July 9, 2005
2:30 p.m.
The Peninsula Manila

From Singapore to Manila...
Wonderful. It's a huge contrast for me coming out from Singapore... incredibly gleaming, and you know you're not allowed chewing gum and you get fined if you cross the road in the wrong place. You have this incredibly modern, gleaming, glistening, bustling sort of metropolis then coming out here to this wonderful, laid-back sprawl.

You mentioned in your journal that you found Manila funky.
It is, it has that sense of (noisy camera equipment)... It reminded me so much of Brazil in some ways and of Mexico in other ways. "Oh, I know what this is. This is one of those. This has that kind of, everybody is sort of a little bit laid-back. Who will eventually work today? Oh, we're not working today... I don't know... What are we gonna do? Yeah." That kind of vibe to it.

You dropped by Rockwell earlier today.
How did you know this?

Well, I heard people talking about it... News travel fast.
Yes. They've done an art competition. And the art competition they had over 120 people submit these amazing paintings. I was meant to pick the three best. I ended up picking nine best and pretty much picking three from them at random. I'm not even sure... The nine best was the nine best that I picked at 9:30 that morning and if you sent me in tomorrow to look at the same paintings, it might have been a completely different nine. The (standard) was perfect. There were so imaginative and cool.

So you�ll get to meet those artists later on?
Yes. I'm taking three of them to dinner.

That's on Monday, right?
I believe so...

Here we go. Here, we have a very high level of literacy, 93 or 94 percent can read and stuff but we actually don't do it. For example, when I was a student we barely even touched our textbooks. We didn't do anything in the form of reading. So how did you get started on reading when you were a kid?
I was one of those kids who were born to read. The problem for my family was getting books away from me. If we actually got out family events like weddings and things, my father would frisk me for hidden books because... I'd be sitting under a table somewhere just quietly reading. That, I think, is the age when the other kids in my class wanted to be famous book authors or astronauts or politicians. I wanted to be Tolkien or possibly C.S. Lewis. Those were the people that I wanted to be. I wanted to be somebody writing cool books. So that was so much my, you know, what I was like as a kid. It was so integral to me. I had a school library, where we haven't done very much in school libraries since the 1920s, but what I loved about that I docked my way through these old... novels, which nobody else was doing. So I just one of those kids who liked books.

You said you were one of those kids who were born to read. How about those kids who weren't born to read? How would you encourage them?
One of the ways that I do my best now is writing stuff like Coraline. I love writing children's books. I love writing children's books that adults think are faintly disturbing or wrong or dangerous because that way we get these kids, the reluctant readers. Like Coraline, 'cause it's got simple words but a really cool, dark story. I love it.

It happened with Sandman as well. You know, the joy of comics. We live in a world in which comics have gone from being, over the last 25 years, a completely despised medium around the world to being a powerful commercial force taken seriously academically. I'm not saying that every teacher in the world will love it if you're reading comics but most of them have actually noticed that comic books have 200 words on that page. I was one of the kids, my teachers would tell me not to read comics and I'd say, "Why not?" And they'd say, "Well, they stop you reading real things." And I said, "I just won the school English prize. The only reason I know how to spell all these weird words is I found them in comics." That's where I found them. On the one hand, I don't think there's anything wrong with reading comics.

Technical difficulties

Do we have to do it over and all?
I'll give you different answers.

But I liked the first ones.
I'm thinking, "Gosh, how they are getting this?"

So Neil, you have actually stumbled unto a country that doesn't do a lot of reading. We have a very high literacy rate, about 93 to 94 percent, but we don't really do actual reading of books, even textbooks. So how did you get started on reading at such an early age?
I was always a reader. I was one of those kids who before going out to like family events like weddings and funerals, my parents would frisk me to make sure I wasn't carrying a book with me because otherwise I would just head...hang on, I can't do this with whispering. Sorry guys. I could do it the first time with whispering but it's hard to do it when I'm going, 'What did I say the first time?' Is everything cool?

And you were saying, family events...
I was the kind of kid who at family events, I was a very little kid, my parents would frisk me to make sure I didn't have a book hidden on me, which I normally did. Because otherwise they knew that I would just go and sit under a table and read my book. I loved reading. I would read the cornflakes package if that was all there was. And I loved books and I loved comics.

