Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman
Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre, and films. His notable works include the comic book series The Sandman and novels Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book. He has won numerous awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker awards, as well as the Newbery and Carnegie medals. He is the first author to win both the Newbery and the Carnegie medals for the same work, The...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth10 November 1960
CityPortchester, England
Writing a book is lonelier and slower than writing comics. The joy of comics is that you have somebody to talk to. What you're writing isn't what anybody reads, it's a letter to an artist. There's immediate gratification as you start getting feedback on it.
Authors know that you should never really write a funny book because funny books do not get awards. Comic novels will not get awards.
A novel seemed the easiest way to get what I had had in my head into the inside of other people's heads. Books are good that way.
Going off the grid is always good for me. It's the way that I've started books and finished books and gotten myself out of deadline dooms and things.
You know, I'm normally so sanguine. But... being accused of rushing these two books out to cash in on the Newbery Medal, without access to time travel equipment or anything, just makes me want to bang my forehead gently against a tree for half an hour. Is it too much to ask people to think?
As for thinking time versus writing time, well, that's up to you. But - and I wish it were otherwise - books don't get written by thinking about them, they get written by writing them. And that's when you make discoveries about what you're writing. That's when you get the happy accidents.
I'm more or less happily writing Chapter Six of The Graveyard Book. I say more or less as I'm at that place where I hope that the book knows what it's doing because right now I don't have a clue - I'm writing one scene after another like a man walking through a valley in thick fog, just able to see the path a little way ahead, but with no idea where it's actually going to lead him.
You can buy a book new, buy it in hardback or wait for the paperback, find it used or as a collectible. I don't mind. What I care about most is that people are reading.
A disturbing novel about dreams and wishes, a nightmarish distaff monkey's paw of a book that it's impossible to forget. Lisa Tuttle remains our preeminent chronicler of family madness and desire.
Las Vegas has become a child's picture-book dream of a city -- here a storybook castle, there a sphinx-flanked black pyramid beaming white light into the darkness as a landing beam for UFOs, and everywhere neon oracles and twisting screens predict happiness and good fortune, announce singers and comedians and magicians in residence or on their way, and the lights always flash and beckon and call.
When I was 7, my proudest possession would have been my bookshelf 'cause I had alphabetized all of the books on my bookshelf.
Read the books you love, tell people about authors you like, and don’t worry about it.
The ideas aren't that important. Really they aren't. Everyone's got an idea for a book, a movie, a story, a TV series.
You need more than a beginning if you're going to start a book. If all you have is a beginning, then once you've written that beginning, you have nowhere to go.