My Favourite Author Interviews - Neil Gaiman

As I trawl the internet I keep finding these fabulous videos by writers.  It certainly saves me from paying out my dollars and getting dolled up to see and hear them in person.  Plus, remember I live in Perth, Western Australia (the most isolated city in the world) and even authors don't visit here much.

After downloading them on to my iPhone I usually listen whilst trucking around in my car.  You learn a lot listening to these guys and I figure I really don’t need to hear that Rhiannon song for the hundredth time. So, why not educate myself on the publishing industry via the people who know.

What may surprise you is that many of these mega-stars of writerdom still face the same insecurities that novice writers face.  Their words offer encouragement, wisdom and vision.  Sometimes, they are simply inspiring and you can feel your fingers itching for that keyboard.

I will keep putting up my favourite interviews as I come upon them, so check back regularly.  And if any strike a chord, please leave a comment. That’s how we humble bloggers get paid.  No, I don’t reach through and get into your wallet, I mean we are paid by the thrill of receiving a comment. 

So pay, people, pay with your words.

Neil Gaiman at the Wheeler Centre

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          From Coraline to The Sandman and American Gods to Doctor Who, Neil Gaiman has made his mark by bringing fantasy and sci-fi from the fringe and into the spotlight. Gaiman joins Clem Bastow onstage to talk about his varied work, the tyranny of genre, sneezing baby pandas and red daleks.

Gaiman’s conversation is lively and wide-ranging; he moves quickly from describing why he feels like a fraud to discussing why he’s not published in mainland China (and how a sneezing panda named Chu might change that). When Bastow asks him if he’s bothered by the effect genre prejudices may have on whether all of his work is read or not, he says that beginning as a comic writer, “every single possible prejudice that can be levelled at an area of the arts is levelled at you.”

          The breadth of his output is one of Gaiman’s most distinctive features. Speaking about his reluctance to be pigeonholed as a writer, he reveals that his restlessness stems from what he learned during early days as a journalist interviewing other writers. He also describes how he tries to enter the storytelling process as openly as possible.

Questions are invited early in the session, prefaced by Gaiman’s explanation of what he considers a question. Gaiman engages playfully with his audience, who ask questions about his inspiration for Neverwhere, his creative approach, his resistance to his work appearing in school curriculums, plot outlines and his knowledge of his characters.

He’s queried on where his ideas originate — “the question that must not be asked of writers” — and elucidates the experience of writing for Doctor Who (“um… it was awesome!”).

          On weightier topics, Gaiman talks about the ideas behind his unconventional characterisation of death and the kind of death he’d prefer to meet. He offers his thoughts on love and vulnerability and confesses that as a social creature, “writing is peculiarly lonely”.

          To close the evening, Gaiman slips his iPad onto his lap and reads a poem he wrote for an Australia Day event earlier in 2011. “There are so few places in the world that I could possibly read this poem,” he explains.

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