So now I've grown up... One thing that I love doing is just trying to get kids hooked on books by writing kids' books and books like Wolves in the Wall, and The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, and Coraline. The first one's a picture book so they have funky words. You want kids to enjoy the sound of the words and for parents to enjoy reading them to them. You have something like Coraline which I'm hearing a lot is now working for kids who are reluctant readers because it has... The trouble is when kids get a little behind these readers, there's nothing to read. If you are an 11-year-old with a seven-year-old reading age, you don't want to read the books seven-year-olds are reading because they're really boring. So the nice thing about Coraline is, it works its way up to fairly old readers but it also... (laughs, gets distracted) Sorry. So the thing about Coraline is it works its way up, adults like it and kids like it. The kids who are not very good readers are fairly good at it.

I think the most important thing, honestly, for a lot of readers is comics. We have seen comics go from 25 years ago being a completely despised medium to being one where, you know, teachers and educators have now noticed that most comics have 100 to 200 words on that page as well as the pictures. The idea, people who didn't like comics think the words are stupid or kids skip over the words. That's not actually how it works. In order to make sense of comics, you have to read them. So with something like Sandman, you're looking at something that you're gonna be getting as much chewing material out of it as you might get out of a novel. But it's a really different experience; it's not the same experience you have reading a novel. It's pictures, it's comics. But it's there for the reluctant readers.

And I have to say that from my perspective, it's very strange being told that the people of the Philippines don't like reading because I'm an author. I'm not a movie star, I'm not a rock star. I'm just somebody who writes. I make stuff up and write it down. Coming here and finding a sort of Beatle-mania early in the morning tends to indicate I would have thought an enormous respect for both the written word and the stories.

Maybe the problem is that the things that are actually in the reading list are not the kind of books children want to read.
I�ve seen a lot of that. They got really bad in England. I think one of the things that really helped turn Harry Potter into the huge phenomenon it was, one of the best things Harry Potter in its turn did for literature, was... There was a point, especially in England, I don�t know if it�s happened in the rest of the world, but in the late '80s and early '90s, when all the books that made it to the school reading list were worthy and incredibly dull, realistic stories. The sort of like you know, The Travails of a Twelve-Year-Old on a Council Estate Surrounded by Heroin Addicts, because that was not middle-class reading. If you were a kid on a council estate surrounded by heroin addicts, you don�t necessarily want to read a book about other kids in that same council estate. Why don�t you go somewhere interesting in a book? The great thing about a book is it can take you anywhere and it can show you anything. And I think that was the big thing that Harry Potter changed in the UK was certainly going, you know, books don�t have to be good for you. They can just be a great story.

We�ve been talking about natural reader as opposed to these kids who don�t get to read very much in their early childhood. Now let�s talk about frustrated writers. There are a lot of writers here who don�t actually get to practice their craft because they don�t think they have an audience. How can you advise them? What would you say?
I think that the web changed everything. The internet has changed everything. The World Wide Web has completely changed everything. I don�t know what I would do if I were beginning to write age 20 now. But I do know that everything that I would be writing would be going up on the web. And I�d be sticking my stories up there because that way I�d be getting an audience, I�d be getting people reading from the word journal, I�d be getting feedback.

I�m fascinated by this enormous set of fan fiction community that has sprung up. I think that�s terrific. Everybody�s writing, everybody�s commenting on everybody�s writing. They have all sorts of rituals� I think that�s quite wonderful. I find some of the things they write about a little bit odd�

�Coming from you.
Yes, well because I� for example, I wrote a book with Terry Pratchett many years ago called Good Omens, which was a very funny novel about the end of the world and how we are all going to die, with a number of characters, the most important of whom was an angel named Aziraphale and a demon named Crowley. And there�s now whole acres of the web dedicated to fiction about Aziraphale and Crowley, in most of which they are jumping into bed with each other rather enthusiastically. I certainly look at it in a faintly baffled kind of way. I�m pleased it makes so many people happy to write sex fantasies about an angel and a demon, but it would never have actually occurred to me to do so.

