On Writing (Again) and Weird Old Words

This post starts off as a fairly focused collection of on-writing quotes, and then degenerates into the ramblings of a madman on the english language. (Just kidding, I just decided to gather together a collection of quotes where Neil casts about for definitions or roots of old, oddball words, and the differences between Olde-English and American "english"... and tack them on the end of this post.) A short one this week, but still, enjoy!

“I just reread the pep talk I wrote for National Novel Writing Month, for authors who were at that point three-quarters of the way through the book when you just have to keep going, and it helped a bit. ("Hah!" I thought. "What do you know, foolish author-man?" But secretly I knew he had a point.)”
--Neil Gaiman 01/28/08

“There are things that you can do as an author in a narrative that are unfair to a reader. Ever read something really interesting that ended with a disappointing "And he woke up. It had all been a dream"? Normally it tends to be an incredibly irritating ending to a good book or short story, because it breaks part of the compact between reader and writer, that, in fiction, you're being told something that matters, and that you'll care about, and which will have consequences, and won't leave you feeling cheated. (I'm not saying that an author can't make "And then she woke up" work -- I loved using that as part of the ending of The Doll's House, and having it mean something very different. And it's the only way out of the Alice books that makes sense, but I've still not forgiven Masefield for the ending of the otherwise perfect The Box of Delights.)”
-- Neil Gaiman 07/05/04

“I don't think I've ever said there were no rules. I've definitely said that you can do a lot of interesting things by breaking them, and also by not knowing them. But overall, I tend to believe something that my old elocution teacher, Miss Webster, used to say, whenever I'd done what I considered a particularly interesting reading of something, which was, ‘Neil dear, please remember that before you can be properly eccentric, you must know where the circle is.’”
-- Neil Gaiman 07/05/04

“Given that art spiegelman's Maus won the 1992 Pulitzer prize, and is a, oddly enough, comic book about the Holocaust, I think that argument was settled 16 years ago. (Dave Sim's upcoming Secret Project is Holocaust-related, and is one of the most emotionally affecting things I've read in comic-book form.) I think any argument that states that comics (or radio or film or a musical or the novel or insert your favourite medium here...) by its nature trivialises its subject matter is foolish, shortsighted, dim, lazy and wrong. You can say "This is a bad comic." You can't say "This is bad because it's a comic."
--Neil Gaiman 02/21/08

“Sometimes it's nice to have an idea for a book or a story in the back of your head for years, accreting bits to it, growing and becoming bigger and more interesting, sometimes it's a worrying thing having a story you'd like to write and aren't getting to, for very occasionally, alone in the darkness, they die and rot and turn to mould and slime.It tends to be less intentional (except for The Graveyard Book, which was a better idea than I was a writer twenty years ago) than to do with how much I write and who's waiting for what.
Sometimes an old idea gets relegated to the back of the line in the mad delight of a new idea, one you've never had before, and that you write fast in the thrill of the new. No rules. Just stories, and you tell as many of them as you can.”
-- Neil Gaiman 01/25/08

“At a guess, either you aren't writing enough, you aren't finishing things, you aren't getting them published, or, if you're doing all of those, you're worrying about the wrong things. Anyway, famousness is probably about as useful for an author as a large, well-appointed hiking backpack would be for a prima ballerina. Honest.
Right. Back to work.”
(When asked: “I read your site everyday, and STILL I'm not a famous author, what am I doing wrong?”)
-- Neil Gaiman 11/29/07

“I have lots of ideas already. I don't have enough time to write my stuff.
If your idea is good, then you should write it. If you're not a good enough writer to do it justice, then get better. Write other things until you're good enough.
If you really want to collaborate with someone, then find a friend who writes, and wants to write with you.
There is a hunted expression you can see on the faces of writers. All you ever have to do, if you want to see it, is to walk over to a writer of fiction and say, "You know, I have an idea for a story. I'll tell it to you and you can write it and we'll split the money fifty-fifty." You will watch their smiles glaze over and watch them back away. Because no matter how good the idea, the execution is everything. And the real work is done at the keyboard or huddled over the notebook, putting one word down after another.
All of my collaborations have come about because at some point I was talking to a friend, and the phrase, "Why don't we do it together then?" was used. At its best it made for something cooler than either of us could have done individually, at its worst it made for something that tasted sort of like the authors, but not really...
The only reason I can think of for collaborating these days, is for fun. I loved collaborating with Gene Wolfe on A Walking Tour of the Shambles because I couldn't wait to get the next envelope with the next four pages in it from him.”
-- Neil Gaiman 01/05/08

