The Faces of Fantasy Essay

neil-gaiman:

inthegrayworld:

THESE ARE NOT OUR FACES.

This is not what we look like.

You think Gene Wolfe looks like his photograph in this book? Or Jane Yolen? Or Peter Straub? Or Diana Wynne Jones? Not so. They are wearing play-faces to fool you. But the play-faces come off when the writing begins.

Frozen in black and silver for you now, these are simply masks. We who lie for a living are wearing our liar-faces, false-faces made to deceive the unwary. We must be - for, if you believe these photographs, we look just like everyone else.

Protective coloration, that’s all it is.

Read the books: sometimes you can catch sight of us in there. We look like gods and fools and bards and queens, singing worlds into existence, conjuring something from nothing, juggling words into all the patterns of night.

Read the books. That’s when you see us properly: naked priestesses and priests of forgotten religions, our skins glistening with scented oils, scarlet blood dripping down from our hands, bright birds flying out from our open mouths. Perfect, we are, and beautiful in the fire’s golden light…

There was a story I was told as a child, about a little girl who peeked in through a writer’s window one night, and saw him writing. He had taken his false-face off to write and had hung it behind the door, for he wrote with his real face on. And she saw him; and he saw her. And, from that day to this, nobody has ever seen the little girl again.

Since then, writers have looked like other people even when they write (though sometimes their lips move, and sometimes they stare into space longer, and more intently, than anything that isn’t a cat); but their words describe their real faces: the ones they wear underneath. This is why people who encounter writers of fantasy are rarely satisfied by the wholly inferior person that they meet.

“I thought you’d be taller, or older, or younger, or prettier, or wiser,” they tell us, in words or wordlessly.

“This is not what I look like,” I tell them. “This is not my face.”

Essay by Neil Gaiman from The Faces of Fantasy; as it appears on Here In My Head, Tori Amos’ website.

"

When the web started, I used to get really grumpy with people because they put my poems up. They put my stories up. They put my stuff up on the web. I had this belief, which was completely erroneous, that if people put your stuff up on the web and you didn’t tell them to take it down, you would lose your copyright, which actually, is simply not true.

And I also got very grumpy because I felt like they were pirating my stuff, that it was bad. And then I started to notice that two things seemed much more significant. One of which was… places where I was being pirated, particularly Russia where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading around into the world, I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. Then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia, it would sell more and more copies. I thought this was fascinating, and I tried a few experiments. Some of them are quite hard, you know, persuading my publisher for example to take one of my books and put it out for free. We took “American Gods,” a book that was still selling and selling very well, and for a month they put it up completely free on their website. You could read it and you could download it. What happened was sales of my books, through independent bookstores, because that’s all we were measuring it through, went up the following month three hundred percent

I started to realize that actually, you’re not losing books. You’re not losing sales by having stuff out there. When I give a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people say, “Well, what about the sales that I’m losing through having stuff copied, through having stuff floating out there?” I started asking audiences to just raise their hands for one question. Which is, I’d say, “Okay, do you have a favorite author?” They’d say, “Yes.” and I’d say, “Good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book, put up your hands.” And then, “Anybody who discovered your favorite author by walking into a bookstore and buying a book raise your hands.” And it’s probably about five, ten percent of the people who actually discovered an author who’s their favorite author, who is the person who they buy everything of. They buy the hardbacks and they treasure the fact that they got this author. Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it, and that’s how they found their favorite author. And I thought, “You know, that’s really all this is. It’s people lending books. And you can’t look on that as a loss of sale. It’s not a lost sale, nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free.”

What you’re actually doing is advertising. You’re reaching more people, you’re raising awareness. Understanding that gave me a whole new idea of the shape of copyright and of what the web was doing. Because the biggest thing the web is doing is allowing people to hear things. Allowing people to read things. Allowing people to see things that they would never have otherwise seen. And I think, basically, that’s an incredibly good thing.

"

- Neil Gaiman on Copyright, Piracy, and the Commercial Value of the Web (X)

(via jebiwonkenobi)

neil-gaiman:

Most of what I have to say to young writers about writing, in one tiny video clip.

(via fuckyeahgaiman)

"

Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that - but you are the only you.

Tarantino - you can criticize everything that Quentin does - but nobody writes Tarantino stuff like Tarantino. He is the best Tarantino writer there is, and that was actually the thing that people responded to - they’re going ‘this is an individual writing with his own point of view’.

There are better writers than me out there, there are smarter writers, there are people who can plot better - there are all those kinds of things, but there’s nobody who can write a Neil Gaiman story like I can.

"

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- A bit of writing advice from Neil Gaiman. (via faramirs)

I said it on the Nerdist Podcast, and I believe it. It’s as true for any area of the arts, not just writing. Perhaps it’s true for life.

(via neil-gaiman)

(via wilwheaton)

jonahray:

NERDIST PODCAST #106: Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman chats with the nerds about American Gods, describes scenes that were cut from his Doctor Who ep (“The Doctor’s Wife”) and doles out PHENOMENAL advice for aspiring writers. Also, an intense spiritual discussion reveals that we are all Hodgman.

(via kaymistertopak-deactivated20111)

"Of course everyone’s parents are embarrassing. It goes with the territory. The nature of parents is to embarrass merely by existing, just as it is the nature of children of a certain age to cringe with embarrassment, shame, and mortification should their parents so much as speak to them on the street."

- Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman (via streetlevelmiracles)

(via neilgaiman)

"Librarians are the coolest people out there doing the hardest job out there on the frontlines. And every time I get to encounter or work with librarians, I’m always impressed by their sheer awesomeness."

- Neil Gaiman (via neilgaiman)

neilgaiman:

fuckyeahladydeath:

(In Which Neil Gaiman Talks About Death’s Creation/Arrival)

GoodReads Update: April 2010

Smile When You’re Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer by Chuck Thompson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

.

Season of Mists by Neil Gaiman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

.

The Sandman, The Dream Hunters by Neil Gaiman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I loved every moment and every panel of this. Not only was the story beautiful, but the art was equally as breathtaking.

.

View all my reviews »

neilgaiman:

(via KidNotorious)

"The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter."

- NEIL GAIMAN