You�ve actually preempted about three of my next questions. They were going to be about online literature, fan fiction and Good Omens. So thank you for saving me the time of asking them. So next... We were taught in creative writing classes to keep the audience in mind. In some of your interviews, you were quoted as saying �I keep the artist in mind. I keep myself in mind, not just the audience.� Do you even try to strike a balance or how do you keep everyone happy?
You figure out a sort of pecking order. The most important person is me because if I�m not happy with it, then I don�t care about anybody else. At the end of the day, I write� Sandman for example. My idea was always that I would write the kind of comic that would make me, if I wasn�t writing it, go down once a month to my comic shop and spend my dollar. The basic idea there: it would be nice to have an audience. With Good Omens, the joy of collaborating there was I was writing with Terry Pratchett; I could make him laugh. If Terry laughed, I knew it was working. Having said that, you don�t write for an audience because I can tell you what an audience wants. Because an audience wants what it always wants, which is what he got last time and liked. And every audience, my entire career has been spent disappointing my audience.

With Sandman, I remember looking online. I discovered there were online people talking about comics. Around 15 issues in, I thought, "What are they saying about Sandman?" And what they were saying was that it wasn�t quite as good as it was, as it used to be. And that was at issue 15. I spent my entire Sandman career with everybody online carefully posting that Sandman was not as good when it used to be. What I discovered was, what they meant was the point they started reading it and liked it and now it wasn�t doing that anymore, it was doing something else. The Kindly Ones, it was hated by readers when it came out but now it's probably the most popular �cause it�s all finished. It has the highest rating on Amazon.com. But then once you finish Sandman, what they want is more Sandman.

With American Gods, which was the last big novel that I did in America for adults, and it won the Hugo Award, the Nebular Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and a bundle of other awards. And I had a publisher who offered to publish me. And I said, "Why not?" They were looking at me and they were very happy with my project. And they said, "Oh, we�re going to make you huge." And I said, "Oh, well, that�s great. How are you going to do that?" And they said, "Well, we�re going to make sure that all your next three books are exactly like American Gods, only maybe a bit more acceptable so that all the people who liked American Gods will like these just as much." And I said, "Great, I�m not signing with you." And I didn�t because I like a world which I can sort of... Neverwhere was an adventure, Stardust was a fairy story, American Gods was a great big sort of state-of-the-nation novel about America and mythology, and the new novel Anansi Boys is a comedy.

I�ve decided it was time to write a comedy mostly I think because I started talking to people who now had figured out how they thought Terry Pratchett and I had written Good Omens all those years ago. And they figured I must�ve written a very serious novel and Terry must�ve walked behind me throwing jokes around, scattering them like that. And I just thought that�s just a very silly way, of you know� I wrote half that book, dammit. I wrote funny bits, too. Thought it would be nice to write a novel that makes people feel good and that�s what I did for Anansi Boys.

In an interview with Colleen Doran, you mentioned something about being insecure at one point in your life. Tell me about not being considered a real writer since you were into comics.
It was definitely a weird, frustrating thing for me particularly because� it actually got weirder. It wasn�t that I wasn�t a real writer because I was writing comics. Graphic novels came along and suddenly they were hip and then it got weirder. I remember one day I was in a party. It was a Christmas party for some English magazine. I wind up in conversation with somebody who turned out to be a literary editor of the Daily Telegraph. And he said, "What do you do?" I said, "I write comics." See, it was just like I�d said, "Oh, I am a part-time murderer" or some profession you don�t want to get involved with. "I clean sewers for a living." It was a� There wasn�t really anybody who could� me into this conversation so� "What kind of comics do you write then?" "Well I write Sandman. I just did something called Signal to Noise�" "Hang on, hang on. Are you Neil Gaiman?" And I said yes. He said, "My dear fellow, you don�t write comics. You write graphic novels!" And I felt like a hooker who�s just been told she was the lady of the evening.

It was very weird, especially in the early years. But these days� It was really nice once I started writing the prose and getting the awards for the prose, because perhaps we helped make the comics more respectable to all. In the old days when I'd be invited to universities, it would be by the arts department and the English department would boycott the event or something ostentatiously. And these days, of course, all the professors there at the English department are inviting me out to talk.

You might be happy to know that there is at least one university here in the Philippines that actually offers a course called comic book writing.
Good.