“I think that rule number one for book reviewers should probably be Don't Spend The First Paragraph Slagging Off The Genre. Just don't. Don't start a review of romance books by saying that all romance books are rubbish but these are good (or just as bad as the rest). Don't start a review of SF by saying that you hate all off-planet tales or things set in the future and you don't like way SF writers do characters. Don't start a review of a University Adultery novel by explaining that mostly books about English professors having panicky academic sex bore you to tears but. Just don't. Any more than a restaurant reviewer would spend a paragraph explaining that she didn't normally like or eat -- or understand why other people would like or eat -- Chinese food, or French, or barbeque. It just makes people think you're not a very good reviewer.
One can assume that if a reviewer is reviewing a book then it's interesting enough to be reviewed. If you as a reviewer, begin by explaining why you don't like a genre, then you put up the backs of everyone who does, and is interested, and probably would be reading your review in the first place. And you lay yourself open to the cardinal sin of dim reviewers, which is excusing something from being part of a genre because it's good. Just assume that horror, or YA, or whatever it is, deserves the attention you're giving it, and then review it as best you can.(As a reviewer, you are probably allowed a couple of "I didn't think I liked these, but this [book/film/restaurant] changed my mind" reviews, but you had better know what you're talking about before embarking on them...)”
-- Neil Gaiman 02/05/08

“I've long known that Claptrap means rubbish or nonsense. I was browsing in a dictionary the other day, as one does, and learned that it came from things one could say on a stage or to an audience that meant very little, but were automatic applause-getters. (Things that literally trap, well, clapping.) And it's also the name of a machine they had once in old theatres that simulated the sound of applause. It's such a good word: anything declaimed from the stage that gets people clapping without thinking. Claptrap. And just as applicable to any side in a political debate...
The other word I've been pondering recently is cucking-stool, the original form of what later became called a ducking stool. Cuck is a word that remains on the fringes of colloquial English as cack (as in such phrases as "when the headmaster said 'now, empty out your pockets' I thought I was going to cack myself"). The OED seems to think that it was probably a cucking stool because people thus punished were tied to a privy seat and ducked into a pond. Knowing the robustness of old English, it's quite possible that the people so ducked were considered cuck, or, even more likely that they might soil themselves in the ducking...
(Which sounds much more like the sort of thing that scaryduck would post than I would really. Only he'd put it so much more robustly.)
Of course, E. Cobham Brewer thinks it was just a "chucking" stool (ie it was chucked into the water); while an 1897 account suggests, unconvincingly, it was a toilet seat used to display the ladies' posteriors in public, and that nobody got dipped in a pond at all.
I love language. It's such fun.”
-- Neil Gaiman 07/18/04

“Hopples is indeed a wonderful word. I shall look it up in the big OED with the magnifying glass downstairs, because I can't find a useful definition for it online.”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/22/04

“Just that ‘hopple’ is a synonym for ‘hobble’, and that ‘hopples’ might mean ‘hobble-bushes’. Dead unhelpful, and nothing at all about piles of stones.”
-- Neil Gaiman 09/23/04

“Honestly, after 16 years out here, as Sherlock Holmes said when chided by Watson for an Americanism, "my well of English seems to be permanently defiled".
On Neverwhere (which I'd started writing before ever I came to America) I suspect the words that are a problem are either:
a) used mostly because they're words used in London too. Take "hooker". A quick google of the Guardian website threw up the following passage from The Guardian,

Thus encouraged, the media have followed suit. Everywhere in the past week, reporters referred to "working girls" - that is, when they were not describing the women as simply "girls" or "vice girls" or "hookers", as in the Mirror's "Hooker No 2 Found Dead", or "tarts", courtesy of the Telegraph's Simon Heffer.

along with about 3000 other uses of the word "hooker" or "hookers" by Guardian writers, many of which were talking about Rugby players, some of which were talking about people named Hooker, and the rest of which were all using the word to describe sex workers (often foreign or at least exotic). It may be an Americanism, but it's one that successfully crossed the Atlantic.
or sometimes it may be that,
b) the Neverwhere audio edition was recorded by Harper Collins from the edition of their text, which contains "sidewalks" rather than "pavements" (a pavement in the US means something else, not the thing on the side of the road you walk along) and a few things like that. If you read the Hodder Headline UK edition of Neverwhere while listening to the audio recording you may well find a word here or there that's different, and they may, in some cases, be the words that trouble you.
(Oddly enough, I wrote Chapter One of The Graveyard Book using American idioms -- "cribs" and "diapers" rather than "cots" and "nappies" -- as it was going to be read by my US publisher first, and then felt weird, so in the following chapters I went back to writing it all in UK English as it's set in the UK, and we'll fix things in the copyedit.)”
--Neil Gaiman 02/15/08

“The truth is that more than ninety percent of the changes that will get made are copyediting changes that are pretty much invisible to the reader, and are things I think of as House Style anyway. Whether you have double or single speech marks, for example. In the US edition colouru and towards will probably become toward. And I doubt that anybody will notice. Sometimes, if I have a sympathetic copy-editor, I'll go in and fight for specific UK spellings and usages when things are set in England (you may have noticed that grey is spelled like that, and not gray, in the US edition of Stardust).”
--Neil Gaiman 02/16/08