Writing, Neil Gaiman, and Kon Satoshi
I almost gave up writing altogether after reading Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman.
I didn’t read it as it was coming out in comics, but later, when it was published in collected volumes.
It was too perfect. Too complete. It seemed like it had sprung fully-formed from Gaiman’s head, and he had to spend years waiting for artists to catch up.
It was overwhelming. Unattainable.
I wasn’t reading the book’s post-scripts, though, because I wanted to avoid potential spoilers. I wanted to experience the material, not the author dissecting it.
I did read them on a second pass. There’s a story on Dream Country, the third volume, about a writer keeping a muse captive so she can give him ideas. It’s a piece with characters that tie into Morpheus’ past and who will come up again, woven into the larger narrative. The book also contains a post-script on how the story came about, where Gaiman states it was at first about a succubus, before moving on to talk about his process for working with the artist.
My eyes kept moving forward, brain storing words from the original script, but my consciousness had taken a step back.
Wait, back up, what was that character again? Who? Calliope. Originally a succubus, replies brain, let me keep going here.
Yes, stupid me. I had assumed Sandman had been gestating inside Gaiman from the start, waiting for an opportunity for the entire story to burst out. He didn’t transcribe a long epic he had already come up with. He wasn’t born with the tale. He worked at it for years, sometimes throwing away material and replacing it with things that fit better. Like a normal human being.
I keep making the same mistake. I wrote about a similar mental bug when talking about Kon Satoshi and Dream Fossil.
We only see the finished product. We don’t see the author sitting down at the typewriting and bleeding.
It’s all work. Some people have more potential and have it easier, others have to work harder at it, but in the end it’s only work. If you want a chance to get better at it, you should treat it as such.
I can’t see Sandman, really. All I can see is the patches and the solutions and the hacks, the places where the art wasn’t what I hoped for or expected, or where the writing fell short of the thing in my head. It’s long enough ago that I still wonder why I was so insistent that DC simply dump “Three Septembers and a January” because it was bad enough that simply publishing it would ruin Sandman. (Sensibly, Tom Peyer, who was editing while Karen Berger was off having a sudden baby, ignored me, or made pacifying noises that perhaps it wasn’t as bad as I believed. These days it’s one of my favourite episodes.)
But yes. It’s all work, and it’s all about the work. I used to write four pages of SANDMAN a day on a good day, which was about eight pages of script, although I’d usually write the last six pages in one swoop being grumpy that I didn’t have enough pages and throwing things away so we’d end on page 24. (Although once, in Game of You, I simply miscounted and wrote a 25 page comic accidentally, so we only did 23 pages the next month to make up for it.) By the end of Sandman I was writing two pages a day on a good day…
