Capping off the International Literature Festival Dublin’s 2018 lineup was the keynote discussion with author Neil Gaiman, known for over thirty years of award-winning work in comic books including The Sandman and Books of Magic, short stories, screenwriting, and novels like American Gods and Coraline. Gaiman discussed his childhood, process and new works, and read the first short story he wrote for his anthology Norse Mythology, “Freya’s Unusual Wedding,” an adaptation of the comedic Eddaic poem Þrymskviða.
Irish Times journalist Patrick Freyne chaired the discussion, quizzing Gaiman on the comics that brought him to writing the seminal series The Sandman. Gaiman explained his love for comics: “My favorite thing that comics can do that nothing else can is a silent panel. … You can’t do that in a novel, you have to use words.” As a kid, Gaiman loved imported American comics, especially the “weird ones” like Swamp Thing and Tales of the Unexpected; in 1985, he approached Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta) for advice on how to write comic scripts. “I said, ‘Okay, show me how you write a comic.’ And he pulled out a notebook and just sort of went, ‘Page one, panel one.’ And just showed me you do everything.”
Gaiman relaunched DC’s The Sandman in 1989. “Sandman is an incredible phenomenon. How did DC let you do that?” asked Freyne. “I was mostly allowed to do Sandman because no one but me knew what I was doing,” explained Gaiman. Sales were good so DC let him work. “Sandman for me was a process of discovery,” he continued. The first eight issues were plotted while driving around Ireland in the late Eighties, holidaying on the first cheque from Black Orchid. Driving all day and composing in his head, “I couldn’t wait to stop for the night so I could write it all down.” While The Sandman became a celebrated icon, not just in comics but in fantasy literature, Gaiman explained his decision to wrap up the series in 1996. “I had to stop for my sanity. … I had this rule, which was I could never get to the point ever in my life where I would look in the mirror in the morning, go ‘Ugh, God, I gotta write Sandman.’ … I never got to the point where it was going to feel like work, but I could see that was about a year across over the horizon if I didn’t end where it ended.”
Gaiman’s latest project for television, Good Omens, a BBC adaptation of the novel written jointly with the late Terry Pratchett, will debut in 2019 on Amazon Prime and BBC Two. While previous screen adaptations of his work have run the gamut from excellent (Coraline) to nonsensical (“Nightmare in Silver” for Doctor Who), Good Omens differs in that Gaiman has direct control over the finished product. “Everything else of mine that’s pretty much ever been done, somebody else or a bunch of somebody elses got to make all the important decisions. … There would be times [working on Good Omens] when producers would come to me and go, ‘Ah, you have to cut this bit because it’s expensive,’ and I’d go, ‘Yeah, but if I cut that bit then it actually stops making sense.’” Gaiman also got to make the casting decisions: “David Tennant is amazing as Crowley. Michael Sheen as Aziraphale is just this revelation.” He also feels a duty to do right by his friend and coauthor: “My job is to make something Terry would have liked. It’s incredibly simple.”
Gaiman joked that he and his wife, artist and musician Amanda Palmer, never expected to find him in the conventional 9-to-5 job and is looking forward to being a “retired showrunner.” In particular, he’s looking to return to novel writing: Gaiman is 97 pages into a new Neverwhere novel that’s been simmering on the back burner, but that he intends to return to within the next month. “I’m loving it. It’s wonderful. All of these characters are still there, they’re still alive, there’re all of these new ones… the Marquis is in deep trouble, and Richard is in more trouble than he thinks he is… There’s all of this stuff that’s going to happen that I know that nobody else does.” And while Gaiman identifies the time around age 30 as his ‘golden age,’ where writing was easy and he was filled with stories, it’s clear that he hasn’t run out yet. Though he doesn’t have the “amazing fecundity of ideas now,” he feels better about the ones he does have. An audience member asked, how does he know when to let something go, when a work is finished? “When I’m more interested in the next thing.”
Here’s to the next thing.
