NEIL GAIMAN

Random Joy

WHEN I WAS twelve or thirteen, I had an experience that changed the way I perceived literature. It happened when I picked up a copy of R. A. Lafferty’s The Reefs of Earth in cheap Ace paperback in some English secondhand shop. It was an American edition, and I have no idea to this day where it came from or how it got there. But it completely turned things inside out for me.

I remember reading the book the first time, and noticing that the chapter titles were slightly odd—they felt like nice, solid chapter titles that describe what’s in the chapter. Then, at some point I went back to reread the table of contents, and I realized: It’s a poem. It’s a glorious poem. It was as if a giant light had gone on and angels, really grubby angels, had come down from the sky tooting on mouth organs and combs with tissue paper over them, to proclaim that there are no rules. It was the moment I realized—Oh my god, you can do anything in literature. No matter what anybody tells you about writing, you can do whatever the fuck you want.

I love the fact that I can remember it. I can actually quote all sixteen chapter titles from memory:

1. To Slay the Folks and Cleanse the Land
2. And Leave the World a Reeking Roastie
3. High Purpose of the Gallant Band
4. And Six Were Kids and One a Ghostie.
5. A Child’s a Monster Still Uncurled
6. The World’s a Trap, and None Can Quit It—
7. The “Strife Dulanty” with the World
8. Was Mostly That They Didn’t Fit It. . . .

You read that, you go, “You’re having too much fun.” But it’s so easy as an author to forget about fun, to forget about joy. To forget about glorious, redundant curlicues that only exist because—well, why the fuck wouldn’t you do that? Because you can. You should be able to have joy in making the words. You do it for the same reason that God created the duck-billed platypus. A Hemingway God would not build the duck-billed platypus. It is too ridiculous, and too redundant, and too unlikely. But it makes so much more interesting a world having duck-billed platypuses everywhere.

There are no rules. Only: Can you do this with confidence? Can you do it with aplomb? Can you do it with style? Can you do it with joy? If you can, you could write a short story that’s an essay on sixteenth-century mapmaking, and everything would go, “Oh my god, what a delightful short story.” It’s because you enjoy yourself. You can put things in rhyme, you can create footnotes, sometimes I even just have my characters talk in iambic pentameter—you do it all because you want to. More than anything else, I just love random fucking joy. Doing things because you can. Taking pleasure in it. The joy of being an author is the joy of feeling I can do anything. While it’s me and my piece of paper, I’m God.

Not that there will be joy every day, every sentence, and in every everything you do. It doesn’t work like that. If you’re writing something as long as a novel, you’re going to write on the good days, and you’re going to write on the bad. You’re going to write on the days that you’ve got a migraine and your wife left you. You’re going to write on the days when you sit down light and happy of heart, and every word drips from your pen or from your fingertips like liquid diamond glinting in the sunlight. You look up, and you somehow did 5,000 words of perfect wonderfulness that day.

But an interesting thing happens when, three or four drafts down the line, you’re reading the galleys. You’ve been sent the proofs to read, and you’re proofreading. You know intellectually that some of these pages were written on glorious days. Some of them were written on terrible days. Some of them were written on days when, as far as you were concerned, you had the worst, most appalling writer’s block in the world, and you were just putting down any old nonsense to try to get something down. And some of them were put down on magic days. The truth is, you can’t tell. It all reads like you. It’s all part of the same book.

It shouldn’t be that way. It would be wonderful if you went, “Ah, here is a fantastic page. Here is a terrible page.” But once you’ve got a little time, that’s not really detectable. And it’s because of all of the work that you did. It’s all the wall that you built by taking the word and putting it in, and taking another one, and taking another one.

I answered a question recently online. Somebody said something like, “What do you do when you get stuck in the middle of a novel, and you know where the plot is meant to go, but you’re in a place where you can’t see your way from here to there?” My answer was incredibly simple: You make stuff up. That made a few people grumpy—acting as if I was making fun of them, or I was keeping the truth from them somehow. But I wanted to go back and say, “You made the whole thing up. You made up the beginning. You made up the end. Right now you’re a roadrunner running from mesa to mesa across the air on a bridge of stuff that you’d made up. All that happened is you stopped, and you looked down, and you realized there’s nothing underneath you. Look back up at that mesa, and start running again.”

One of the things I think people really respond to in fiction—as, perhaps, in life—is just knowing you’re in safe hands. Feeling like you know that the person doing the thing knows what they’re doing, and is enjoying it. Also, it’s all made up. All of the things that are considered rules are rules until you break them. They’re only rules until you throw them out because you don’t need them anymore.

