Neil Gaiman on libraries, Dr Who, fanatical fans and his dreams

Guardian.co.uk
One of the most decorated writers on the planet thrills fans with a wide-ranging discussion, revealing details of new books in the pipeline and his hopes for sequels to the much-loved Coraline and American Gods

Neil Gaiman signing books for fans at the Edinburgh international book festival

Considering how massively popular Neil Gaiman is, I feel I have a duty to share my notes from his talk here at the Edinburgh interational book festival on Tuesday. There was a real sense that despite his success, he has plenty more writing in him and is full of ideas, if only he had the time to do them justice.

Dozens of people contacted me on Twitter saying they wished they could be there, so here are the main points in his own words for those of you weren't lucky enough to get a ticket.

Gaiman on his new books:

"I'm currently battling with a short story, I'm on page 50 and it's definitely not a short story. It seems to be children's fiction, I'm not quite sure, because it starts with an adult suicide. It's about this kid who is eight years-old and he becomes friendly with these three women who run a farm at the bottom of the lake. They say they come from the old country, but not the real old country because that sank. And their mother says none of them know what they're talking about because the really old country blew up. Weird stuff happens on their farm. It was such a simple story when I started writing it, elegant in its simplicity. But then I started writing it.

"The other thing I'm writing right now was meant to be the next children's picture book. It's called Fortunately, The Milk. It was meant to be a kind of sequel to The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish because people say I'm very unfair to fathers and I think, 'You're right, I should write something which proves how important and cool fathers are.' It's about the morning these kids wake up and there is no milk so their dad goes off to get some. And they wait and they wait and they even contemplate putting juice on their cereal. Eventually he gets back and they say, 'You forgot about us.' He says, 'Actually there was a humming noise as I left the corner shop and I found myself in a spaceship.' He starts this amazing tale.

"There are pirates in it, there are aliens, prophecies and volcanoes. And as each desperate situation unfolds, he says 'Fortunately, the milk was...' and the milk survives. I thought it would be a nice 2,500 word story but it keeps growing."

Gaiman on watching his own Dr Who episode:

"Normally I can't enjoy my own stuff. But I loved my Dr Who episode. I absolutely love it, because what I wrote was the script and what I get back is this glorious wonderful stuff. And Rory dies, again. Some of it was how I imagined and some of it wasn't and that's great. That's why I like collaborating. The fun of it is sitting down and thinking, this is great.

"One of the main things that formed me as a kid was Dr Who. When I was a kid I had David Whitaker's book Dr Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks, that's actually the title. And because you had no DVDs, videos or any way of ever watching these things again, once they were watched they were gone. I would read and re-read and re-re-read."

Gaiman on following-up Coraline and American Gods:

"Fans and readers like the last thing they read. They say they want another American Gods or another Stardust. I get these letters from kids explaining to me that I need to write another Coraline. And they suggest plots, it's great. They all suggest the same plot too, pretty much, that Coraline goes to school and the Other Mother is now one of their teachers. And I sympathise and empathise. There's a part of me that would love to go and write some more of those.

"American Gods was designed to be if not open-ended, at least a trilogy kind of shape, so there's definitely one more book, probably another couple of books there to get written. I'm actively researching the second one now in a lazy kind of way. I did some research for it the other day here at the Fringe in Edinburgh when I hung out with a mentalist. Mentalism is one of the things that strands through the second American Gods in the same way that coin magic stranded through the first."

Gaiman on his fans:

"For years up to The Graveyard Book I loved the fact that I tended to exist in either, 'Neil Gaiman, never heard of him,' or 'Neil Gaiman, oh my he's my favourite author.' Somehow The Graveyard Book achieved critical mass. I don't think it's part of the job to interact with fans. I love being a writer.

"I actually worry when I speak to younger authors who have been pointed at my website or worse, to my Twitter feed, by their publishers who have said he's successful, do that. I tell them look, I do it because I enjoy it. I started blogging a decade ago because I like blogging. Writing's a kind of lonely thing to do and I liked the idea of demystifying the process because I loved it as a kid and teenager and as somebody who wanted desperately to write."

Gaiman on libraries:

"When I was young I was reading anything and anything I could lay my hands on. I was a veracious to the point of insane reader. When I got the Carnegie Medal for The Graveyard Book I gave a talk about libraries and how incredibly important libraries were to me.

"As a kid I would get my parents to drop me off at my local library on their way to work during the summer holidays and I would walk home at night. For several years I read the children's library until I finished the children's library. Then I moved into the adult library and slowly worked my way through them. With the kids' library I did it alphabetically but I discovered I couldn't do that with the adult one because there were too many big boring books to read, so I did it by interesting covers."

Gaiman on his dreams:

Taking questions from fans, Gaiman was asked: "Question, random. Do you have vivid dreams or is it just things you observe?"

He replied:

"Answer, equally random. I steal from my dreams. Dream logic and story logic are totally very different. The most important thing I get from dreams is how I feel about things. I've stolen scenes, images and moments from my dreams. I've only ever stolen one whole story and I remember the joy of waking up and going, that's a story with a beginning, middle and end. It was Feeders and Eaters from Fragile Things. It really was a dream and I woke up and scribbled it down."

Gaiman on his character Death and death, as in dying:

"Death began when I came up with the idea of a character who was the incarnation of a dream. I grabbed a great big book of quotations and I read all of the quotes on dreams looking for things that inspired me and then I went to sleep. Somewhere in there was the quote that said, 'Death is the brother to sleep.' I was vaguely thinking there could be a family, so that was good. I had a glorious opportunity to use the inherent sexism of language to mess with people's heads just a little bit. I knew Death had to be a sister because that was so much more fun.

"Deaths in fiction fall into two camps. Either they are skeletons in human form with no emotion. Or you have Deaths who are tortured, who have to take lives and it's all, 'Oh what a terrible thing.' I thought no, what a great job Death must be. It gets you out of the house, you get to meet people. Actually you get to meet everybody.

"I thought about what kind of person I would like to meet when I die. I thought, 'I don't want to meet a skeleton or somebody tortured or someone who wants to play chess.' I would like to meet somebody nice. If she's going to say, 'You really should have looked both ways before you crossed that street,' well at least do it in a nice way. There weren't many lovable Deaths out there so I thought it would be nice to have a lovable Death."