So if I catch up with the professor later at the signing, maybe you could talk to him.
I would love to meet him.

What�s the first story you remember writing? As a kid, I�m sure you were already tinkering around and stuff.
Oh gosh, first story I remember writing� It was interesting. When I was a kid, I used to do a series. I used to create a bunch of characters and do essays� So I remember when I was about eight years old, it was about a team of adventurers. There was a professor and somebody else doing some stuff. By the time I was nine, it was a kid and an alien who looked like a frog. I kept their adventures up until they were back in time meeting� and people like that. Then I ran out of ideas. (laughs)

Do you still have the copy?
My mother probably has somewhere my old English notebooks�

People might probably love to�
What a terrifying idea. When I was about 19 or 20, this first book that I ever wrote, it was a children�s book called My Great Aunt� I wrote it, I sent it out proudly to a few publishers and it came back and I put it in the attic. Well at that time I put it in the� and it sort of moved around and wound up in the attic. When my daughter Maddy was about six or seven, I said, "I just become this famous children�s author and I have this children�s novel in the attic. I�ll go and read it to her." And I took it out from the attic and I read her the whole novel and then I went and put it back in the attic. (laughs)

Didn�t she like it?
She loved it, but I didn�t.

But you told her that you wrote it, right?
I think she just liked the story.

Did you really want to become a journalist at first or was it like just a stepping stone to you?
It was probably a stepping stone, looking back on it. I mean it was a stepping stone in the sense of, I wanted a� you know, eating was really important. And that was the only way it was going to happen at that point. But more important than that, I wanted to be a journalist because all the short stories and stuff that I was writing were coming back to me. I figured that I needed to know how the world worked. The best thing about journalism, as far as I�m concerned, is you meet everybody. And it�s one of the few professions in the world in which nobody minds however many questions you ask. If you�re a journalist you can sit there, ask the nosiest questions and you have no right to ask them and you have no qualifications to ask them. You can be having a conversation in the morning with a rock star and in the evening with the head of NASA and the next morning you�re out in some grubby film shoot or whatever. You sort get an idea of how everything worked. And that is, I think, invaluable.

But in even in journalism, you kind of went against the grain. You wrote for Knave, which is not exactly�
No, but it was just discovering� A lot of it was just about that I was feeding myself. I remember writing� the first two articles I sold to magazines. The first one was to She. They were incredibly respectful. I did a 2,000-word article for an interview and they paid me 80 pounds and never printed it. But I got paid. The next one that I did was Douglas Adams for the English Penthouse and they paid me 300 or 400 pounds and printed it the following month. I thought, "Okay, respectability or interviewing cool people I liked for porn magazines. I�m there with the porn magazine."

(To crew) I think we should change careers. (To Neil) Was there ever a time when you wanted to go back to journalism, like screw all those graphic novels?
No, but I loved knowing it was always there as an option. The best thing for me about the early years at DC was just going, "You know, I don�t have to do this. I know that I can support myself well as a journalist and I know I could always walk away." And that was really comfortable. That may be good somehow because that meant that I really could just leave myself. I always knew that if DC ever said we can�t do this in a comic, I�d just say "Okay, we�re done, no problem, bye bye."

Knowing that as opposed to� I just got off recently from a television project doing with a couple of other people from America. The other people that I was working with desperately wanted to do it and I don�t really mind; I�m really busy. So when they got their first set of notes back from the studio, the original outline... And they read all of the notes and took them as gospel and threw out most of the interesting things about the stories they�ve come up with and wrote this incredibly dull thing. And nobody wanted it and nobody liked it. It was boring. So I said okay, let me take over. And I went back and looked at it and� You�re not meant to believe all these notes from the studio. The studio basically is just saying "We�re not comfortable with that. We think you should change this." But mostly what they want is something really good. So I took half of the things that the studio had told them to take out and decided to put them back in. And sent it off and the studio loved it and everybody loved it because it was interesting. It can be really useful sometimes just to ignore what you�re told.