Lafferty was the only author I ever had the confidence to write to. I would have been nineteen or twenty, and I found an address in some who’s who of authors in my local library. I could write to him, I realized, and I did. Somehow, the letter—having gone from place to place, forwarded from wherever he was living in the 1960s to his home in the 1970s—eventually made it to him. And three months later, I got a reply. And for a little while in there I corresponded with Lafferty.

I sent him a derivative story, a Lafferty-ish story. He wrote back and was polite about it. He answered lots of questions. Mostly it was just that thing when you’re a nineteen-, twenty-, twenty-one-year-old and you’re full of dreams, and somebody finally seems to be taking you seriously and treating you like an adult. At that age, mostly what you need is to be taken seriously, because that’s where the confidence comes from.

Suddenly, I had a very real sense that writers were real people. Up until that point, they’d seemed more like magical ghosts. But, suddenly, I had a writer I loved who was writing to me. It gave me a wonderful feeling: Well, I might be a writer, too.

The interesting thing was that the words in Lafferty’s letters read like Lafferty. I started to realize that style is not an affectation—it’s the stuff that you can’t help doing. I remember running into a quote once years ago from Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, where he said, “Style is the stuff you got wrong.” Because if you took him out, the person, everything would be played beautifully and perfectly—the falling away from perfection is what we recognize, and that makes style. It’s a fascinating quote, but when I went to Google it, all I was ever able to find was me saying it quoted in interviews. (Perhaps he never said it at all.) But there’s definitely that feeling that, at the end of the day, style is the stuff you can’t help doing.

My sympathies lie with writing professors, but I think they are a terrible thing. (I include myself in their number.) The biggest problem is that writing professors get prescriptive. What you’re trying to do with a young, unformed writer is, a lot of the time, like trying to teach a small child that there are things to eat other than peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The writing student turns up. They’ve read nothing but peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, they want to write peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And now you, as a professor, are going, “Okay, eat some of this Chinese food over here. Good, now eat this curry. Now let’s examine salads.” Somebody goes, “But peanut butter and jelly!” And you go, “Well, yeah—but no, not right now. Let’s talk about all of the other things. Let’s talk about Ethiopian food.”

The trouble is that, fairly often, the love and the joy go away. The reason they wanted to be a writer was because they loved peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. All they really take away from their course is that they used to love peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and now they’ve been told that’s a bad thing. They had to eat all these things they didn’t really enjoy, and the whole thing now tastes like spinach, and they’re done.

That’s why it’s important to read so widely when you’re younger. I think your receptors are open at a right age to so much, and you don’t necessarily even understand at that point where all of your influences are coming from, or what they can mean, nor should you. They compost down anyway, good influences, no matter how old you are. It’s like when you put the scraps onto your compost heap: eggshells, and it’s half-eaten turnips, and it’s apple cores, and the like. A year later, it’s black mulch that you can grow stuff in. And influences, good ones, are that too. Trying to figure out what’s influenced you is as difficult as taking the black mulch, and saying this used to be half an apple.

Some years ago, I was talking about a short story that I’d done a long, long time ago—and somebody asked if they could read it. I went and found my old notebooks, and pulled them down, and started reading the stuff that I was writing when I was eighteen, nineteen, twenty. (About when I was reading—and writing to—Lafferty.) The truth is, if somebody showed that story to me now, and said, “Does this person have a future as a writer?” I would think, “No, probably not.” There’s no evidence of any potential. The stuff reads like the novel openings and terrible short stories of a nineteen-year-old with nothing to say, but who is desperate to talk.

I wanted to be a writer, and I didn’t have anything to write about. I was kind of judging myself against all of the prodigies. Anyone from Chatterton to Samuel R. Delany, these are people who had their first novels published when they were nineteen. I had nothing to say. That’s okay. You’re not actually expected to have new and original things to say. Somewhere in there I actually looked around and I had things to say.

A good writer I know—Brian Vaughan, who did Y: The Last Man, and now does lots of wonderful television—tells the story of meeting me when he was a young writer and couldn’t get published. He turned up at one of my signings, and when he stopped to talk with me, he just basically outlined his problem. I listened. “Look,” I said. “Normally the advice that I give people is: Just write. But, in your case, the advice that I give you is live. Stop worrying about writing, and go and do shit. Go get your heart broken. Get a job or two. Knock around. Have things happen—because you don’t have anything to write about yet, and you need that. You’re a good enough writer, and you have the ability, but you don’t have anything to say yet.”

He said he went off and did that, and everything worked. He came to me years on. He said, “Did you give that advice to everybody?” I said, “No, almost nobody.” Quite possibly he was the only person I’ve ever given that particular piece of advice to: Just live. Sometimes, that’s necessary too.