Notes From An Evening With Neil Gaiman

Okay, if you ever have the chance to see and hear Neil Gaiman in person, I highly recommend it. I was fortunate enough to get a ticket to his sold-out show at Benaroya Hall here in Seattle and it was so worth it.

While the auditorium was too dark for me to take notes with pen and paper, and I didn’t want to disrupt others around me by using my phone, what I am sharing here is what I took away from his talk, from my memory and not verbatim.

As we first entered the lobby there were tables set up with index cards and boxes. We were prompted to write down a question for Neil and then he would try to answer during his talk. Apparently, Seattlites ask a lot of questions (more than he was anticipating) based on the stack of cards he came out on stage with.

There were some personal questions about his life with Amanda Palmer, and his son Ash, that he graciously answered. But what I was most interested in were his answers to the writing questions that as an attendee, you knew to expect there would be some.

One of the questions posed dealt with writing while depressed or in a dark place. He answered by talking about when he was writing The Ocean At The End Of The Lane. It’s a dark and depressing story and he found it affecting him, drawing him into dark places and depression.  To combat this, he decided to work on another story at the same time, Fortunately, The Milk, a children’s story he described as having one character being a stegosaurus that traveled in a hot air balloon. Just the image of that alone brings a smile to your face.

Personally, I found this happening when I was working on a particularly dark section of Between The Beats. Getting inside the mind of a killer is difficult and disturbing and I would have to walk away from the story and do something to clear my head. Next time, I will take Neil’s advice and try to write another story that is the antithesis of what I’m working on.

Another question was regarding how many drafts does he produce before he’s ready to publish. He reminded us all that the first draft of anything is us, the writer, telling ourselves the story. No one else should see the first draft. Interestingly, he writes the first draft of anything he is doing, longhand, and with different colored fountain pens. One reason is it doesn’t allow him to edit as he writes, which is too easy to do when typing on a computer. The other is to see how much he’s written each day. The example he gave was one day there was a lot of green, the next day very little black. Obviously, the green day was a good writing day and the black one not so much. But at least he had written each day. And that is the other important thing to note. Write every day.

Which leads me to the next question I remember. Someone asked how do you write when you’re not inspired? He told the story of when he first started. He had to write because that’s what paid the bills and put food in his stomach. If he didn’t write, he didn’t get paid, he didn’t eat. Simple as that. You can’t sit around and wait for inspiration to hit, you just write. It may not be good writing, but you have written something. And later on, there were others who were dependent on his writing; artists, colorists, letterers, all waiting on his words so they could produce the comic The Sandman. And so they could also pay their bills and eat too.

He shared readings from Good Omens and Trigger Warnings, and his tribute to Ray Bradbury, The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury. He shared anecdotes about his relationship with Terry Pratchett and how Good Omens came to be a television series. He told stories about his daughters, Holly and Maddy, and how they in part inspired Coraline and how had it not been for the beta reading done by the children of his agent, Coraline wouldn’t have been a children’s book.

It was a wonderful and magical night, full of stories and inspiration, and sound advice. For all my writer friends, I urge you, go see him if you have the chance, otherwise, listen to any of his speeches you can find. And most of all, continue to read and write. The world needs your stories too.