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Neil Gaiman exclusive! Part 1
To mark the publication of Neil Gaiman's latest novel, the magical, macabre and moving The Graveyard Book, SFX is proud to present an exclusive interview with the Dream King. Jayne Nelson asks the questions in an entertaining ramble that takes in the beauty of cemeteries, undying schoolboy resentments, the lingering terror of Kia-Ora adverts and, tantalisingly, the possibility of a Neil Gaiman penned episode of Doctor Who....
So, I read the Graveyard Book and I absolutely loved it.
I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever done; I am just so happy with it. Normally when I do things you have a platonic ideal in your head and you measure success by how much you fell short of that platonic ideal. Right now it’s my Batman comic and I have this wonderful, marvellous, glittering, glistening, golden idea and I’m just wrestling with the thing and it lies there on the page and I say, “No, you’re meant to be marvellous!” And it’s all about how close to marvellous you can actually get. And with The Graveyard Book I achieved everything that I set out to write. The themes are big themes. I did them justice, and I loved all of the characters, I’d love to go back and do more stories with them. I think it’s really special.
I agree. It’s quite sinister in places though, for a kids’ book, although a lot of young adult fiction seems to be like that these days.
There were things that I decided, going into it, that were important. I didn’t want to write a book in which ghosts were dangerous. I knew my shape of my story, but it had to be a world in which the dangers are all from living people because that’s a really cool thing to tell kids. When I think of how much time I expended being afraid of things like graveyards as a kid... there’s nothing to be afraid of in graveywards, they’re beautiful places!
Do you spend a lot of time in graveyards?
I love graveyards! What I tended to do was assimilate graveyards and feel every bit of every graveyard that I loved. I tried to explain it to someone. I said, “You have to take Stoke Newington Cemetery, then you have to topographically rearrange it onto Glasgow Necropolis, and then having done that you have to take a part of Highgate West and stick that at the back.” So it’s all of these wonderful cemeteries and marvellous graveyards. You know, the UK has all of these glorious places, ever so a little bit seedy. Highgate is all cleaned up and nice but Highgate West is the trees and the ivy and it’s all rack and ruin and it’s just magic.
Most graveyards I know have cider cans on the graves from the people getting pissed there the night before!
Not quite my graveyard! Although it’s implicit in the fact that the council shut the doors to my graveyard at night, to keep out the cider drinkers. The other thing about that graveyard is that it’s slightly out of the way. You had an old town which has now become part of the big city, and the old town is tucked away, just a corner, so there are much more modern graveywards that don’t involve trekking up an enormous hill.
But they’re probably the horrible soulless crematoriums...
That’s part of why I thought, “They probably stopped burying people here in about 1970.”
A lot of the characters in the book come from different ages so they talk differently. Did you have to research their speech?
No, because that’s just one of those things that you research for years. That’s the kind of thing I researched when I was doing Sandman. I had enormous fun writing 17th century people talking to 19th century people – there are bits in there that make me smile! Which is a terible thing when you’re the author and you smile at your own jokes, especially ones that aren’t too funny… There’s one person in the graveyard who saw the Queen and just describes her as “A fat lady in a fur hat.” And we’re never quite sure which Queen it was!
I assumed it was Victoria!
I think it was probably one of Henry VIII’s. I think it was Anne of Cleves. But I love the fact that we don’t really know, and all you know is that Bod is really good at some things when he goes to school and really bad at other things. He has real problems with history because he was hearing from people who were really there!
I loved how he’d sit in class and say, “But it didn’t happen like that!” but then he couldn’t explain how he knew. Teachers hate that kind of thing, don’t they?
Well, they hate it when you do know anything. I got shit from a very nice English teacher, probably the best English teacher I ever had, a guy called Mr Hayes, and he was an excellent teacher. Every now and then I’d put up my hand and say something and he’d say, “Well, that’s not true.” And they’d be odd things – we’d be talking about contractions or whatever and I’d say, “George Bernard Shaw said that you shouldn’t put the apostrophes in won’t and wasn’t and shan’t.” And he’d say, “Well that’s obviously not true because that would mean that George Bernard Shaw was not a literate fellow.” And I remember once saying, “Sherlock Holmes was a cocaine addict,” and he said, “No he wasn’t.”
