the view from the cheap seats by neil gaiman

Some of the tools that hang in the garden shed of a writer are tools that help us, as writers, to understand what the patterns are. ‘I hope we get there soon,’” and you realize you did it all. And you go back and you read that book as an adult and you discover a sentence that says something like, “‘What a jolly awful night this would be,’ he said as they rode their horses through the forest. A book that you remember a scene from so vividly, something that was etched onto the back of your eyeballs when you read it, and you remember the rain whipping down, you remember the way the trees blew in the wind, you remember the whinnies and the stamps of the horses as they fled through the forest to the castle, and the jangle of the bits, and every noise. I don’t know if any of you have ever had the experience of returning to a beloved childhood book. No two readers can or will ever read the same book, because the reader builds the book in collaboration with the author. What we give the reader is a raw code, a rough pattern, loose architectural plans that they use to build the book themselves. We don’t give them the people or the places or the emotions. What we, as authors, give to the reader isn’t the story. The miracle of prose is this: it begins with the words. Weller alone knew what they were good for. In the garden shed, every kind of strange hoe and spade and trowel and dibber hung, and Mr. Weller was eighty-five, and he came in every Wednesday and did things in the garden, and the roses grew, and the vegetable garden put forth vegetables, as if by magic. I love learning about fiction, but the learning is only as interesting as it is something that I can use. I want to know how I can make something work for me. I’m fascinated by academia, but it’s a practical fascination. It is the task of the academic to walk around the bomb site, gathering up the shrapnel, to figure out what kind of an explosion it was, who was killed, how much damage it was meant to do and how close it came to actually achieving that.Īs a writer, I’m much more comfortable exploding than talking about explosions.

That was just put in to make it a catchy title. It’s actually nothing at all about the genre of pornography. So I have no idea how long this is going to be. I’ve written a speech, because I’m nervous, but I’ve also made lots of little marks in green ink where I’ve told myself I’m allowed to go off and just sort of start talking if I want to. Oddly enough, I think in some ways my talk is about passionate unknowing. It’s not the actual speech I wrote, because I departed so far from my notes in the giving of it. This is a transcription of a talk I gave in Orlando to an audience mostly composed of academics. SOME THINGS I BELIEVE The Pornography of Genre, or the Genre of Pornography Neil Gaiman gave this keynote at the thirty-fifth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, held in Orlando, Florida, in 2013.

The view from the cheap seats by neil gaiman