Art Matters - Neil Gaiman Q&A

September 1st 2021

Art Matters is a creative call to arms from the mind of Neil Gaiman, combining his extraordinary words with deft and striking illustrations by Chris Riddell. To celebrate the paperback release, our team caught up with Neil to find out more about the book. 

Have you ever got into trouble voicing an idea?  If yes, what was the idea?  If no, have you been afraid to voice an idea?

Speaking as a prominent person who is also active on social media, I have absolutely got in trouble voicing ideas! There’s probably not an idea that you can voice - even the absolutely self-evident ones or the ones that seem to me self-evident like ‘perhaps we should help each other’ - that somewhere somebody is convinced that only the deepest people soaked in infamy would ever utter that idea. And there are groups of people out there who just get incredibly upset, and who make a practice of doing the equivalent of turning up on your doorstep and yelling at you, and it’s been happening now in my life for - how long have I been on twitter? - about 12 or 13 years, and before that it would happen on my blog.

I remember the first ever professional comic I had published. I’m going back a way, but this is a relatively apt example. I found myself debating a member of parliament on the radio who believed that things like the comics that I had just written should be banned, and that people like me should be put in prison. Because I retold some Bible stories which happened to have some fairly appalling things happen in them, all of a sudden, I was debating whether or not people like me should be put behind bars. A couple of years later, I had to fight to keep a Swedish publisher, named Horst Schröder, out of prison for also reprinting that story. It’s a story from the book of Judges, which contains a rape, murders, and some mutilation. It’s quite awful, really a terrible story. My point was that there are terrible stories in your Bible, and you may not know it. Theirs was that you should never tell things like this in comics.

So, you get in trouble from the word go.  You only ever have two choices – to shut up, or to keep making art, to keep making ideas, to keep talking, to keep discussing, to keep doing stuff and, so far, I’ve kept going. But I’ve watched friends of mine become cowardly. I’ve watched friends of mine decide it was actually too much trouble to keep going, and they’ve shut up and that always strikes me as something very sad when it happens.

Has someone else’s idea changed the way you think?  If yes, who, what and why?

Alan Moore. Getting to work with, around, and talk to Alan when I was in my early- to mid-twenties. I first encountered Alan’s work when I was twenty-two, and I met Alan when I was about twenty-four. Whatever Alan did, he did it as well as he could - and it changed me. Up until that point I thought, there’s the great work - whatever the great work happens to be - and then there’s the stuff that you can do that’s good enough. Then I watched Alan and thought - you know if he wrote a Telly Tubbies comic, he would be writing a Telly Tubbies comic that would make the world turn around and go ‘wow we didn’t realise what depth and what brilliance there was contained in Telly Tubbies’. And I thought well, it’s because he is brilliant, and because he gave it one hundred per cent. And I thought I have to be that. I have to not be half-arsed. I have to not go ‘well, its good enough’. I have to really just do the best thing I possibly can.

When I was doing Sandman, I remember getting… ‘mocked’ is an unfair word, and ‘teased’ is an unfair word… but I was certainly given a small amount of shit from other writers, who would point out that it was taking me three weeks to write a Sandman script. And they would explain that in order to be financially viable they would write all their scripts in a day, or two days, and I would think - well yeah, but this is how long this thing is taking to write, and it has to be as good as it can be, so I have to take my time. And these days I look at all of those stories and they are all still in print, and they are now transmuting. They became, probably, the bestselling thing on Audible. They’re also becoming a new television thing and I’m really glad I put that time into writing them. Because making them as good as they possibly could be at a time when the audience for comics was tiny - and at a time when it didn’t matter if they were good or not, or it didn’t seem to matter – meant there was no particular connection back then to critical success and commercial success. But it was important to make. And I learnt that one from Alan.

Do you still use your local library?  If yes, do the Librarians still help you?  If no, why not?

It all depends which of my local library it is. I mean, I always use my local library because I have a small boy. And the magical thing about having kids is, kids always want more books than you can ever buy - and that you could ever have shelf space for. And so, one of the joys of libraries is you’re forever taking your kids into libraries. I now have Ash, and I’m out on my Waiheke Island, and I utterly love their library which even has a tiny little spiral staircase that leads up to a little space where kids can just go and hide and read. Had that been in my local library when I was a kid, I would simply never have left. I would’ve gone up that spiral staircase and nobody would’ve seen me again. I would’ve hidden there after dark. It would’ve just been my place.

In the small Wisconsin town where I lived, I was not just a frequent visitor to the library, but also a frequent buyer of books in their library sales. Which I loved. There comes a point, though, when you have spent your lifetime buying books and being sent books - and then given more books than you can ever read - when you turn around and you realise that you’re probably better stocked in your areas of interest than your local library is! And that, I’m afraid, has happened to me on several occasions.

Have your reading preferences changed?  Or do you still look for ghosts or magic or rockets or vampires or detectives or witches or wonder?