I can see this has haunted you over the years!
It’s not the kind of thing you forget!
I have exactly the same kind of story – I told my geography teacher that chimps ate other monkeys and she didn’t believe me. “They’re herbivores!” she insisted. “No, they’re omnivores!” I said. And she marked me down from an A to a D because I argued with her. So I understand your frustration. You bear resentments!
You do! My favourite of all of those was for the mock O-level English paper where I was marked down because my essay, which was a short story, was 'too good'... which meant I had to have stolen it. And I thought... you can’t do that, that’s wrong! [Laughs]
We should start a support group!
So anyway, a little of that crept in with Bod.
He was very likeable – a good hero.
He does things wrong, with the best will in the world and occasionally not! And there’s a point in there where I wanted to make it clear that some of this stuff was changing him – you can see ways that he could have gone but didn’t go.
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Neil Gaiman exclusive! Part 2
Because The Witch’s Headstone was written first, and then published as a short story, did you have any feedback from that which influenced what you were writing?
What I did was I wrote it, which may sound silly. You have to bear in mind that I had the idea for The Graveyard Book when I was about 24. My son was about 18 months old and we lived in a very tall house which was mostly stairs and no garden and there was a churchyard over the road. Mike had a tricycle, so I would let him pedal around in there. During one of these little pedals between the gravestones I thought that I should do something like The Jungle Book but in a graveyard. And that was the idea! I wrote a first page, didn’t like it very much and thought, “This is a better idea than I am a writer.” And just left it. So then time passed and every few years I’d try to write a bit of the first chapter. Normally I’d try to write the adoption scene and it wouldn’t be very good. Finally I got to the point where I thought, “You know, I’m not getting any better. I should probably write this thing!” And so I started with chapter four, with Bod as a boy actually out there doing stuff. I was writing on the beach in Antigua while we were on holiday for Christmas a few years ago. My daughter Maddy asked what I was writing so I read her the first two pages and at the point where I looked at her about to say “It’s terrible, it’s awful, I have to give up,” she said, “What happens next?” So I just kept writing, more or less to entertain her.
I guess she is the target audience!
That was nice. And once I’d written chapter four I knew what had happened before and I knew what happened after, so I had the flavour, the taste. And I also had this idea – I didn’t know if it would work or not – something that was actually a novel and build it out of short stories two years apart. I love the structure, I love the feeling you get of it beginning as a short story collection and then it becomes a novel. It’s very gratifying when people tell you that they cried at the end!
I cried too! I was on the train going by Battersea Power Station and had to stare hard at it while it went by to control myself!
Do you know what’s lovely? I did the audio book. The director, Michael, and I and the engineers had been working on it for three days and I’m on the last page and I noticed that Michael took the last page away to write down credits that I needed to read and hadn’t brought it back. So I told him, “I don’t have the last page to read.” And my director comes in and he’s crying and pretending not to. And it was the strangest moment! He had a good cry!
I have to ask – will there ever be a Graveyard Movie?
Oh, I think so. The thing that I love about The Graveyard Book right now is that it’s a thing that I’m really proud of, that I’d love to go back to. It’s absolutely not beyond the bounds of possibility that I would do a second Graveyard Book.
There’s a sense of melancholy running through the book. I think it would make a fantastic series.
There are things that I want to know the answer to. There are so many things we don’t know!
Well, hurry up and write it!
I have other things to write, but that one’s calling me back like a little siren song. It makes me happy. There was a happiness involved with those characters. They say that writing, when you’re doing it well, never feels like work, and the truth actually is that it really does feel like work – if it wasn’t for my blog, I wouldn’t remember the bad days now! But mostly it was just a joy to write.
So which aspect of the book do you think you’re most proud of, then? Is it the characters, or the concept?
