Neil Gaiman Got Something Right

Before the internet conquered the earth, CompuServe filled in as a dinky sort of predecessor. Sitting in front of it one day, I saw Neil Gaiman give advice to somebody who wanted to be a writer. The beloved fantasy king can inspire some upsetting talk when placed near a girl and a bathtub. But online he’s different and this was in the days when his public, though fervent, was a fraction of its present size. He had time on a Sunday morning to tell a fan how you make a living out of putting one word alongside another. The great thing was that the fan argued. He figured Gaiman didn’t align with his vision; he found the author’s point of view rather crass, not to say conniving.

The fellow was in the army but only for now. He had big plans. I forget the details but they involved a line-up of different comic book titles, with the heroes… no, really, I forget. But he’d been posting his hopes and dream and Gaiman stepped forth to light the path. What Gaiman told the fellow was, of course, that he shouldn’t put all his eggs in a start-up line of comic book titles, that really none of his eggs should be there. Instead, Gaiman said, he should look around and see what publishers and readers felt like buying, and then see, out of all this, what he felt like doing. Eventually he might show the publishers and himself what he could pull off, after which he might launch the comics lineup or some other dream project. The wannabe fired back with an elaborate post. Announcing that he’d been awake all night thinking about Gaiman and his errors, he let loose with a metaphor in which Gaiman played the part of wise guy advising a runner on how to gauge the pack, how to hang back here, rush forward there, dart for this opening, avoid that clump, when all the runner wanted to do was run, run for the joy of running. It was a long paragraph but it had snap; the sentences clicked. You could tell the fellow had spent time on it and that the time had been a waste.

Coming in late, I conceived two responses but didn’t post them. Let’s say the guy’s handle was ArmyMan314. First response: “ArmyMan314 *about to chuck the ball* I don’t look and aim. I don’t ascertain my target and see how best to attain it. I throw! I throw for the joy of throwing! *He chucks the ball* Oh shit.” Second response: “Neil Gaiman: You want a career as a writer? I have a career as a writer! Let me tell you how I did it. ArmyMan314: *thinking* I should probably argue with him.” Some nice stuff there, I think.

Gaiman took a different tack, a simpler one that demanded less energy: he got sniffy and left. The fan made fun of him for being sniffy, and then the fan went on to some posts bitching about the benefits paid to army enlistees. I suppose Gaiman went on to the next issue of Sandman, followed by a prospectus for Neverwhere. Now he’s known for his Netflix series (Sandman), his Amazon Prime series (Good Omens), his award-winning children’s books, his best-selling novel, his other best-selling novel, and the best-selling novel after that. The fan’s probably known for being difficult around beer.

A decade passed and Gaiman had entered best-sellerdom. Journalists wanted the lowdown on his career, so he expanded on his earlier advice. I’d line up his thoughts this way: if you love writing, you want it to be your life; if something is your life, then you have to make a living off it; you make a living by seeing what people pay for; and there’s no point to any of this unless the money you’re paid is for something you want to do. ArmyMan314 never noticed that last element. Inspecting the market doesn’t mean overlooking your hopes and dreams. When you take your survey of all that publishers put on the shelves and racks, you home in on the things that suit you, the things that you like to read and would like to write. Then you get busy thinking up projects that thrill you and that’ll attract the outfits appropriate to your wavelength.

The approach takes a lot of legwork and reading time, and also a solid sense of who you really are. Gaiman knew he wanted to write; he knew that’s how his life had to go or it would be a waste. Most of us wannabes know something different, namely that we want to be special and that writing is our best bet toward that end. Then we tell ourselves that we want to be writers. The result is that we huddle close to our project, sometimes too close to even work on it. If we do work on it, we may feel special during those moments when progress is made and the project grows. But we’re always alarmed at the thought of the big world drawing near and making our plans look small. So we don’t check out the field; often enough we don’t even write. We’re deluded and wind up nowhere. Gaiman was undeluded and wound up somewhere.

Gaiman’s psyche has come to suffer a pronounced case of celebrity poisoning, and his sexual behavior is at best disturbing. But his career remains a thing of beauty. Doing the odd, out-of-the-way things that he wants to do—stories that call for adjectives like unsettling and droll, puckish and haunting, novels influenced by Norse mythology and, God help us, Thorne Smith—he’s created books found for sale at airports. Some writers want to turn out straightforward horror stories, romance stories, science fiction sagas, espionage thrillers, and they go ahead and do it and have a career—which is certainly hard enough. But Gaiman’s a brand-name author who remade his niche rather than settle into it. Gaiman had to seek opportunities and create them so that his work could happen the way he wanted it to. A tremendous amount of intelligence brought Gaiman this far, and that intelligence was both practical and emotional. Even if most of his work isn’t for you, and I know most of it isn’t for me, none of it is a maneuver. His best writing (for my money, the first half of Sandman and some scattered issues after that) comes from somebody who’s looking past the edges of immediate life, not to the cosmos but to the zone where our little lives wrap behind us and encounter sad, large truths that never go away. He doesn’t manage this often, but he manages. I suppose he did it one misty evening in East Grinstead, back when he was 17 and adulthood loomed ahead.

Your one and only life. That’s the realization at the base of his success: this is your one and only life. It may be the saddest and largest truth. He missed out on some others; that one he’s got down. ArmyMan314 and the rest of us could learn a lesson, but I suspect it isn’t the kind of thing you can learn.