more than repaid the effort I put into them.) A certain, single-minded, idiot persistence in the face of all odds is certainly very useful.
So it's obviously not an impossible dream, as far as I'm concerned. And it probably is for a lot of other people. And some of them may find, as with any dream, that once you've got it, it's not what you want any longer.
And furthermore, when you take away the condition of "making a living" and add in those writers who teach, or doctor, or police, or do another kind of writing, or whatever, to make the money to supplement or to support their writing habits, you get a lot more "working writers" out there -- and a lot more varied author biographies.”
-- Neil Gaiman 06/18/03
“When I said "I love collaborating. And I love being in control too. As long as I get both I'm fine." I meant that I like the mixture, going back and forth from collaborating to doing things that were mine, and I did not mean that I only like collaborating if I'm in charge…”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/15/06
“I fell off the world for a couple of days, and finished up a bunch of incomplete things. The most overdue was the H. G. Wells introduction for a Penguin Modern Classics collection of his SF short stories, and that, along with a couple of other things, is now on the done side of the ledger, and I am so much happier. I'm going to fall back onto the world tonight, but in the meantime...”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/12/06
“Mostly I just carry on. The bad stuff can mostly be fixed or thrown out. The most valuable thing is the period between finishing it and when you reread it pretending you've never read it before and definitely didn't write it, the few weeks when you allow yourself to forget it. Then when you read it as a new reader, sometimes it's obvious what to do to fix anything that needs fixing. I'll also send stuff out to people whose opinions I trust, explaining that until it's done they aren't really allowed to say much more than "Is there any more?" but once it's complete I'm happy to take all and any input onboard. Just as long as no-one minds me throwing it back overboard as soon as I start rewriting.
(Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what's wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.)”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/29/04
“Several people wanted to know my opinion on Anne Rice's recent outburst on Amazon.com.
I think that unless a reviewer gets their facts completely wrong, the author should shut up (and even then, the author should probably let it go -- although I'm a big fan of a letter that James Branch Cabell wrote to the New York Times pointing out that their review of FIGURES OF EARTH was bollocks*). As Kingsley Amis said, a bad review may spoil your breakfast, but you shouldn't let it spoil your lunch.
I suspect that most authors don't really want criticism, not even constructive criticism. They want straight-out, unabashed, unashamed, fulsome, informed, naked praise, arriving by the shipload every fifteen minutes or so. Unfortunately an Amazon.com reviews page for one of the author's books is the wrong place to go looking for this. Probably best just not to look.
(On the other hand, the statement "You read it wrong" is not an entirely meaningless one. When I first read Gene Wolfe's PEACE, aged 17, I thought it was a bucolic and sort of pointless set of reminiscences by a sweet old man. When I read it again, aged 26, having spent some years as a writer and critic, I found myself, rather to my surprise, reading a deeply chilling and murderous novel narrated by one of the darkest characters in literature, who was a ghost to boot. But Gene Wolfe isn't going to make people who didn't like or get PEACE suddenly like it by going on Amazon and telling them it was too good or too clever for them, even if it was.)
When you publish a book -- when you make art -- people are free to say what they want about it. You can't tell people they liked a book they didn't like, and there is, in the end, no arguing with personal taste. Different people like different things. Best to move on and make good art as best you can, instead of arguing.
I think Anne Rice going on Amazon and lambasting her critics was undoubtedly a very brave and satisfying thing for her to do, was every bit as sensible as kicking a tar baby, and, if ever I do something like that, please shoot me...
For most authors, not being James Branch Cabell, it's probably wisest after reading a particularly stupid or vicious or bad review to mentally compose your letter to the editor, fill it with your sharpest and most cutting and brilliant bon mots, and then, having made it up, to successfully resist the urge to put it to paper, and to return cheerfully to work.”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/22/04
“Big Deadline is still a thing of madness. The other two little deadlines at its feet chivvy and squeak and grunt and bare their sharp little teeth. Several smaller deadlines howl impatiently from the bushes outside.
Argh.”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/01/06
Unfortunately, something to do with either Neil's Blog or my computer makes it very hard for me to cut and paste text from his entries into mine, and I therefore have been lax in my duties, since so much more work is now required on my part. But I will do my best in the new year to adapt and put more quotes from everyone's favorite, shaggy englishman writer on this page.
