Interview with Neil Gaiman

FWOMP: And, you’re what, 25 or 26 now?

Neil Gaiman: Oh bless you. I’d always wanted to be a writer and I had a really bad night, the kind of long dark night of the soul, one of those nights you only get once or twice in a lifetime and I got one when I was about 20. I remember being unable to sleep and about four in the morning I keep thinking "I keep thinking I’m a writer. I like to think I could write stuff just as good as anybody else out there but I’m not really doing anything about it." And that’s not the bad thing. What’s the bad thing is that in 50 or 60 years time I could be on my deathbed and I would say to myself, "I could’ve been a writer," and I wouldn’t know if I was lying or not. It was the long dark night of the soul that genuinely changes everything. So I said "Okay, I’m gonna try and be a writer because even if I’m not, at least I’ll know that I’m not." So I started writing. I wrote a children’s book, I wrote a bunch of short stories, and a lot of other stuff and sent them out to people . . .and the stories came back. Then I thought, "I’m doing this wrong. Either I’m not a very good writer (which I choose not to believe), or I’m doing this wrong. I want to understand how publishing and all that works. So I got up the next morning and said, "All right, I’m now a journalist. I’m a freelance journalist." So I got on the phone to editors and pitched them story ideas about things I wanted to write and by the end of the day—by dint of lying cheerfully about previous experience—I now had several commissions and then had to turn them in.

FWOMP: And how did that go?

Neil Gaiman: It actually went fine although I must say as long as I had a typewriter, which was probably the next couple of years, there was a piece of paper taped to it that said, "Don’t let your mouth write no check that your tail can’t cash." I think that’s a quote from Muddy Waters. And every now and then it would make me think, "I just got myself into a book contract. How the fuck did that happen? What do I do? I’ve never written a book and now I have a book contract." So I’d write books. But it was good. There’s nothing for getting you good fast like having to be good fast, if that makes any sense.

FWOMP: It does. But let’s get back to this dark night you had. Do you think that had any influence on how you write now? You write dark fantasy—the Sandman Chronicles, American Gods with the Shadow character, and even the angel in Neverwhere who’s a white angel but turns out to be the bad guy—so do you think that dark night influenced your writing career or do you think your style evolved later and independently?

Neil Gaiman: No. I think you wind up writing the kind of stuff you wind up writing. I don’t necessarily think you get to pick. I actually thought I was going to be a science fiction writer. I thought I was going to be a Larry Nivens-style writer; hard SF, Frank Herbert in Whipping Star mode. What’s odd is that isn’t what I tended to write for pleasure, even back then. What I wrote was stuff that had an odd, slightly fantastic, edge to it. I’m sure there’s an alternate universe where I got to become a pulpy science fiction writer. It was incredibly wonderful winning the Hugo Award for American Gods because it felt like I somehow managed to get where I was going without taking the right path. It’s like traveling from New York to Washington and you somehow manage to get there even though you went by Australia. It’s like when people ask, "Why do write about mythology" or "Why do you do this or do that," and the best answer I can give is "I am who I am and this is what I want to write." It’s what stories turn up and run around in my head. None of us know where our stories come from. That’s why writers make fun of people who ask us where we get our ideas . . .because we don’t know.