Once upon a time a writer sat in a large room and looked around. The words and papers that he had dreamed into existence had begun to clog the space. Once upon a time a writer sat in a large room and looked around. The words and papers that he had dreamed into existence had begun to clog the space. To get from his magic writing place to the world outside he had to push his way past words on stacks of paper that had grown so high that he was no longer able to see over the top to the door. Sometimes the lanes they had formed led him not to a door, but into a wall and he had to find his way back to the desk where he made the words, and start over. He began to wonder if the words had started shifting their locations while his back was turned, if they intended to keep him in his writing place, making more and more words and stories to keep them all company. One day a doll with button eyes that he kept on his desk stood up and told him that he really should do something about the growing menace if he wanted to be able to leave the room ever again. The writer was suitably terrified, and vowed to get right on it, concerned about the possibility that he was losing his shit.
[image] Neil Gaiman - from maskable
I know nothing of Neil Gaiman’s living situation, of course. He may be the neatest person alive, a place for everything and everything in its place. Black shirt here, black pants there, black jacket over there. Another black shirt here, another black shirt here...While it is likely that his words are all nicely tucked away on hard drives, in clouds, on servers and disks of various ages and sorts, I envision stacks of paper hither and yon festooned with buzzing colonies of paper mites. Maybe his wife gives him the stink-eye about the piles, urging him to take some time and deal with the mess. So he bites the bullet one Saturday morning when the creative urge is at low ebb. He gathers a stack from here, a sheaf from there, and as I imagine anyone who writes might do, he reads some of the things he has written, some of them decades old. Not half bad, he might think, and he would be right. But in gathering all the material together, and now admiring the still dusty but paper free sections of floor that have become newly visible, and considering tying up all the paper for inclusion in the recycling bin, it occurs that they might be worthy of another form of recycling. Thus, newly energized, he begins to pore through the materials a second time, and in this pass, he makes three piles, keeper, on the fence, and toss, ties up the toss pile, and off to the bin it goes. Somehow the keeper and on–the-fence piles seem to magically move closer to each other until they are indistinguishable. The result is The View From the Cheap Seats, a compendium of mostly small bits from Gaiman’s large body of small non-fiction writings.
They are divided into ten sections, but the fences bordering each are easily and frequently scaled. The largest element in the collection consists of introductions Gaiman has written for other writer’s books. They are all heartfelt, sometimes moving, and are infused with his personal experience of those writers, whether purely through their work, or, in many cases, through his relationships with them in the real world. I was reminded of Bill Clinton’s memoir, My Life, in which it seemed as if everyone he met had a huge and lasting impact on him. I am sure Gaiman means all the glowing things he says about the people he writes of here, but it does seem a bit much at times. Who didn’t impact your life?
There are many speeches he has delivered, at commencements, at professional conferences, at award ceremonies. A fair bit of autobiography is tucked into the works, not enough to fill out a true version but enough to whet your appetite for more. He includes considerable advice on writing, both doing the actual writing, and coping with the external realities of writing professionally.
I quite enjoy Neil Gaiman’s work (see linked reviews at bottom). He is a bright, articulate, thoughtful and creative sort. He has things to say and says them persuasively. But I have to concede that I enjoy Neil Gaiman the writer of fiction a fair bit more than I do Neil Gaiman, the writer of book intros, album liner notes, deliverer of commencement addresses and speechifier at sundry professional events. It is not that particular items included in this considerable compilation (I counted 84 individual pieces, but I could be off by a few) are not good. Most were at least somewhat interesting and a bunch were very interesting. Ok. A few were boring. There seems a redundancy to much of the material. I got the feeling one has on occasion after having listened to a song you really like about twenty times too many. The collection seemed too large, and would have been improved by some intelligent culling, down from over 500 to maybe 400 or even 350 pages. Gaiman is a prolific producer of product, very much like Stephen King (there is a nice interview with King in here) or Isaac Asimov (although he has nothing like Asimov’s range, not that anyone else does either). So even with such a large volume, odds are that there is material lying about to fill several more.
So what are the upsides? Ok, you already know the guy is a pretty solid writer, so the quality of the writing is fine. Even though he is out of his power genre, he was a journalist and can crank out non-fic, no problem. He shares plenty of insights, particularly when making the case for the value of fantasy, although they sometimes sounded a bit emo:
We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write.
He writes about works that and writers who have influenced him, whether those influences were TV Programs (Dr Who), writers of comics (Will Eisner), or of books (Harlan Ellison, and many others), of children’s or adult fiction. I enjoyed his observations of the writing experience. There are details in this collection that will definitely enhance your appreciation for how some of his well-known creations came to be, the what-ifs that sparked the process.
I write to find out what I think about something. I wrote American Gods because I had lived in America for almost a decade and felt it was time that I learned what I thought about it. I wrote Coraline because, when I was a child, I used to wonder what would happen if I went home and my parents had moved away without telling me.
He offers insights into some other works of his, for instance Sandman and The Ocean of the End of the Lane.
I quite enjoyed his tale of attending the Oscars when Coraline was nominated, and had exactly no chance of winning. Gaiman, a pretty well-known sort, was relegated to the relatively cheap seats, even though Coraline had received a nomination. Another tale, of his work on the film Mirrormask and then attending the opening at the Sundance festival, had a lovely stranger-in-a-strange-land feel. He includes some interaction with musicians, notably Lou Reed. And one of the two pieces about his now wife Amanda Palmer was quite interesting for it’s look at the strains of coping with the together-all-the-time relationships inherent in going on the road. I enjoyed his straight-up autobio pieces, including his childhood reading experiences and fondness for comics.