I still love all of those things. My reading preferences have changed in so far as, as I’ve got older my vision is not what it was. All of those years that my grandmother would say ‘if you read in the dark, you’ll ruin your eyesight’, and here I am at sixty - fifty years after she was saying that - to say that my grandmother was obviously quite right, and my eyesight is now starting to go due to reading in dim rooms. So, I’m definitely spending more time with audio books, which I’m enjoying. And more time on my Kindle - which I hate. Because I love books, and I don’t like Kindles.

And yet, I’m definitely taking advantage of things on screens because they’re easier to read for me now than a lot of things on paper. That being said, currently I’m really enjoying myself as I slowly revisit, on audio book, the works of Robert Acon; which are filled with wonder, ghosts, witches, monsters, and pretty much everything on that list except possibly rocket ships. Well, no rocket ships that I know of anyway.

Have your “flat packed furniture” building skills improved? (Or have you found another way to procrastinate?)

Oh, I can procrastinate. I can procrastinate for Britain, if there were a procrastination Olympics. Flat packed furniture assembly is fabulous, though. Because at the end of it, you actually feel like you’ve done something - especially if it stays up. But I haven’t had to do any since last year’s lockdown, when I was on the Isle of Skye. At that point I’d had my house for about fifteen years. And I’d always been proud of the fact that there was no television there. And I had to grit my teeth and admit that with projects like Sandman I’d need to do enough work that would require a television, and I’d have to get one in. And I loved putting together the television stands and other things like that. Also, I’m incredibly impressed with some of the stuff you can buy through the mail. I am, when it comes to putting together furniture, a proper honest-to-goodness, kind, caring idiot, and they have made assembling some of that stuff idiot-proof. Even I could do it.

What is the warning that you would write on a piece of paper and slip into “Art Matters” for the readers?

Well I might put in a piece of paper that just says, ‘warning: the author of this book writes fiction and is thus not to be trusted’. I think it’s always good to remember that people like me make stuff up for a living, and we are incredibly convincing. We may or may not be right. I hope I’m right, and if I’m not, at least people can fail interestingly with me. Or beside me.

What did you enjoy writing the most?

The Ocean at the End of the Lane, I think. Because it just sort-of turned up. It wasn’t planned, it wasn’t intended, I didn’t know that I was meant to be writing that book, I just wrote the book. And I was overjoyed. I thought I was writing a short story, and I was thrilled when it was over to do a word count and discover I’d written an unexpected book.

Is there another art form you may have chosen if you hadn’t become a writer?

That is such a good question. I always think that if I could’ve been anything in this world and I wasn’t able to be a writer, I would’ve loved to have been a sort-of creative theologian. It’s not really a job that exists, but I’d love to make up religions for a living. You know, right now I feel like people’s choices are too small and too narrow and too limited, and I would love to be able to have the kind of job where people call you up and say, ‘hello, hi I need a religion’ and you say, ‘sounds good, let me know, what you need in your religion. Are you going to be big on feast days? Where do you stand on sacrifice? How many sabbath days would you like during the week?’ All of that kind of stuff. And then you go away and craft a whole religion for them.  It’s not really a job that exists, is it? But you know, it ought to. Or maybe there’s a place in the universe where it does.

Have you started a new list of things that you want to write?  If yes, what’s on it?

Erm… no. What I have now is a list of things that I have to do before I can get to the list! I feel a little bit like I’ve inherited my life from somebody pre-pandemic. And pre-small boy who had all sorts of plans. And now I get to look at the world and think – okay, if I’m going to actually get stuff done, I suppose I have to finish this. And I suppose I have to finish that. And then once those this and that are done it’d probably be nice to get on and just do stuff that feels like fun. And get back to doing stuff for joy.

Although when I look at the list of things that I wanted to do when I was a kid, that’s done. I can come up with new things for the list now, that make art, but none of them have the driving madness of the original list. You know, the original list was just, - okay, I need to deform and warp the world enough that one day I will get to write an episode of Doctor Who. And here I am, and I’ve won a Hugo award for an episode of Doctor Who. It all seems very unlikely, but I’m very glad I did. There’s nothing else that I could come up with now that has the same intensity of the things that I imagined, hoped and dreamed when I was seven, when I was eleven, when I was fourteen.

Do you have any wise words for Stephen King?

Wise words for Stephen king… no. In fact, I received some really wise words from Stephen King the other day. He sent me a sweet email in which he pointed out that, no matter how fun and attractive making movies and doing film projects is, he always comes away from them thinking ‘why did I do that? It’s more fun to write novels.’ And I thought, that’s pretty good advice, Steve. But one of the things I love about Steve is that he keeps going and he does the work, good or bad. There are things that Steve has written that are as good, I would say, as anything that anybody has ever written. And then, there are novels of Steve’s where I look at it and think - why? Why would you think this was a good idea? And yet, I also know that there are people out there who love the books that I think are probably not big successes. In addition to the fact that he's going to keep going. And Stephen King for me is like how Lou Reed was, or Elvis Costello is, in that I want to go along with them during their career, I want to see the art they create. I know not everything is going to be for me, but I also know that enough stuff is. And that, if I keep going along for the ride, there’s going to be some amazing sights along the way.

Art Matters is out in paperback from Thursday 2nd September.