As befits a man with his undying work ethic, Neil Gaiman once said “Writing is flying in dreams. When you remember. When you can. When it works. It’s that easy.” One of the world’s most successful and versatile writers, Gaiman is a best-selling novelist (American Gods), an award-winning comic book writer (The Sandman), a popular children’s book author (Stardust) and a highly respected screenwriter (Neverwhere). The dazzling diversity of concepts produced by Gaiman’s fecund (some might say fevered) imagination has led many to ask him where he gets his story ideas from. His answer, more often than not, is that a few of them were written to amuse himself or, more precisely, to get an idea or an image out of his head and pinned safely down on paper: releasing demons and letting them fly. Other stories began in idleness: mere fancies and curiosities that got out of hand. In Gaiman’s richly imagined fictions, anything is possible: an elderly widow finds the Holy Grail beneath an old fur coat in a second-hand shop; under a bridge, a frightened little boy bargains for his life with a very persistent troll; a stray cat fights and re-fights a terrible nightly battle to protect his unsuspecting adoptive family from unimaginable evil, and so on and so on… The distinctive storytelling genius of Neil Gaiman has been acclaimed by writers as diverse as Norman Mailer and Stephen King. I’m sure, if you haven’t sampled Gaiman’s work already, that if you seek it out it will no doubt similarly dazzle your senses, haunt your imagination and move you to the depths of your soul.
Top Posts & Pages
The Inn at the Edge of the World
Click image to read my short story 'The Inn at the Edge of the World' in Bardic Tales and Sage Advice, Vol. 8.
The Witch of Wicken Fen
Click image to read my short story 'The Witch of Wicken Fen' in Aphelion, the Webzine of sci-fi and fantasy.
Tolkien
-
Another Road to Middle Earth
Fifty years after its first publication, The Lord of the Rings found a new and even larger audience in a new medium, the three films directed by Peter Jackson and released in successive years 2001–2003. These are some of the most successful films ever made. The three between them had taken some £1,279 million at the […]
-
After the King: Tolkien’s heirs
It is something of a relief, having looked last month at his critics, to turn this time to Tolkien’s many admirers. It would not be true to say that there was no such thing as epic fantasy before Tolkien: there was a tradition of English and Irish writers before him, such as E R Eddison and […]
-
Tolkien: The Monsters and the Critics
“This is not a work that many adults will read right through more than once.” With these words the anonymous reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement (25 November 1955) summed up his judgment of J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. It must have seemed a pretty safe prophecy at the time, for of […]
-
The Wolf in the Attic
1920s Oxford: home to C S Lewis, J R R Tolkien and, in Paul Kearney’s novel The Wolf in the Attic, Anna Francis, a young Greek girl looking to escape the grim reality of her new life. The night they cross paths, none suspect the fantastic world at work all around them. Anna lives in a […]
-
Of Wood Woses and Wild Men
In The Lord of the Rings a strange and primitive folk named the Woses came to aid the men of Gondor in breaking the siege of Minas Tirith. These wild woodland people lived in the ancient forest of Druadan, below the White Mountains. In form they were weather-worn, short-legged, thick-armed and stumpy-bodied and they knew wood-craft […]
Fabulous Realms 