You will come away from Cheap Seats with a nice list of authors you may want to check out, the product of the laudatory intros Gaiman wrote for books by or about them. I guarantee that, despite the considerable stack of household names, some of the writers he notes here will be new to you. There is enough good and very good material in the collection to justify checking it out. Even if you find yourself in a piece that might dull the senses, the next piece is only a couple of pages away and could be quite good.
Neil Gaiman has done pretty well for himself and deservedly so. So one must take with a grain of salt a view from such a successful guy that purports to be from the cheap seats. Gaiman is a top notch author and if he is looking at the world from the cheap seats any place but at the Oscars he is probably slumming. You will definitely enjoy much of what is included in this large collection. But there is enough that seems duplicative, in tone if not always in content, that it keeps the collection from being quite row five, orchestra center.
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. - Ernest Hemingway
One writer I know tells me that he sits down every m
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. - Ernest Hemingway
One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, “It’s not like you don’t have a choice, because you do—you can either type or kill yourself.” - Anne Lamott
I have not always felt much like writing. My writer’s block, if that is what it was, and not merely the tardy development of some creative muscles, occupied a large portion of my youth. Writing papers for school was not merely a chore but a horror. I am not sure when chips were first broken from that large mass but I do recall actually having some fun as a high school sophomore, in otherwise weak report on Midsummer Night’s Dream, describing the play as “Shakespearean Slapstick.“ Writing did get easier, but was never less than challenging. I have had occasion to write a bit of this and that in my working life, but my employers have all been consistent in finding no use at all for what writing ability I may possess. That impulse found its way into letters, and, for disparate periods, journaling. I managed to crank out a newsletter for the baseball and softball teams I managed, but those days are well back in the rearview. For the last fifteen years or so, I have been cranking out reviews here on Goodreads, and seem to have found a rhythm. This is by no means automatic. Every one of these things, well, with one or two exceptions, takes real effort. But it is possible. It is not horrifying. I am comfortable in knowing that when I read a book I can definitely produce a review, not always a good review, but at least one that is not completely embarrassing. At the very least, it is not cadged from the kid sitting in front of me, or helped along by ChatGPT. I have developed my own system, an approach to how to go about it. I could probably keep at this until my ashes are strewn, but there is a piece of me that would like to take on something larger, something less reactive. And so the horror returns. It is quite clear that just because a person can write book reviews, that does not mean a person can necessarily write an actual book. My inner child begins to whine, “but I wanna, waaaaah.”
So here we are. No shortage of ideas, but massive supplies of anxiety, fear, ignorance, and self-doubt. What’s an aspiring writer to do? I may not be able to tamp down the emotional/psychological impediments, but I can try to address the ignorance piece. And one way to begin this process is to look for some advice. Which brings us to Anne Lamott. My Christmas list for 2014 included Stephen King’s On Writing and Santa came through, but his assistant, my elfin book goddess tossed in another, Lamott’s Bird by Bird (or as it might be referred to in some parts of my home borough, Boid by Boid) as well. I will be getting to King’s book in time. I had read BbB many years ago. My ambitions were different then. I expect there are times when certain books and certain readers converge. You can read a great book and not appreciate it because of where you might be in your life, but connect with it totally if you catch it at the right time. I may have incorporated a bit of this book way back when but now was definitely a propitious time for a refresher.
[image] Ann Lamott - image from Salon
Of course, you will be at diverse stages in your writing interests, if you indeed have such urges at all. Not everyone does. There are many ways to transport the inner to the outer and writing may not offer the right means for most. But, as you are reading this, I expect there is a good chance you like to write, and maybe want to kick it up a notch. If so, Lamott’s book is a wonderful place to find a helping hand. In fact, it is a masterpiece of the genre, rich with wisdom, offering a host of ideas about how to get from not-writing to writing, in manageable, small pieces. One thing about this book is that it is very funny. I laughed out loud a lot while reading it, which can be awkward on crowded subway cars. Hopefully some of the techniques here will provide some bandages for the Hemingway quote at the top.
She offers advice on how to get moving when you are stuck, provides cheerful, uplifting support for trying times, and permission to allow your creative process to work through its issues, up to a point. She lets us all know that Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts, which is very, very good to know. There are chapters on plot, character, and dialogue. Some explanation of technique. Lamott is echoing in print the writing class she teaches.
The book is eminently quotable. My personal favorite, however second hand it might be, is
E.L. Doctorow once said that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
Although this does ignore the obvious, that in making that trip one already is aware of the destination, and the route, still, it gives me hope. Maybe an inability to see the entire picture from the beginning does not condemn my efforts, or yours, to failure. One concern I have is that whatever I write, as seems to be the case for every idea I have ever had, has already been done, probably multiple times, and probably better. Lamott has a quote for this:
Mark Twain said that Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before. Life is like a recycling center, where all the concerns and dramas of humankind get recycled back and forth across the universe. But what you have to offer is your own sensibility, maybe your own sense of humor or insider pathos or meaning. All of us can sing the same song, and there will still be four billion different renditions.
If you are considering writing more generically, as opposed to having a specific project in mind, Lamott offers a wealth of assignments designed to get the wheels turning. And for those who dabble in analyzing books, there is plenty of intel on structure, and the dynamics of story-telling, all of which are relevant to reviewers of books.
If you harbor no aspirations to writing, Bird by Bird offers a warm, illuminating and entertaining look at some of the things writers go through, provides some insight into the process of writing, and some of the challenges writers confront. If, however, you are a writer, aspire to be a writer, or indulge in analysis of writing, Bird by Bird will feel like a kindly mentor, an older, wiser sibling maybe, who can take you by the hand and offer a gentle nudge in the right direction. Your writing may or may not soar, but Lamott’s excellent tutorial will certainly add a few feathers to your wings. Maybe those will be all you need to finally take that step away from the nest and let your creativity take flight.
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