Here's a fat juicy one with all kinds of comments on Neil's craft:
--RRNN
“I'm on deadline. Actually it's worse than that -- I'm on deadline on several things, which means I can't simply fall off the earth for a few days and wrap up whatever's late, because there are other things to do as well. (Deadlines sometimes run in packs, damn it.)
So I'm mostly working down at the bottom of the garden, not doing much email, my phone turned off. (This is being typed by me in bed before getting up in the morning, while also on the phone, and put together from an unfinished blog post from the last few days.)”
-- Neil Gaiman 08/29/06
“I've been published in Fantasy and Science Fiction, and in Realms of Fantasy (who reprinted "Troll Bridge" in their early years). There are a few magazines that published me over the years that don't exist any longer. I haven't dealt with the others out there currently, because I don't write enough short stories, so cannot speak for popularity or respectedness or payment rates and speed of payment (most writers I know rate the latter two conditions before the former).As a general rule, though, a short story writer should probably send her work to anyone who will both pay for and publish it. Making a list of all possible places who would publish it, from most desirable to least, is always good. And then, when it comes back from the first one she sent it to she should send it to the second one on her list, and she should repeat the process, moving down the list, until someone sends her an acceptance letter and a cheque.”
-- Neil Gaiman 08/29/06
“It's nice to learn that I'm a perverse romantic. Spread out all over the kitchen table in a drafty kitchen I was mostly worried that the collection of stories was all rather depressing.
Also nice to learn that I'm a neo-goth-pulp-noir author. Next time anyone asks me what kind of an author I am, I can finally tell them. I wonder if there are any other neo-goth-pulp-noir authors out there. We could form a society or something.”
-- Neil Gaiman 07/11/06
“I wrote the words "The End" today, out in my little writing cabin (actually I wrote my name and the date) on page 306 of the leather-covered book in which I've been writing Anansi Boys. (Although I did 102 pages in another notebook when I was in Ireland.) Which doesn't mean the book is done -- more that, if this were a patchwork quilt, I've now cut out all the squares. Now I have to sew it all together -- there's around 42,000 words still untyped which now need to be typed and moved around and changed and polished and thrown away. But I know the shape of it, and I know it all ends on a beach, and with a song, and I know what happens in Basil Finnegan's meat cellar, and where Fat Charlie got the lime from. So that's all right.”
-- Neil Gaiman 12/31/04
“I think I wrote most of Act 3 of the thing I'm doing with Penn Jillette in about two utterly mad days and nights. (I am very unshaven, and the white of one eye has gone bright red, so I look really scary and vaguely manic.)
"When we do Letterman," said Penn, today, "I'll tell him it took us eight years."
Of course, it sort of did. We had the idea for this shortly after we first met properly, on the Babylon 5 Episode I wrote, "Day of the Dead", in 1998. It then took us four years to track down who controlled the rights, and another four years to find the time to get together and do it. And our eventual solution was that we don't have time to do it so we may just as well put it on our calendars and do it anyway, which was what we did.
So today we took everything he wrote, everything I wrote and everything we wrote and we stitched it together, and were astounded that it came to about 128 pages of film script -- which is probably about 8 pages beyond where it should be, but I do no doubt that once it's been trimmed it'll run to about 120 pages.
Deadlines. One down. Five or six or seven to go.”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/03/06
“I don't know that I can be objective. On the one hand, in a country of, what, nearly 300 million people, there are a few hundred novel writers, if that, who support themselves only though writing fiction, maybe another few hundred, at most a thousand, who completely support themselves scriptwriting for films and TV, and at a guess somewhere around 50 people who support themselves writing comics. And as someone who is earning more than a decent living wage from all three fields, I know I'm in a tiny, very very lucky minority.
On the other hand, it really is 90% just showing up and doing the work, and doing it as well as you can. (I remember one comics writer, now long gone from the field, telling me I was an idiot for spending 3-4 weeks on a Sandman script. She'd figured out how much her time was worth, and never took more than 24 hours to write a single issue of a comic. On the other hand, all the Sandmans have stayed in print, in trade paperback, for year after year, and have more than repaid the effort I put into them.) A certain, single-minded, idiot persistence in the face of all odds is certainly very useful.