My favorite story from that time as a young journalist who, on occasion, would write fiction: I gave a short story to an editor who rejected it about three weeks later. And I sat down and looked it over a few days, a few days after that. "You know, there�s nothing wrong with this. He�s being an idiot." So a week after that, I gave it back to him and said "I hope you enjoy the rewrite. I had completely rewritten it and let me know what you think." He phoned up the next day and said, "I just read it. Your rewrite really just makes it sing." And umm, and bought it the next day. (Gets distracted by something noisy) We were doing so well� The point being that, you know, you sort of don�t have to change things as much as people want. The joy, for me, of doing Sandman was it was my comics.

How did you pitch Sandman to DC?
Actually, they pitched it to me, although they didn�t actually pitch the content. Dave McKean and I were doing a book called Black Orchid. We were halfway through Black Orchid and I got a phone call from the people at DC saying, "We�re a bit worried because we�ve just realized this is a graphic novel about a character that nobody remembers by two guys nobody knows and the character�s female and female characters don�t sell and we think we�re in trouble." So we got an idea, what if Dave does this Batman book called Arkham Asylum and you do a monthly comic. I want to get your profile up a bit so that when we release Black Orchid, at least people will buy it. And they said, "Suggest a few things you�d like to do with a monthly comic." And I said a few things and got a phone call back saying "Actually, we�re not very interested in those. But do you remember that Sandman idea that you pitched� You remember that Sandman thing, why don�t you do that?" And I said, oh okay. And then I put together the proposal for Sandman, which was really the first eight issues.

In the past few years, Philippine comics have undergone a sort of evolution. But the problem is that, as with anything here in the Philippines, funding is kind of a problem at every stage. So it�s kind of difficult to convince readers to patronize them and hard for businessmen to believe that this is a project that is worth investing in. So what were the problems that you encountered at first?
I think the Filipino problem, interestingly enough, is actually the same as the British problem. I mean what you have now is a bunch of English authors, English people doing comics in America that then get sold back into England. Filipino artists for years have been some of the most respected artists in American comics. The idea of actually creating stuff over here is much harder; it�s much harder in England where Judge Dredd has worked but almost nothing has actually worked in the last 30 years. So it�s much, much harder for me to actually offer any kind of advice coming from a country which eventually our solution was, we do that in America and, you know, it will come back to England.

(Crew changes camera�s batteries)

Going back to more comparisons between England and the Philippines, you�ve always been passionate about the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Here in the Philippines, it�s kind of the reverse. Press freedom is granted and guaranteed under our Constitution. But the problem with that is sometimes it can go a little overboard. What scenario would you prefer, the one in England or the one we have here?
Having just come from Singapore where they have incredibly tight censorship and where the government has to approve everything you see, everything you hear... Any movie coming into Singapore they go through a major� the government censors and they�d snip out any words they didn�t want you to hear, or any images. Would you rather see the film? Would you rather get to be an adult making your own mind up?

I happen to believe that I would much rather have press freedom; I would much rather have artistic freedom. I would much rather be able to say what I want to say and assume that any adult also has the right either to watch it, not watch it. Somebody doesn�t like what I�ve written, let them write about it. If you are in America and you hate what Michael Moore did, the solution is go make your own movie and talk about how much you hate what Michael Moore did. The solution is not trying to shut out Michael Moore.

I think the First Amendment� you know, coming from a country where there are stuff you couldn�t say and you couldn�t see and you couldn�t read to a country in which it was guaranteed but was always under attack, I would much rather be out there manning the barricades and absolutely keeping the freedom. Head out to Singapore and explain to any of the people on the street the situation out here and which you would rather have, the government making sure there are things you can�t see or the situation out in Manila, I don�t think there�ll be an awful lot of them saying, "Oh, we really like censorship. We love not being able to see nipples on our screens. We think that�s so great."

More on the media, in American Gods there is a modern-day deity called Media. You yourself, you come from the media. And this deity is self-absorbed, insincere and sometimes just downright annoying. So what�s your real take on the media?
I think we can be self-absorbed, insincere and sometimes downright annoying. I think that� it�s like when you meet a morning television host in particular. Incredibly slick. Nothing watches over them. They have a politician in one moment and somebody out there showing you the new way to shampoo your dog the next and everything is met with the same early-morning, insincere smile. And as somebody who�s been in that morning television studio myself, and happy people with perfect smiles first thing in the morning and little wires coming out of their ears� You�re thinking, are they really human?