I don’t particularly think that it’s the concept. You know, there was an article a few years ago in some Scottish paper which basically presented my entire life as a tragedy because I had come up with Tim Hunter... the way they presented it was that I came up with Harry Potter first and didn’t get to do it properly or whatever and here’s what happened. And I thought, the idea is the tiniest, littlest thing! Coming up with a Tim Hunter or a Harry Potter – I wouldn’t say it’s something everybody could do, but that’s not the hard bit. The hard bit is everything else. The stories that happen; it’s the world it’s in; it’s everything that goes along with it that people respond to. From my perspective Tim Hunter was an incredibly minor thing that I created for fun and I’ve never believed that Rowling had stolen Potter and never felt like it was something that I’d done anything more with than my original assignment, which was “Could I do a history and a who’s who of interesting magical characters?” And as with Sandman, it’s something I’m very proud of. Again, it’s not the idea, which is ‘pasty-faced bloke lives in dreams’, it’s everything else that comes along with it. Even now I love the idea of ‘boy in graveyard brought up by ghosts’. You could have handed that idea to a hundred writers and got a hundred different books back. I’m proud of the one I did – kids love it and adults love it. They love it in different ways and I’m just starting to figure that one out. With Coraline, the only other time I’ve done this, I had a book which adults responded to with horror and kids responded to as an adventure. With this, it’s much more that adults seem to respond to it as a tale of growing up. The fan letters I’m getting from children who are early readers are about how much they wished that they were Bod.
That’s lovely! Whereas nobody would want to be Coraline, as she really did have a horrible time. How’s the Coraline movie coming along, by the way?
It’s astonishing! I think it’s a really interesting thing because technically it’s the most advanced stop-motion film anybody has ever made.
Henry Selick is a genius.
He really is. And he’s doing it all in stop-motion. I had problems with Corpse Bride, which was stop-motion but was so cleaned up that it could have been CGI and nobody would have been any the wiser. This is stop motion and it’s an entire stop-motion universe. Now I’ve seen beyond the first 45 minutes, some of the sequences in the latter half of the movie are really scary! And Teri Hatcher as the Other Mother is amazing. When she was cast I had no idea what I thought, and then you see and hear the performance and it’s gorgeous! Teri Hatcher basically has four different roles; she plays Coraline’s normal, grumpy mother, the Other Mother the first way she is, where she’s like an idealised supermum, sweeter and nicer and funnier. And then she starts getting more and more insectile and thinner and then the final version, which so far I’ve only seen stills of, looks absolutely, pants-wettingly terrifying!
I think children have a great capacity to be scared at the cinema. They absolutely love it! I was talking to a nine year old today who loves Jaws, even though it’s not really for kids.
It’s that thing about where kids get their nightmares from. For every kid who gets nightmares from having sat down in front of a film that may be a bit early for them, you get a kid who gets a nightmare from a TV advert about a Hoover! Nobody ever says, “Let’s ban those ads.” When I was a kid I remember being absolutely terrifed by one of those Kia-Ora adverts with the dog and the crow bouncing along, and nobody ever proposed banning them! We take our nightmares where we can find them. [changing subject] Listen, could you thank everybody at SFX for me for bringing me in at number three in that favourite authors poll you ran? I’ve never been so thrilled about anything ever! I went down the top 100 going, “He’s better than I am... she’s better than I am... She should be higher...” It was one of these things when you get to number three and think, a) I’m so glad I’m not number one andin a world in which Terry and Tolkien are number one and number two, I loved being number three.
I’ll let everybody know your thoughts!
Also it’s one of these things with SFX... I’m one of these strange creatures anyway where I’ll go off and do movies or TV or comics and things, and it was nice making it onto a best author list as well. Normally when I’m in SFX it’s because I’m being interviewed for something I’m doing.
I’m sure you’re in there for American Gods; that’s kind of your signature piece, really.
I don’t think I know what my signature piece is! I just did an interview this morning about 20 years of Sandman where they said, “Well, you’re obviously Neil ‘Sandman’ Gaiman...” And I thought, “I’m Neil ‘Sandman’ Gaiman unless you found me through something else! Neil ‘American Gods’ Gaiman or Neil ‘Coraline’ Gaiman or Neil ‘Neverwhere’ Gaiman.”
Or Neil ‘Stardust’ Gaiman, because the movie must have brought in so many new fans...
That one’s funny, though, because for the first time ever I’m getting people saying, “Wow, I loved the movie! But I didn’t like the book...”
It’s a difficult crowd out there, I don’t envy you!
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Neil Gaiman exclusive! Part 3
Do you know, you’ve gone through this whole interview for SFX and you haven’t asked me if I’m going to write an episode of Doctor Who!