So it's obviously not an impossible dream, as far as I'm concerned. And it probably is for a lot of other people. And some of them may find, as with any dream, that once you've got it, it's not what you want any longer.
And furthermore, when you take away the condition of "making a living" and add in those writers who teach, or doctor, or police, or do another kind of writing, or whatever, to make the money to supplement or to support their writing habits, you get a lot more "working writers" out there -- and a lot more varied author biographies.”
-- Neil Gaiman 06/18/03
“When I said "I love collaborating. And I love being in control too. As long as I get both I'm fine." I meant that I like the mixture, going back and forth from collaborating to doing things that were mine, and I did not mean that I only like collaborating if I'm in charge…”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/15/06
“I fell off the world for a couple of days, and finished up a bunch of incomplete things. The most overdue was the H. G. Wells introduction for a Penguin Modern Classics collection of his SF short stories, and that, along with a couple of other things, is now on the done side of the ledger, and I am so much happier. I'm going to fall back onto the world tonight, but in the meantime...”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/12/06
“Mostly I just carry on. The bad stuff can mostly be fixed or thrown out. The most valuable thing is the period between finishing it and when you reread it pretending you've never read it before and definitely didn't write it, the few weeks when you allow yourself to forget it. Then when you read it as a new reader, sometimes it's obvious what to do to fix anything that needs fixing. I'll also send stuff out to people whose opinions I trust, explaining that until it's done they aren't really allowed to say much more than "Is there any more?" but once it's complete I'm happy to take all and any input onboard. Just as long as no-one minds me throwing it back overboard as soon as I start rewriting.
(Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what's wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.)”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/29/04
“Several people wanted to know my opinion on Anne Rice's recent outburst on Amazon.com.
I think that unless a reviewer gets their facts completely wrong, the author should shut up (and even then, the author should probably let it go -- although I'm a big fan of a letter that James Branch Cabell wrote to the New York Times pointing out that their review of FIGURES OF EARTH was bollocks*). As Kingsley Amis said, a bad review may spoil your breakfast, but you shouldn't let it spoil your lunch.
I suspect that most authors don't really want criticism, not even constructive criticism. They want straight-out, unabashed, unashamed, fulsome, informed, naked praise, arriving by the shipload every fifteen minutes or so. Unfortunately an Amazon.com reviews page for one of the author's books is the wrong place to go looking for this. Probably best just not to look.
(On the other hand, the statement "You read it wrong" is not an entirely meaningless one. When I first read Gene Wolfe's PEACE, aged 17, I thought it was a bucolic and sort of pointless set of reminiscences by a sweet old man. When I read it again, aged 26, having spent some years as a writer and critic, I found myself, rather to my surprise, reading a deeply chilling and murderous novel narrated by one of the darkest characters in literature, who was a ghost to boot. But Gene Wolfe isn't going to make people who didn't like or get PEACE suddenly like it by going on Amazon and telling them it was too good or too clever for them, even if it was.)
When you publish a book -- when you make art -- people are free to say what they want about it. You can't tell people they liked a book they didn't like, and there is, in the end, no arguing with personal taste. Different people like different things. Best to move on and make good art as best you can, instead of arguing.
I think Anne Rice going on Amazon and lambasting her critics was undoubtedly a very brave and satisfying thing for her to do, was every bit as sensible as kicking a tar baby, and, if ever I do something like that, please shoot me...
For most authors, not being James Branch Cabell, it's probably wisest after reading a particularly stupid or vicious or bad review to mentally compose your letter to the editor, fill it with your sharpest and most cutting and brilliant bon mots, and then, having made it up, to successfully resist the urge to put it to paper, and to return cheerfully to work.”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/22/04
“Big Deadline is still a thing of madness. The other two little deadlines at its feet chivvy and squeak and grunt and bare their sharp little teeth. Several smaller deadlines howl impatiently from the bushes outside.
Argh.”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/01/06
posted by Really_Rather_Not_Nice at 6:33 PM
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