I think the media can be incredibly shallow. I think the media often is incredibly shallow. I figured if you were lifting things that get worshipped these days, TV gets worshipped. People sacrifice their time to it the way they sacrificed animals.

Going back to that, the kind of religions that are popping up lately. Being an author, you�ve always had the power to influence a lot of people, but sometimes this influence goes to extremes like in the case of L. Ron Hubbard. What�s your take on the entire Scientology thing?
I don�t have a take on it.

So what would happen if you found out that someone was starting this religion in honor of you or in honor of Dream or something like that?
Well, I remember once getting a letter from a young lady saying she was 17 and three-quarters and she was about to turn 18. And she decided that on her 18th birthday she was going to pick a religion and right now she was wavering backwards and forwards between Buddhism and believing in the Endless. And I thought anybody who actually goes at it from that angle should probably be encouraged, you know. On the other hand, the Endless very specifically are not gods. They don�t like worship and you get into trouble if you try and worship them �cause they�re merely natural forces. If somebody was setting up a religion based on me, I think that would definitely be kind of creepy� I don�t know.

I get weird enough honestly on account of the whole cult of personality stuff anyway. The reason for doing the blog, I have this blog over at www.neilgaiman.com, is� I could see the weird cult of personality that was growing in the 1990s and I really wanted to do something to deflate it because I�d turn up places and it would be obvious that people would expect me to be eight inches taller, much more pale, dressed in beautiful Gothic clothes and sort of mournful and beautiful, which is not me at all. And I said, "Well, if I�ve got my blog, people actually get to see the idea the work of a writer, what you do if you make stuff up, and it�s very hard to think somebody as a lonely, romantic figure when you're seeing them cleaning up cat vomit at three o�clock in the morning," which is why, you know, I tend to leave in cleaning up the cat vomit in a blog.

I�m not sure it works probably because I never expected blogs to have the weird kind of power in their lives. It got to a point where we got several million people reading so it has become this sort of strange... on its own.

(Iya de los Santos of Fully Booked reminds us to wrap it up)

Last question. I�m sorry for using somebody else�s time�
(Laughs)It is because you are here and they�re not� Yeah. That�s kind of being insincere�

And downright self-absorbed�
Self-absorbed and downright annoying, yes. Beautifully phrased.

My last question: Here in the Philippines religion is a very big thing. And there�s a lot of gods and mythology in your books but somehow you�re kind of distant from everything and you�ve never mentioned Jesus. I�ve heard a lot of people... For one thing, that is something I�ve heard a lot of people ask, why don�t you talk about Jesus? Jesus was hitchhiking in Afghanistan in American Gods but he was not actually there.
There actually is an American Gods Jesus. I put him in. In fact if you get the� edition� I stuck him in, the Jesus sequence which I took out of American Gods �cause it didn�t really work. I didn�t take it out because I thought it would get me into trouble because after you�ve written a novel in which at the end of chapter one, a man has been eaten by a prostitute�s vagina, you don�t really worry as much about books getting you into trouble. You figure anybody could get you into trouble because of the stuff written there. But it was that scene when Shadow was on a tree and he actually gets to meet Jesus, he gets to meet the American Jesus �cause the idea was the one who would have been seen hitchhiking in Afghanistan would have been the Jesus, the Afghani Jesus. But he gets to meet the American Jesus who is a lot like Steven Spielberg. And he�s out there in California, gorgeous place, and sort of trying to deal with the problems of success, and you know, everybody loving you, and trying to be open to all people� He can make wine, magic wine, not terribly good wine �cause I figured that sort of�

If I ever meet Steven Spielberg, I�ll tell him that you based your Jesus on him.
I did. He had a little baseball cap.

Oh, cool. I guess we have to go� really, really great to talk to you. I don�t know if you�ll have time to sign all this stuff�
Let me scribble a name while they bring in the next�

Have you heard from Tori lately?
I got a message from her in, um�

They�re actually running out of numbers�
They went 200 numbers over what we said we could do. We figured out I could probably do 500 people then it ended up 700.

They gave out 800 numbers�
Oh no� 800 people?

Jaime Daez of Fully Booked:
(To Neil) We�re not issuing any more. I�ll talk to you later about it.

Click here and know what it feels like for a (fan)girl.