It was on the bottom of my list of questions – I was nearly there! I was laughing about what you said on your blog about how you rang the Visa people and they asked you about it...
I couldn’t believe that! I rang up and they said, “So you’re Neil Gaiman.” I said, “Yes.” “THE Neil Gaiman?” “Yes...” And this was the day after it was announced that I’d be writing Batman. So he says, “So, are you going to be writing...” and I thought he was going to say Batman, “an episode of Doctor Who?”
What did you say?
I told him, “When I was asked that last week at a bookstore signing I said, ‘That would be nice,’ and that they should ask Steven Moffat, who was coming out to Comic Con the following day. The following day at Comic Con Steven Moffat fronted a panel, and a girl asked him, ‘Neil Gaiman told me to ask you if he would be writing an episode of Doctor Who,’ and Steven Moffat said, “I can absolutely confirm that that would be nice.’”
So it’s a nice thought, if that’s not too much of an understatement.
Having said that... the amount of stress I’ve suddenly gone into on this Batman thing, where I was quietly writing my thing and now all across the internet it’s “ZOMG Neil Gaiman is writing Batman! Oh my god this is the best thing in the whole universe!” And I’m kind of like, “I’m trying to get this to work right now, and you’re not making it any easier by all going ‘OMG this is amazing!’” So I can now actually see a universe in which if I DID get to write an episode I think I would probably try to write it first, before I actually let anybody know it was being written.
Yes, that is a lot of pressure... And Who fans are very opinionated! I think you’d be perfect to do it, though.
In many ways, while I don’t think of Neverwhere as being Doctor Who-y, it’s true to say that when I was doing the character of the Marquis, I was definitely going for a ‘how would I do Doctor Who’ vibe. One of the things I still remember as a kid about William Hartnell – this is as a tiny, tiny kid – was that I was never sure which way he was going to jump. And a lot of it went back to the thing that he does in the first ever Dalek story where it’s dangerous and they are on Skaro surrounded by radiation and he wants to know what this place is and all the others don’t, and so he breaks the TARDIS. Intentionally. And there was a loveliness to that, in that as a kid I thought, “He’s not entirely trustworthy.”
I think Tennant’s brought that to him; he’s very skittish, you never quite know what he’s going to do next.
You don’t, although I think from Troughton onwards there was definitely the feeling with the Doctor where you knew he’d always come out on the side of good. But you weren’t sure what he’d do. And I liked that. So that’s what I was trying to get in there with the Marquis. My one little Doctor Who reference. Although then again that was done 15 years ago... there’s an essay of mine that I put up from 2002, 2003 as an introduction to a Doctor Who book and there’s a line where I say, “It’s probably good that they never let me get my hands on Doctor Who. I would have un-happened so much.” And people have taken that to mean, “Oh, he would have been really bad at continuity.” But what I meant by that was that the main thing I would have done would have been get the plethora of Time Lords out of the world and make him unique again. And that’s the one thing that made me so happy the moment the Christopher Eccleston series happened.
It’s certainly more interesting than him being a fugitive.
A fugitive could have worked, but at this point Gallifrey had become a place where retired Shakespearean actors in silly costumes were kind of hanging out. I never got a sense, ever, of what they did there, apart from wear funny hats. And have useless guards! They were like Vogon guards!
They were particularly crap, weren’t they?
You’re going, “You are a fucking Time Lord! You are a master of space and time and your only job is to lock the Doctor’s assistant in this little room and you are going to fuck it up!” My suspension of disbelief always broke whenever we went to Gallifrey.
It was rubbish. You wanted Gallifrey to be the most amazing planet in the universe and it was always this white room with wobbly walls. And you’re right, they did wear funny hats.
They did. I love that Gallifrey has now moved into the realm of myth.
It has. It’s like Atlantis or Camelot.
The lost place you cannot get back to, and that’s wonderful. So what will probably happen is that I will write an episode of Doctor Who one day and bring back Gallifrey. It’ll depend on all sorts of things – the BBC, Steven Moffat and me and time. But along with Mr Moffat, I can absolutely confirm, as I did with the gentleman at Visa, that it would be nice.
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman is available now from Bloomsbury Publishing.
Edited by Georgia, 01 December 2008 - 12:44.
